Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Meal swap idea

What is a Meal Swap?
It's exactly how it sounds! You get together and swap meals. This is a great way to get have prepared meal on hand that simply need to be put in the oven with only a fraction of the work. There should be about 6 people in a group. Each pick a freezable meal and make 6. Then, get together, swap meals, and go home with 6 different meals.

What do you make?
Since you didn't want to come home from the meal swap with 6 different versions of lasagna, we decided to create 6 different categories that you can rotate. Of course this is open to change based on the group taste preferences, these are simply a suggestion.

*American/European
*Breakfast for Dinner
*Chili/Soup/Stew
*Italian/Mediterranean
*Indian/Asian/Eastern
*Southwest/Mexican

How do you stay within your budget?
1) Use your stockpile: Look through your cupboards and then decide what you're making. If you pick a recipe before you check out your stockpile, you may end up needing to buy everything.

2) Plan ahead:  Because we have a rotation, I know which category I have for each month. I went through and decided on the meal that I would make within each category. I made a list with the ingredients I will need for each meal and I pick them up as they go on sale.
Thanks spectacular Savings for sharing this idea!

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