How $10 budget per person for a weekend can turn into some tasty meals with a little meal planning.
How $10 budget per person for a weekend can turn into some tasty meals with a little meal planning.
Show Notes:
- Price out your shopping ingredients with ShopRite online.
- Recipe Menu Cards
- Recipe 1-pagers with price breakdown per recipe.
- 5-person shopping list (excel file).
- 20+ person shopping list (excel file)
- The New Camp Cookbook (Amazon)
- The Camp Dutch Oven Cookbook (Amazon)
Cover photo by Fabian Centeno on Unsplash
Transcript:
If you’ve spent any time reviewing these videos you’ll see I’m a bit of a nut with organization. One of the things that really warms my heart is to plan out and feed the adults attending within budget.
In our troop we try and stick to the same budget the boys do. $10 per person for food. Keeping it the same makes the accounting easier, and really prevents us from going nuts with the food. It would be very easy to create a hungryman plate of surf and turf, but it’s probably the wrong message to send to the boys.
I have a stable of 1-pagers for menus, but frequently try something new. As a general rule we look to spend about $1-2 for breakfast, $3 for lunch and $5-6 for dinner. This is doable if you have at least 5-6 people and keep it relatively simple.
In essence with $60 to play with you have about $8 for breakfast, $18 for lunch and $34 for dinner, which seems a lot more reasonable.
Regardless of the food on the plan, I always break it down in excel, each expense gets a line item and it all gets rounded to the highest dollar. This makes is very easy to see if I’m running over budget, and where I might be able to cut, or usually where I might be able to add an snack or two. Usually if I am planning it right I have about $10 left over to get a tray of cheese and crackers. I’ve included a couple of examples of past menus in the show notes for you to use, and maybe inspire you to my level of crazy.
When I am coming up with prices for items, I don’t just guess, although for most things that will usually work. I log on to Shoprite.com and I look up each item I want to purchase. While I don’t use it, there is an option to add things to a shopping cart and for a $20 fee the local Shoprite will prep and bag it all for you.
As I mentioned I have 1-pagers for frequent meals, these one-pagers not only have the recipes but break down the costs for a 6-person meal plan, making it easy to copy and paste into excel with the prices, so the only thing I need to calculate is the odd meal that isn’t part of a 1-pager. I’ve included my 1-pager document as well in the show notes.
It’s always a source of pride when one of the boys comes over to the adult’s meal and says “why can’t we make that”, the answer is always the same, you can, you just have to plan for it. But this is what works for us.
Take what you like and leave the rest, and as we say in Woodbadge, feedback is a gift, leave yours below in the comments, with the hope we can all learn together.
I’m Scoutmaster Dave, and this was menu planning.
