Budgeting and menus

I am a planner. I like to plan anything and everything. Sometimes my plans work out and sometimes they don't.
One thing that we really needed to do to help us with our surrogacy journey was to get our finances in order. So I developed a plan for that. The first thing that we did was make a budget. I know that the word budget is a scary one and believe me I resisted having a budget for a VERY long time. But now that we do have a budget it has taken so much pressure off us. I love that I know what our money is doing. When we started budgeting we weren't sure how to go about it. I looked for info on the internet and found Dave Ramsey. His principals are what we loosely follow for our finances. We have a basic budget that we use each month and then tweak as needed. And one thing that I love doing is seeing how much under budget I can come in. My favorite budget category is food (okay so to be honest that is my favorite category for most things. I love food). We have a set amount of money each month for me to spend at the grocery store. I like to see if I can actually have money left over at the end of the month. Some months I do, some months I don't but it is a continuing challenge to myself.
I make menus to help me with my food budget and my time budget. I work 40 hours a week outside the home so I really need to have a plan in place for things like meals. We eat what I call simple foods and I make alot of 'rubber meals'. These aren't meals made out of rubber or tasting like rubber (not usually anyway) but meals where I start with one item and turn it into 2, 3 or even 4 more meals. Such as a Pot Roast. My Rubber Pot Roast might look like this:
Meal 1- Pot Roast cooked with potatoes, carrots, celery and onions.
Meal 2- Shredded beef and cheese enchiladas served with 'spanish' rice
Meal 3- Beef and veggie gravy (the leftover beef and veggies from meal 1 put in a homemade stroganoff like gravy) over egg noodles.

All of the meals would have a salad or a green veggie (or both) added to them and often times slices of fruit too and occasionally homemade bread or rolls.

I have been using rubber bean recipes alot lately too. This blog http://lentilsandrice.blogspot.com/ has been a huge source for me for her stretchy beans recipes. http://lentilsandrice.blogspot.com/search?q=stretchy+beans. This week we are using some of her garbanzo bean recipes. My family loves garbanzo beans (I grew up calling them chickpeas). Tonight we are having curried chickpeas with naan (fancy word for flatbread). I've made it once before and actually had to cut my husband off at his fourth serving! Tomorrow night is my version of falafels.

I post the weekly menu on the fridge. Hubby and the kids know what is for dinner and the younger girls even help me with cooking it. Tonight DD#3 will help me by rolling out the bread she does a great job at that task and it gives me some time alone with her.