Organization

I should be doing my reading for class tomorrow, but I am really having some attention deficit. I am ready for school to be out! So I thought I would share my new organization tip. Lin and I are on a really tight budget because he decided to go off of salary pay back to hourly in order to be able to leave work early to go to school in the fall. Unfortunately with this rainy spring it has meant less hours and therefore much less income. So one of the ways I have tried to save is on food. We were already pretty good at eating inexpensively, but now we have gotten even better. We don't eat out (except lunch when Lin works out of town-work picks up dinner) and are going 3 weeks strong. I have also gotten back to planning meals. I try to plan about 2 weeks of meals so that I can go shopping every other week. Since money was very tight this last week I decided to try out Buy Low market. It was great. I got almost the same amount of food I usually do for about $20 cheaper. That is a lot for us :) I was pleasantly surprised by BuyLow and plan to shop there again (although I will always have a bias towards Maceys in Spanish Fork). Well I am on a tangent. . . . .While I was planning my meals I decided to search for cheap recipes on the internet. I stumbled upon the 99cent chef and was pleasantly surprised to find a delicious salisbury steak recipe using ground turkey or chicken. (Lin made it and it was delicious) I also found on the blog a comment about saving money by using leftovers. I try to use leftovers, but lately we either haven't had enough leftovers to use as a meal for two or it just hasn't seemed appetizing later. The comment said to make a list of leftovers as they get put in the fridge that way when you go to the fridge hungry you can know what is in there and avoid the disgusting science project I came across last week. :b Lin thought it was a great idea because then we can also put a date on the list so we know how long its been there. He suggested a white board so we could just erase the item we eat or use. Since we are trying to save I didn't want to go buy a whiteboard unless it was very cheap but I was excited about the list so today I improvised a whiteboard and I think I like it better. I simply took a piece of cardstock and slid it into a shiny, smooth sheet protector. I stuck it to the fridge with magnets and viola! a dry erase board. It works really well and I even labeled the paper with pen (leftovers/date) so that we can erase the leftovers without erasing the category. This is important because I also put a grocery list spot on the paper broken down into categories (meat, produce, breads, cans, dairy, & non-food). I feel so organized and I love it. How do you plan meals, save money, or what are your cheap dinners?

I guess I should get back to homework. . . . . .