Episode four fifty eight, The Key to Simple and budget friendly meal Plans with Mandy Clen's.
Welcome to the Frugal Friends podcast, where you'll learn to save money, embrace simplicity, and liver your life. Here your hosts Jen and Jill.
Welcome to the Frugal Friends podcast. My name is Jen, my name is Jill, and today we are talking about a listener favorite topic, which is meal planning, specifically budget friendly with our friend Plandy Mandy Mandy Clen's.
It's such a good one. It's not just a listener favorite, it's our favorite thing to talk about food. And we really rapid fired a lot of questions at Mandy, questions we were not prepared to ask, just decided to ask in the moment, and she rapid fired back at us. Yeah, some really great stuff. So I'm glad we're here. I'm glad you're here. But first, this episode is brought to you by shaking things up. Who doesn't love a fresh take,
a little plot twist, a new perspective. It's what we need when we're in a food slump, and the little inspiration couldn't hurt in other parts of our lives as well, which is why we've written the Friend Letter. We send it to your inbox for free, three days a week with alerts of free food, ways to save money, and helpful, helpful perspectives on money. So get Shook, Get the Friend Letter, fruglefriendspodcast dot com. I rebranded it. You're welcome, Get Shook.
I love that for you, all right. So if you are interested in lowering your grocery bill, then we have a ton of great episodes for you. We've got episode four sixteen Simplified Meal Planning, which we talked about low ingredient meal plans, Episode four thirty three Tips for Grocery Shopping on a Budget, where we talk about specifically being in the store grocery shopping or on the app grocery shopping.
And then episode three point fifty four Meal Planning for people who hate to cook, which is similar to us. So we talk about some tips to get that make a meal plan that's sustainable that you will stick to. That's really the highlight of that episode is sticking to So Mandy Clents she is a stay at home mom turned frugal grocery shopping expert and on her platform Planedy Mandy,
she shares budgeting tips, systems, and recipes every day. She's passionate about saving money and helping other people learn the skills that she has, and we had a really great interview with her, so I'm excited to share with you.
Let's get into it.
Mandy, Welcome to the Frugal Friends podcast. We are so excited to have you here. Thank you so much for having me.
Food is my favorite thing to talk about and we have to eat it every day. Food decisions happen daily. So if we can help ourselves make better spending decisions, just better food decisions, I'm here for it. So I'm so excited to have you.
Yes. Yes, food is life.
It's like you can't really avoid it, especially when it comes to your budget.
Yes, all right, so give us a little background. What led you to being passionate about budget friendly meal planning?
Yeah?
Absolutely, I would love to say that it was something that I just enjoyed doing, like, oh, I love being in the kitchen. But in all honesty, I got into budget cooking because I was a really young mom of three kids. I had all three of my kids by the time I was twenty four, and my husband and I were kind of drowning financially, and I was in this position where I couldn't really work outside of the home because I wasn't going to make more than what child care.
Was going to cost.
And so I kind of had to start getting creative and thinking how can I help our finances without actually making more money, And what felt in my control at that time was cooking and dropping our grocery budget. And so that's really that was about ten years ago. That's kind of where it all started. And I didn't grow up cooking or learning how to cook, and so over the last decade it's just kind of been me figuring it out as I go and getting a little bit better each week.
Yeah, that's amazing that you were able to identify that at such a young age. We talk about the Big three on this podcast, so the things that take up the majority of our budget being housing, transportation, and food costs, and food being the one thing that we can have a little bit more control over in the day to day. Certainly it's important to make good housing and transportation decisions, but these are decisions that are that were being faced
with regularly. So to be able to identify that at such a young age, this is an area where I can make some big shit gifts and really see it take root in our finances and see it benefit our family is really amazing. And that you did that ten years ago. I imagine that's still helpful for you now seeing the rising costs of food now, like you're already prepared for it.
Oh.
Absolutely.
My husband and I talk often that, of course we would never want to go back to that phase where we were struggling so much, but it changed the rest of our life with how we deal with our money. I think anyone who's gone through a phase of being broke quote unquote, it really makes you more responsible when you grow in the future and have more income to deal with that you're not broke anymore, but you kind of still understand the responsibility factor because you never want to go back.
Yeah.
Yeah, Do you have any funny stories from when you first started trying to get your budget your grocery budget together, Like big mistake you made or something that you like overcame that you look back now on and it was maybe devastating then, but it's now. Yeah.
I mean, my mind immediately goes to Chili Rianno castrole, which I'm sure makes no sense, but when I was first learning how to cook, you know, you don't have the disposable income to mess up is really what it comes down to. So I was cooking because we needed the money, but if I messed up, the steaks felt really high. And this one night I made chili Riano castrole and I thought it was going to be so great, and I brought it out to my husband and I was kind of looking at it, like that's not what
that's supposed to look like. And we both kind of had this moment where we're like, well, we're eating this because we don't have money to go get anything else.
But also this definitely was not what it was supposed to be.
I think just little moments like that where you really don't have the wiggle.
Room and so if you do mess up.
Along the way, it's like, I guess we're eating like aggy soup with some peppers on it tonight. I'm so sorry.
Did you figure out like what went wrong? Or are you just like the recipe was just not it. I have been so intimidated since that day. I've never even tried that recipe again.
It was.
It was a nailed it moment, like the yes.
Got it so you're about ten years into now having meal planned in a budget friendly kind of way. I'm curious at this point, could you walk us through your typical meal planning process from start to finish? What does it look like for you?
Yeah? Absolutely so.
Whenever I talk about this, I always tell people, even as someone who's done it for ten years, I really try and stay in the cycle of being a beginner because I think that no matter how good you get at meal planning, you kind of become competitive with yourself and you can always save a little bit more. So, I actually have six steps to an effective budget, and this is kind of how they go, and I'll summarize
because it could be a whole lesson. But the first thing that I always start with is an audit, so basically figuring out what am I spending, And especially if you're new at budgeting, this is such an important step, just tracking what you've actually spent in the last week or the last month, so you can see where your
improvement or your decline is. After I kind of figure out where I'm at, the second thing I do is I figure out areas of improvement, So where could I improve, Where did I overspend or what did I buy that wasn't necessary, or what a habit that's not helping my budget. Then I set goals where I want to change my budget for that following week, something that I could improve, like maybe I'm going to eliminate a snack that I'm buying with a homemade recipe instead, and little things like that,
and then I use my systems. So I have developed a bunch of systems over the last ten years that really just helped.
Me stick to the meal plan.
Because I think it's really easy to write stuff down, it's one hundred times harder to actually follow through with it, especially if you're busy, especially if you have little kids. So I have some systems that I use, like a breakfast freezer, stock once eat twice meal plan type of thing. So I just figure out what I'm going to use for that week to help me stick to the plan,
and then I actually write down my meal plan. So when I'm meal planning, I plan for a seven to ten days stretch at a time, really because I'm trying to stay out of the grocery store. The more often you go into the grocery store, the more money you're spending. It's just inevitable that we're going to walk down a hall or an aisle and just be oh, I need mao or I need this and that looks good. So I try and stay out of the grocery store as much as I can, just to reduce that impulse buying.
So I plan seven to ten days at a time, and I actually write down a recipe for every meal of the day. So when I'm planning an individual day, I have a detailed breakfast, not anything extravagant, but just exactly what we're.
Eating for that meal.
I don't do any kind of rough planning like oh, we have cereal or we have bagels. I really write down We're going to have blueberry bagels with sausage links and Greek yogurt. We're going to have waffles with fresh fruit and yogurt.
Yogurt.
It's a big thing in my house apparently, So I write that down for each meal of the day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So what I end up happing is a seven to ten day stretch of three meals a day, so that when I go grocery shopping, I can do a verified grocery list, which just means I'm actually in my kitchen. I do a lot of grocery shopping on apps, so I'm actually in my kitchen looking at my specific meals and only buying what I actually need from the storm.
So that's kind of the planning process, and when I go to implement it, it just gives me a lot of flexibility because I have all of those meals for that seven to ten day stretch, and if I have to move them around or shift things a little bit, I'm able to do that really easily because it's so in depth.
Yeah, I love the in depth breakfast, lunch, dinner, and I'll go with snacks too. I personally need that. Jills like the opp is that she's kind of you know, the options and pick front.
Oh who secusing.
I need that structure or I'll forget to eat and then I'll get hungry and then I'll need something bigger than what I had planned and then like things go awry. So yes, I love that that point about really going in depth and making the specific and obviously you can deviate from the plan, but if you don't have a plan to start with, you're like setting yourself up for failure.
Yeah, And I think a lot of times where people fail with meal planning, is they it's not in depth enough, and then they hit what you're talking about, right, like almost a defeated mindset because they're like, darn, now, I'm hungry. I'm going to opt for stuff that I wouldn't have if I would have just had a plan to go with.
So I'm going to go through the drive through. By the way, like the average.
American family is spending about ten percent of their annual income eating out, and I think a lot of if that simply comes from having to find a plan B because they didn't really have the Plan A to begin with, and so they're kind of in this like flying by the seat of their pants mode, and we just don't make the best financial decisions.
When we're in that mindset. Yeah.
Yeah, I think you're accurate in saying it could sound as though you have to be a very specific personality type to be able to do this, like a type a person who is very detail oriented. But I appreciate that what you're describing is that if we don't do it that way and we just write down, oh, we're going to have like burritos, but we don't know whether or not we have the tortillas or the beans or
the rice or the salsa. Then we end up either not having it and scrapping the meal and then going out to eat, or if it's not written down, we've not done the inventory of what's in our pantries. We're then re buying things that we don't need because we weren't so detailed with it. But to that point, I'm curious if you've run into this at all. For people who might claim, like, I can't be that detailed, I'm not that detailed of a person, are there ways that
we could kind of get over that hump? Yeah?
Absolutely, Well, I always tell people this really is a skill. It is at the end of the day.
It's a skill that you kind of have to learn and get a little bit better with each month. But for beginners, I say start small. I think when we're talking about grocery budgets, it's everybody's dream to go zero to one hundred and all of a sudden they're saving hundreds of dollars a month compared to the last month.
I just don't think it's realistic because there are a lot of things that go into meal planning, Like as someone who's done it for ten years, I kind of have a system for every meal of the day and snacks, and that didn't happen overnight. So my biggest suggestion is to start small and tackle one thing at a time. So if you're someone who can't make a seven to ten days stretch because maybe just cooking that much is overwhelming to you and you don't know how you're going.
To do that, eliminate one day a week that you're eating out.
Plan one extra meal per week where you're like, Okay, this day, I'm not eating out and I'm going to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner from home. And then once you master that and it feels a little more capable, add another day on for that next week, and just kind of tackle it in baby steps rather than trying to do one big overhaul. It's just going to be
much more realistic for the average person. Okay, so let's talk about these systems that you were mentioning, because the biggest barrier to meal planning, especially when you're trying to get like in depth, is the time that it takes to plan and setting that time aside every Saturday or Sunday to make the plan, and it can take a long time if you're not like working with systems, so like, what what do you do to make this like sustainable? Yeah, my biggest tip is to make your time that you
are spending in the kitchen count for multiple meals. To give an example, a lot of times people just plan on making a breakfast, right and they're in the kitchen. Let's say they're making blueberry pancakes.
They make the.
Blueberry pancakes, the meals done, now they have to clean it all up. My mindset is to sort of make that time that you're making blueberry pancakes count for a ton of future days. So you're already there, You're already in the kitchen making the batter, making the mess, having to do all the cooking. Instead of just making blueberry pancakes for that day, let's make an extra three dozen.
That sounds crazy, but when you actually look at the time it's taking, it's really not adding much more time because you were already there doing all of the starting steps. So following through with a couple extra batches of pancakes, it's saving you the time in the future.
I always say, my future self will thank me for making these snacks.
Just systems that duplicate recipes in really large batches is my biggest tip.
I use this for breakfast.
I have something called a breakfast freezer stock, and basically what it means is exactly what I just explained anytime I'm making something for breakfast, because this is a huge way to reduce your budget. Homemade breakfast items are pennies on the dollar compared to what you're spending at the storm, and most of them are so simple. And so whenever I'm making something, I make at least two batches, sometimes three, and.
Then I throw them in my freezer.
And on busy mornings when I don't have time to think about all of this, because that's just reality, I can take something out of the freezer stock that I made a couple weeks ago, pop it in my microwave or my soster oven, and I'm sticking to my plan because I created my own convenience.
Yeah.
One of the things that stands out to me about what you're doing and some of the systems that you've created is both the meal planning and the budget friendly aspect of it. I feel like I have recently been able to combine the two, but I think oftentimes when we start out, it's meal planning. I can make a meal plan, I can look up recipes and da da da da. But then ingredients from one thing don't carry over to the next, and a lot of times will
only meal plan for dinner. I don't know why, but yeah, most of us eat three meals a day, maybe two. But still there's more than just dinner and snacks that we're eating. And so I'm curious for you how that merges, how you are able to when you're sitting down to make a meal plan. Combining it with this is going to be cost effective too.
Yeah, So I always say I'm an ingredient household. I make a lot of things homemade, and to some people that feel really overwhelming because they immediately think that takes a ton of time. But basically the way that I have molded the two together is I've learned how to make really basic things from ingredients rather than buying those premate at the store, like muffins, you know, simple things like that, but also doing it in that batch style cooking.
So the way I've been able to combine it is kind of taking two different systems and melding them into one. Because you have those people on Instagram, you know, like the Nora Smiths, they're making all of these homemade things.
Mine aren't extravagant, though.
I think the biggest key to success is almost lowering your standard instead of trying to meal plan these extravagant meals.
What if we just meal planned simple things.
Because when you go simple, the ingredients are basic and it's cheap, but also it's easy to make and it's easy to batch prep and then you can kind of meld the two into one.
How much time would you say you are spending both meal planning and prepping all of these ingredients and meals.
Yeah, the meal planning itself is honestly not that much time, I think, especially once you get in the routine of knowing what your family enjoys, like our breakfast items. I kind of have my five to seven go to things and we just rotate through those. So for me, that is more of an autopilot thing.
The dinners.
My business is based around writing a whole new meal plan for people every month, so I do have to get more creative with that probably than the average person.
So I can't put the same thing out every month.
But I would say overall, maybe like thirty minutes to an hour a week where I'm like actually planning out what we're eating.
And then as far as the.
Cooking, I for someone who has a cooking platform, I hate being in the kitchen. It is probably my least favorite place to be. So I don't even cook every day because I'm using that batch prepping. So I cook dinner about every other night. I cook breakfast like those big bul bulk batches maybe three times a month, and then lunch is usually just simple things that I'm throwing together. So I really am not spending a ton of time
in the kitchen. I would gamble to say even less time than the average person who's not me planning.
Can you give us some examples of your throat together lunches? This is just for me, Yeah, really absolutely, Lunch is such a stumper for me.
You're probably gonna be underwhelmed by what I say. Because simplicity is my go to. I always try and pair high protein, so salami, cheese, crackers. That's one of my kid's favorites. Quesadillas and guac with some kind of you know, fresh fruit, and maybe like a Greek yogurt dip.
My kids love leftovers for some reason, so we'll dose.
Like we had a friends giving this last weekend, so we've been reheating the meat and the side dishes from that. I hate wasting food, so that's always my go to. Stuff that's prepared. Chicken salads, big batches of chicken salads. Simple things that are kind of almost pre assembled or just really easy to throw together.
Because we're on the go a lot, so we just don't have time.
I see a lot of really extravagant prepped lunches, and I think that's wonderful. I'm a family of five with three kids, and so it's just not as easily to implement for me, so I go simple components.
Components are a.
Big key, So keeping things in your fridge, Like I do a big batch of hard boiled eggs every weekend to last us the whole week. I have pre prepared fresh washed fruits ready to go in the fridge. Everything's kind of like prepared so that when we're in that rush and we need something fast for lunch, we can grab it, throw it on a plate, eat it and be done.
And what does your prep look like? So I know you're doing those breakfast bulk batches like three times a month, But what is your how long does your weekly prep take, and kind of what does it look like.
So I don't do it all at once, and I will say that I think that is really important for the average family. I'm not one of those people who spends five hours on a Sunday doing stuff because I don't want to spend five hours on my Sunday doing that, and I don't think anybody else does either. So kind of what my routine is is when we come home from the grocery store, as I'm unpacking everything, that's when I'm sort of rinsing and washing my fruits, throwing them
in the containers, getting them in the fridge. That's my routine with that, and then my dinners, like I told you was about every other night, and the breakfast prep I tend to try and double down. So I will say, we're having those blueberry pancakes for breakfast, and as we're having that for breakfast is what I'm also making those extra batches and getting them in the freezer. So the sacrifice there would maybe be I'm not sitting down and
having that blueberry pancake breakfast with my family. I'm in the kitchen and talking to them as they're eating their pancakes, and I'm making those extra batches to get them in the freezer. So I try and do it in little spurts rather than one big trip, so that it kind of fits a little better into our busy schedule.
Yeah, but then you can have like seven other blueberry pancake breakfast with them because you're not making more.
Yes, And so I think most people have kids, they're getting out the door to school in the morning, or if you don't have kids, you're still trying to get out the door to work. So my thing is I want to be able to have a well rounded breakfast in five minutes on a busy morning. And so when you have things like those pancakes in your freezer, you're able.
To wake up.
They reheat perfectly in the microwave, toss them with a little bit of Greek yogurt and fresh fresh fruit. Homemade pancakes are significantly more nutritious, and you have a well rounded breakfast and you warmed it up in thirty seconds in the microwave and tossed it on a plate. So that is really I always think about my future self like, Okay, yes, I'm making three dozen pancakes right now instead of sitting
down and eating these pancakes with my family. However, on those mornings when I'm trying to get everything going, I'm able to have breakfast in five minutes.
One of my biggest barriers when it comes to meal planning is the inspiration week to week, month to month. I will often just go. I do keep a written list, similar to my spending plan. It's all just written down with pen and paper, so I will write down, like what are we going to do? I just do lunch
and dinner because breakfast is like always the same. Yeah, but I just feel like I get in such a rut where I then will just redo the last two weeks and that works for a time, but I feel like the flexibility, the variety is also what I'm looking for. I'm curious how you do that, since you've said you have to put a little bit more effort than maybe the average person to get content out to your followers.
Where do you find inspiration for meal ideas? What tips do you have to kind of spark that creativity in the kitchen?
Yeah? Absolutely so.
Of course I have my go tos as well, just stuff that I kind of keep in the back pocket when I can't fill those last couple of days, the spaghetti's and the chilies of the world that everybody is used to throwing in. I think when you're in a rut, I always suggest Pinterest to people. You have people on Pinterest like me right who their job is to kind of come up with food ideas, and you can use
it as a keyword search. I think a lot of people are kind of sleeping on Pinterest a little bit because they're not actually using it the way that it works best. So if you're trying to come up with meals, you can plug in chicken pasta recipe, beef protein recipe, and it pulls up stuff almost like a chat GPT would, and you have the recipes ready to go right there.
Personally, for me, I try and mix flavors together. So I'll give you an example.
A couple weeks ago, I had a second pack of ravioli tortellini type of things because I bought a twopac from Costco. But my kids really wanted my homemade mac and cheese, and I was like, I'm going to combine these two things, like you can't go wrong with a tornalini pasta, but then making it as a mac and cheese recipe, and I sort of just combined the two flavors together and I made a tortellini and cheese.
Wow.
So it was delicious, by the way, Yeah that's amount of cheese. Yes, yes, it was my daughter. She's our carved monster and she was in heaven.
She loves it.
But I just try and mix flavors to come up with something a little different. I also love a good protein that's really flexible. One of the things that I have done in some of my newer meal plans is something that I call a variation option, and I think that this is really helpful for exactly what you're talking about, which is like burnout of certain flavors. So for me, I don't like cooking every day, so I tend to
double batch a recipe. So if I'm making, you know, just basic beef tacos, I'm going to double that basic beef taco recipe so that we can have a second meal from it later in the week. But some people don't like having the same thing two times, and so I started giving a variation option, and it was basically, hey, here's these components you already had for this first meal. I'm using tacos as an example because it's just simple
and everybody knows what I'm saying. But you have these beef tacos, and now this second meal, here's what you need to add these two things to turn it into a beef burrito bowl or enchiladas, kind of taking those same things that you already spent time prepping, but turning it into a new meal so it tastes a little bit different and you're not having to have that burnout flavor.
I think what you are saying is the key. I think it's the key to this episode because we always say how in frugality, the real way to save money is to give yourself parameters that foster creativity. When we always have money in order to solve our problems, then we don't give ourselves the space to get creative to save money in certain ways. And a lot of times that those restrictions are, you know, imposed by the money
that we have. Even when we increase our incomes, we want to self impose those restrictions to continue to not let our lifestyles inflate. Right, And so what you're doing is you are prioritizing space to be creative and that I mean, that's how you come up with things like tortalini mac and cheese. Right, It's not something you maybe will do all the time or whatever, but it's the space to get creative with the variations, the repurposing and
all that. Like, at the end of the day, that's going to be like the real key to reducing your food waste and eating more of the foods you have at home.
I feel like that repurposing piece is a hard one to teach. I think it aligns with what you're saying, Mandy, that this is a skill that we can build over time. But with that, I'm curious if you have anything to say about prioritizing repurposing ingredients throughout the week, some simple to on how to think about this, because I know you've also mentioned eliminating food waste and that's part of this equation and keeping this kind of budget friendly meal planning.
So when we sit down and make a meal plan, rather than just oh, that looks good, and that looks good, and that looks good. Any quick tips for us on how we can make sure these ingredients flow through the week that we aren't wasting stuff absolutely.
So the first thing is similar proteins. I think we kill our grocery budget a lot when we try and have too much variety in one grocery shopping trip, because when you think about it, the best, most frugal way to buy proteins is in bulk. I buy a lot
of my protein at Costco. When you're doing that, though, if you're then saying, oh, we're going to have a steak meal and a chicken meal, and a pork meal and a ground beef meal, you're having to buy a lot at one time, and not that it won't get used right, because you can use your meat, you know, for a long period of time. But for me, I really try and stick to a solid weekly budget. My family, I try and spend just eighty dollars a week on
our dinners. So if I'm trying to fit all of that diversity into one week, it's blowing my grocery budget up. And I think a lot of times we then forget it's in the freezer, we don't use it.
It doesn't sound good.
So I try and stick to similar proteins. So let's say in the week, I'm like, okay, I'm gonna make chicken and beef meals this week, and it helps me narrow in on what I'm buying. Also, a lot of times you have side dishes that you can use for multiple meals, so especially during the summer seasons, I mean any season, but my family loves a good cold pasta salad, and during the summer we tend to have that more
often with the warmer weather. But I know that pasta salad recipe is huge and we're not eating that in just one meal, so I will tend to side share, meaning like I make that big batch of pasta salad and it's a side dish for a couple of different meals that we're having during the week. I think a lot of side dishes can reheat perfectly to that side share so that you're not wasting food and making a big old batch of something and then tossing it the
next day. And then also similar produce, so things like bell peppers. One bell pepper right now at the store is like a dollars fifty to a dollar eighty, but you can get a three pack for like three dollars, So I tend to opt for the three pack, and maybe I'm making a couple different meal that week that
include bell peppers. So just kind of trying to take what you have on your grocery list and make multiple meals out of it instead of having a ton of variety, because and you inevitably will have to buy more than what you're probably going to use in that recipe, and then if you don't have plans for the rest of it, it's going to waste. And my biggest pet peeve is throwing food away because you're literally dumping dollars in the trash can.
And like you said earlier, chat, ept and Pinterest and just the internet can be really helpful with this if we don't have the ideas in our brains. Okay, I've got one extra bell pepper and some shredded chicken. What do I do with this? And let the internet decide for you? Yeah? Absolutely, you know what.
I don't ever let the internet decide for me so many things, but not this one thing. This needs to come right from.
It and it brings variety.
The bill of the week, that's right, it's time for the best minute of your entire week.
Maybe a baby was born and his name is William.
Maybe you paid off your mortgage.
Maybe your car died and you're happy to not have to pay that bill anymore.
Duck bills, Buffalo bills, Bill clon.
This is the bill of the week, Mandy. Every week we yell at our guests and our faithful listeners to share with us their bill for the week, and we would love to hear yours.
Okay, my bill of the week is a friends giving bill. So my friends, we do a friends giving celebration every year, and this year I actually wrote a helpful holiday guide for the holidays, and I wanted to test it all out, and so I actually catered a friends giving for about thirteen people, and I made all of the side dishes for seventy dollars. So we had a pumpkin cobbler with vanilla ice cream. We had a baked mac and cheese. We had a mashed potato casserole with homemade gravy. I
made dinner rolls and biscuits, and a garden salad. I had about seven different side dishes that fed thirteen people plus leftovers, and I only spent about seventy dollars at the grocery store.
That's amazing. That's a great bill. I love that bill for feeding that many people, and you made all that food yourself.
Okay, it's honestly the simplest recipes, the biggest crowd pleased.
But yes I did.
I made all of those in about two hours to cater.
Now, Jill and I are like, what what am I doing wrong? What am I doing wrong? I get.
I think most people aren't making that much food in one stretch, So I always had to say that you could make a lot of those dishes in ten to fifteen minutes. In the kitchen, I was catering almost the whole thing, So I did all of it in about two and a half hours. Yeah, that doesn't include baked times for everything. Obviously stuff had to get popped in the oven.
But we have to find more friends who have food Instagram accounts.
We have so many budgeting friends and animalism friends, and you know where we have really dropped the ball. He is food fluencers, and I think you have really lit the fire under us too.
We're moving, We're moving your way.
Yeah, come on over to Kansas City. My friends.
They definitely weren't upset when I said, Hey, can we have a friend's giving in October so I can make all these dishes and try them out.
They said, yes, absolutely.
What was your favorite thing that you made?
The pumpkin cobbler?
Honestly, honestly, I unfortunately had leftovers and I've been eating it every night since then. I can't even explain. So this pumpkin cobbler, it's very basic. Cobblers are so simple, So if you're a newbie at baking, you gotta get this recipe. But essentially, when you go to bake it, you top it with you know, brown sugar and sugar.
This is not a healthy one, and then you pour water over it, which sounds crazy, but what it does is when it bakes, it makes a caramel sauce that lines the whole bottom of the pan, so it's a pumpkin cobbler, and when you scoop it out, the whole underneath is like this gooey caramel, and then you serve it with warm vanilla ice creams.
It made me say pumpkin pie.
Who it sounds so good. I guarantee I would mess that up, like the second you start to pour over it, like, I don't think it'd come out that way. It would be no chili Ryano's for me? What is this mush.
I'm convinced it's a no fail.
I was skeptic the very first time I made it, a long time ago. I was very skeptical to say, is this gonna work out? Because this feels like a lot of water, But it just it basically goes around the battle into the bottom.
I'm gonna have to take your word for it. That's amazing, though, Mandy. Well done for all of you listening. If you have a bill that you want to share, if it's about just dumping water over something and it turning into some sweet, sweet pumpkin goodness, or if it's about the money that you didn't have to spend this holiday season, or the money you didn't mind spending, you know the drill, Frugal friendspodcast dot com, slash bill. Leave us your bill. We
can't wait for it. And now it's time for the man.
I wish someone would pour water on meme.
I'm pour some sug on me. Water and water and.
Water high duration. Yeah. Okay, So for today's lightning round, we want to know what's on your meal plan this week. Maybe that you're most excited about.
Man.
Right when we're filming this, it's around Halloween and my kids love a good themed meal. So we had a mummy cow zone, which was just a cow zone, and then I wrapped it.
Up and made it look like a mummy. That's where we all shoot.
Croc bot carneadas burritos. Three ingredient carneadas in the crop pot, shredded up. Make burritos with it delicious. A ravioli bake also so simple. Throw a bunch of stuff in a nine x thirteen Gowey goodness pasta.
We had mummy dogs. That's a good one.
Please tell me that's hot dogs. Please tell me that is just some hot dogs? Is parents tell you I love hot dogs? Yeah, can tell you I love secrets.
It doesn't have to be a mummy.
You can just make this recipe. It's hot dogs wrapped. I make a homemade crescent dough. But if you're not a homemade girly, you can just do crescent dough from the store and you wrap them up in crescent dough and bake them. And it's like this beautiful blend between hot dogs and corn dogs. But it's also a few It would be great for New Year's.
Everybody would love you for New Year's. It's so good. Ye in a blanket, jeels it a blank.
I'm somewhere else now, I am not podcasting. I'm imagining hot dogs.
Okay, well i'll go. I'll let you back to us and I will go. Okay, so I will pull up my meal plan right now because I don't. My brain doesn't hold information for long.
You keep it digitally.
Yeah, I do, Yeah, of course. So tonight actually we had an emergency Sunday, so I couldn't make what I wanted to make Sunday, so that pushed everything forward or back, I don't know. Last night was salads. I actually had a salad with just like chicken rotissrie chicken on it, but we had a leftover rotissery chicken. And I saw on Instagram this recipe for a five ingredient Offga Lemono soup, and I love Greek food, and so I tried it and it turned out pretty good.
I brought me.
The leftovers today for lunch, but I didn't have it last night. I had a salad last night and brought because it only made two servings because it was only half a rotissery chicken. I got unstuffed peppers, sheet pan roasted chicken with veggies and my veggies are I have brussels, breads, asparagus, and carrots. Yeah, so I don't. I will probably make all of them at the same time, but only due to because I I think I have more sheet pan chicken.
We'll see spaghetti and meatball and oh a roasted chicken apple kale salad. Yeah, yeah, I love me you go. Oh and then on Sunday, I got a rosemary lemon chicken bait.
These are all new new words coming out of your mouth, like you're good at coming up with new things.
Oh wow, I'm gonna I'm gonna spoil this for people. I pay for an app, you know what, isn't me really? I pay for an app that has options and I plug them into my days, Like I've got my my breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks all planned out with recipes from.
I love that. Yeah, there you go. You don't have to be a type a person. You can just know how to download that.
Yeah for you money, Like if you want somebody else to do it for you, like Mandy, like you sell meal plans, Yeah, you could have Mandy do it for you, but you will have to pay some money. So honestly, it's a seasonal thing for me. Sometimes I want to do it myself and some seasons I don't want to do it myself. Yeah, and I pay. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing. Yes, very seasonal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But you know what though, I think sometimes people over complicated in their brain because they think, oh, I'm spending a little bit of money, right like I'm paying this Plandy Mandy Girl twelve ninety nine.
It's like, okay, yes you are.
However, is it helping you save way more than that at the grocery store or is it helping you avoid stopping for takeout which is going to cost you a solid fifty dollars. I think people sometimes don't think about that income and out output of you're paying someone, but this is their job and they're probably doing it really well to help you save more than your stay.
It helps me save time to make it sustainable so that I stick with it. And now that I have this, I eat out so much. Yeah, Like there was six weeks that I just didn't eat out at all.
Not to mention the skill set that you build because you get to experience what an expert has created for you, Like we get to see through you Mandy, ten years of experience. Here's how you can reduce your food waste, rather than just trying to hack it yourself and feeling like really bummed that you can't do it yet because you're just starting out. So I've learned so much through like learning from other people on Instagram or yeah, just yourself for these podcast interviews. I don't think we can
do it alone. I think sometimes we do have to pay for it, or we're going to spend the time researching it ourselves. Yeah, for me, speaking of paying for convenience, this week is a weird one for me. We just got back from like a two week trip to Europe, which was very lovely and very fun. And I will often when I'm gone for a long time give myself the gift of a meal delivery kit upon my return, and I take advantage of the intro offer. So this
is a meal kit delivery I've never received before. So I paid eighty dollars for five meals, four servings each meal. There's only two of us in our household. But to your point, Mandy, I like to make a lot at once, and I'll either freeze it or it'll be another meal for another day. So essentially like ten meals for my husband and I for eighty dollars, So it wasn't even
like that expensive. No, So I haven't had to go grocery shopping now in returning home, and it really kind of eliminates a lot of what I'll need to buy now. I'll need to get like some fruits and stuff for us to be able to have breakfasts. But it really has taken the stress out of kind of coming home and getting back into the rhythm and needing to have a meal plan and go grocery shopping and remember what
I have in my pantry. It just it showed up the day we got back and food is decided, And that feels like such a kindness to me.
Yeah, that really does help with you avoiding like eating out even more because you've been out on vacation. The last Yeah, once you want I get home is eat out more because I haven't had time to go.
But it feels like whiplash to be like get back into the groove of things and like come up with what you're making and quick get yourself to the grocery store. It's just like I have a few days now before I have to get to the grocery store, which feels so so great. I'm not going to keep receiving the meals, but this is a really helpful like soft landing for this first week home.
Yeah, it's a stepping stone.
I heard someone recently say give yourself permission to be a beginner, and I really loved that because I think when you're talking about budget stuff, if you haven't learned those skills yet, you are a beginner and you're not going to do it great or like what you're saying, you have a transition period. It's like you don't have to commit to paying for that service forever, just a short period of time as a stepping stone, is okay, you're a beginner.
Yeah, thanks so much Mandy for all of your insight and tips. For those who really want to learn more from you or even get your meal plans, how can they find you?
You can find me on Instagram. On Instagram, I'm Plandy dot Mandy, and I actually share free recipe videos there every day so you can come and try some stuff out for free. My meal plans are also on Etsy, and those are fully built meal plans, pre shopped grocery cards, pre counted macros, the whole nine yards and I'm also planning Mandy on Etsy as well.
Lovely, thanks so much, Mandy, Thanks.
Of course, thank you. I love I loved all of that. And if you actually want to check out Mandy's meal plans, she's given us a thirty percent off code use frugal Friends thirty. Just search Plandy Mandy on Etsy where her meal plans are and use the code frugal Friends thirty for thirty percent off.
I love that, Yeah, I love I love highering it out for convenience when it's needed. Now, as you just heard in our lightning.
Round and when I was when we were talking about it, I was like, this sounds so like not stereotypically frugal.
There's going to definitely be somebody that comes at us and is like they're talking about spending more money to save money on grow trees and in reality sometimes and this is and I hate this saying, and I'm gonna say, now, oh, are we going to say at the same time, good times you have to spend money to make money so close yes, but still true, say spend a little to save a lot, and that is not always the case.
A lot of the times that comes like out of procrass to spending, where we spend when we don't need to to make us feel like we're doing something. But there are definitely seasons where spending a little to save a little time and sanity is what causes you to save more in the long run.
And again I can't highlight enough how much it can teach us the skill that we need to eventually be able to do it on our own. That we can't just immediately start and have flawless low waste ingredient overlapping throughout the whole week. When we are able to purchase, you know, whether it's a meal kit or a meal plan or whatever it is, that can almost become a template for us over time. So I don't think we have to feel locked in, but it's nice to have these resources.
I mean, I just talked to a friend who is doing YouTube and he's paying just for the thumbnails of his video, like three or four hundred dollars a thumbnail, right, And he told me I don't plan to do this forever, Like, yes, that is stupid expensive. That's obnoxiously expensive. You could get
these done for fifty dollars piece. But he spends a lot of money because he wants to take time learning from somebody who's in the top of their game, who know who is obsessed with the psychology of YouTube thumbnails, and learn what they do to get these really high converting thumbnails so that eventually he can just do it himself.
Yeah, that's great sometimes.
Yeah, it's not always about spending money all the time, but spending money in the seasons where it's most beneficial to you to save even more. Thank you for listening. We love reading your kind reviews, and if this episode helped you, I hope that you will leave a rating and review kind of like DJL nineteen fifty two happens to be five stars and they say funny and useful. I enjoy listening to the show very much. The stories of folks who have paid off significant debt are inspiring.
Shows about investing and financial planning are educational. The show that discuss various strategies for saving money on everything from groceries groceries to clothing provide lots of useful tips. All information is provided with big doses of humor. Thank you, DJL, that's amazing. Thank you so much for leaving that review. It really does help us. And if you have not left us a review before, and you are enjoying the show. We really encourage you to do that. It only takes
a minute and it helps us immensely. It helps potential new listeners find us, know what the show is about, and it just it's just good. It's just good for us.
And then we read them on the show and that's fun too, So it creates content for us, So thank you.
Frugal Friends is produced by Eric Siriani. Okay, Jen, great, Oh you have something from oh my last episode, we didn't get to talk about finn Con. Okay, so not many people will know what fin con is. It is for financial media creators. So your favorite podcasters, your favorite YouTubers, your favorite instagrammers, bloggers, bloggers, you know, your favorite media creators, favorite media creators.
In the personal finance space.
Only in the personal although I did. There was a interior decorator there who is there to meet? She's like, why am I here? She was there on purpose to meet real estate investor influencers to get her work in front of them. Yeah, because I mean real estate, like housing is still in personal finance. So I have to tell you that I am never more wined and dined than I am when I am at finn Con and I get to hang out with so many cool people and do so many things without my children.
And without your business partner. We should probably update everyone that Jen goes to finn Con and I Jill choose not to. I went one time and that was enough.
And everybody every year asks because I go and I room with my friend Caroline from carolinevnhil dot com and they always think Caroline is Jill, and then I say, she says, we're frugal friends, but we're not the frugal friends, and people are like, where's Jill? And this year I had to say, Jill's in Europe and they were like lucky and I was like mm hm, and they're like where and I was like, she told me that I don't remember because I haven't seen her in a month.
Yeah.
It was back to back hurricanes for us. And then and then I went to EU.
Fin Con and everyone asked about you. Everyone said hello, thank you, and I ate I went to a surf and turf dinner and I ate an extra surf thank you.
Yeah, what was your favorite food and drink? Bevy you got? And being wined and dined at fin Con. Okay, so.
I'm going to lose my frugal influencer card on this, but that surf and turf was the most immaculate dinner I've ever had.
Well, it was provided for you. I forget to keep your card now.
I was there on a fintech company's venture capital money, like yeah. And then the best drink I had was an espresso martini from the Ritz Carlton and it was so good. I went back the last day and I had too, but I didn't pay for either of them.
That you're totally keeping all your cards right now, even your credit card had stayed in your pocket.
The first one I did pay for it was a twenty one dollar oh wow. And I went back and intended to buy another twenty one dollar martini, and I was just lucky enough.
That I could have two good paying for them. Wow.
Because I walked out, two different friends got each round.
Oh that's so kind of them. No, Wow, it pays it to have friends.
It does pay to have friends for sure in the personal finance game for like ten, fifteen, twenty years.
I'm so glad you had a nice time, and I'm so glad we're back together same Never leave me okay.