Money Mom Podcast

68: The $100 Grocery Reset: 5 Meals You Can Make from What You Already Have

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Feeling overwhelmed with summer chaos, constant snacks, and skyrocketing grocery bills? 

In this episode, we’re doing a little mid-summer mental health + money check-in for moms, and I’m sharing my favorite strategy to save $100 (or more) this week without sacrificing dinner plans.

I’m walking you through a simple but powerful challenge: Shop the Shelf. You’ll learn how to use the food you already have at home to plan meals, cut waste, skip the store, and instantly reduce your spending. 

Whether your fridge feels empty or your pantry is overflowing, I’ve got tactical tips (and easy meal ideas!) to help you stretch what’s already in your kitchen.

Plus, I’ll share how this challenge helps members inside Money Mom Club save hundreds, and totally transform the way they think about meal planning.

🔗 Grab your free 2-week meal plan: [CLICK HERE]
🎧 Tune in, take the challenge, and DM me your results!

xoxo,
Rachel

Where to find me:
Instagram: @heyrachelcoons

Save $600/month on Groceries: FREE live training

Speaker 1:

Hey there, welcome back to another episode of the Money Mom Podcast. How are we all doing? Let's do a little mental health check-in for moms in summer months, because we all know that these months tend to carry a lot of extra weight as moms when we become entertainers, personal chefs, constant house cleaning for our family and I know I mean my kids got out May 24th I think it was like the end of May that we got out and they go back early in August, and so it's usually around this time of summer where I'm like, okay, I'm ready for routine, I'm ready for structure, I'm ready to have my kids eat somewhere else out of my house, to have some type of schedule every single day, and it just it gets to be a lot by the end of summer. Now I'm not saying that summer is a burden for me as a mom. It's not. I actually have loved having my kids home this summer, and props to all the moms that are homeschooling out there. I just literally bow down to you and I'm so impressed by your ability to create structure when there's not much external structure in your world. But it usually is about this time that I just am really feeling drained. My battery has been completely demolished, and I really have to be careful about how I fill my own cup and making sure that I'm not just always pouring into my children, and on top of that, we also can look at the fact that we could be draining our bank account as well. In the summertime, it gets really easy to have like an open revolving door in the kitchen where the kids are always snacking or always eating, which forces us to be spending more on food than we want to, and so today's episode is going to hopefully help you kind of figure out ways that we can save some money in the next week or two by using a tactical approach in how you look at the food in your house and how we look at grocery shopping a little differently.

Speaker 1:

As a mom, I have a limited amount of time, and I think all moms can relate to us that. You know there's only so many hours in the day, and most of those hours are spent with me. You know, trying to help my kids find activities to do, to clean the house, to do the laundry, to get the activities done and to get the things on my to-do list done, and I see so many moms wasting hours of the day heading to the grocery store where they don't know what they're eating for dinner. So they run, jump in the car. It's really simple, right? I just jump in the car and I run to the grocery store and get a couple items and then come home. But, truthfully, those trips add up to being, you know, 30, 45 minutes every time you have to go to the grocery store. Not only that, you're probably also spending more money than you want because you're having to go to the grocery store more often. So you're spending time, but you're also spending money, and so the tip, the structure that I'm going to give you today is hopefully going to help save you time and money, and this is why this works is basically one we're helping you reduce food waste because we're going to help you use the food that you have on hand. We're going to help you save money kitchen, where you're thinking differently about the food that you make for your family, where you're thinking first about what's in your pantry, fridge and freezer. Not necessarily limiting yourself, not making you feel like there's not enough food or there's not food that you can have for dinner, but breaking out of this autopilot loop that we have, where we jump in the car and head to the grocery store to get new food. So something I like to do with my members in the Money Mom Club.

Speaker 1:

One of the first steps of my shop method is called shopping the shelf. It's S stands for shopping the shelf, and I'm going to make a challenge to all of you listening to today's episode to focus on shopping the shelf this next week in your house. So what does that look like? Well, truthfully, all of us, myself included, probably have hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars worth of food that is already sitting in your fridge, pantry and freezer. That's just sitting there either waiting to be used, is going to end up as food waste or gets pushed to the back of the pantry. And when we start to think of our shelf a little bit differently, as food that we need to use up versus food that we just should always have on hand, we're going to start to create more creativity in your dinners and the way that you prepare your food. So here's the little challenge. This is how you're going to save $100 easy, if not hundreds of dollars this next week.

Speaker 1:

I want you to plan your meals not around what's in the grocery store, but plan your meals around what's already in your home. So checking the freezer and seeing what type of meat you have frozen or what kind of you know non-perishable foods you have in your pantry, or what kind of perishable foods do you have in your fridge produce items, things that need to get used up. Let's focus on using those first and plan out five meals of food that you already have in your house, because the food that you have in your house is free, right, you don't have to pay for it anymore. It's free 99, as they say. So when we can really start to think about okay, what kind of food do I have in my house that I can use? Then we can go and create dinners from that food. Now, there's an endless amount, depending on what type of food you already have in your house right now, and you can be as creative as you want.

Speaker 1:

But one of the best resources that we have and you're probably already using it is ChatGPT or Google. If you don't like using chat, then go into Google and type in. I just inventoried my house and I have, you know, frozen chicken and I have canned black beans and I have canned diced tomatoes. I have these items. Can you come up with three to five meals, using up the items that I already have on hand, with limited amount of additional items that I need. You will be amazed at some of the things that it spits out for you. You don't have to be creative in this. You literally just have to go, look in your house, find the ingredients and then put it in the chat GPT and it'll come up with some meal options for you.

Speaker 1:

Some of my favorite shop-the-shelf friendly meals that we make that I make on a regular basis shop-the-shelf friendly meals that we make, that I make on a regular basis, would be a taco night, where I'm using up ground beef. I can make my own taco you know spice recipe and I'll pull out whatever veggies we have in the fridge and we'll just top that with some cheese and some salsa and we're good to go. Another thing that tends to be something that families always have on hand is some type of pasta. So if you have a pasta, can you make some type of sauce, like a red sauce, a cream sauce, pesto, throw in whatever frozen meat you have on hand, whatever produce you have, and make up a pasta. Another thing that is really simple that you probably don't have to go to the grocery store right now is breakfast for dinner. Could you make pancakes and eggs or French toast or something super basic for dinner with food that you already have on hand. Another one that's maybe more geared towards wintertime but doing like a soup night of whatever canned ingredients, like a homemade chili, is super easy to kind of just throw in whatever canned goods that you have and create a soup for dinner. Another one of my favorites is a sheet pan dinner. Whatever protein you have, throw it on a sheet pan. Whatever veggies you want to roast, throw it on that pan and then serve it over rice or pasta or whatever. Those are really yummy meals that my family loves and really uses up whatever food that I have on hand.

Speaker 1:

The goal, if you can do it, is to try and stay out of the grocery store for one week without having to purchase new food for your meals. Now, that doesn't mean you're not going to have to go to the grocery store maybe for some other essential items like milk or butter or eggs or whatever. You can definitely do that, but really try to make your meal plan for dinnertime come from what's already in your house. If you do that, my guess is you're going to save at least $100, if not more by just shopping the shelf. It's a very basic principle, but when we do shop the shelf challenges inside of Money Mom Club we have members that come back and say I literally saved $400 in two weeks.

Speaker 1:

But on top of that, it changed the way that I think about going to the grocery store. It changed the way that I think about the food in my house, because we should always be shopping the shelf. This isn't just something that should last for a whole week, it's something that should just become second nature to you. When you are planning your meals, when you're sitting down to meal plan, you're thinking about the food that's already there, because chances are like I said, chances are you have a lot of food in your house. So how can we really get on top of that and really think about how do I use up that food?

Speaker 1:

If you do it, if you do the challenge and you're successful and you feel like you really changed your mindset, I want to hear about it.

Speaker 1:

Dm me on Instagram, send me an email, whatever you need to do.

Speaker 1:

I want to hear about your success in this because it's really, really fun when listeners and members start to see the changes just simple shifts can make in your grocery budget and the amount of time you save.

Speaker 1:

And if you need help, if you want ideas for dinner or recipes for dinner, I'll put a two-week meal plan below that we give away for free, that you can sign up for. So I'll put the link for that in the description of this episode and you should go, put your email in and I'll send you a two-week meal plan. And it tends to be my meal plans tend to be very shop-the-shelf friendly, where I try to keep it very basic, where there's not a ton of ingredients and hopefully ingredients that you already have in your house and are ready to go. So try it out, let me know how it goes and hopefully you can start shopping the shelf a little bit more so you can start to save some money on groceries. Okay, that's all I have for this week. I hope you have a wonderful week, enjoy your summer, enjoy being with your kids and I'll see you in the next episode.

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Rachel Coons

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