meal planning: a beginner's guide

The title of this post indicates that this is a beginner's guide. Well, it is...but not in the way you might think. This is a guide to meal planning made by a beginner...so, a beginner's guide, if you will. 

Ever since the new year started, we have been trying really hard to follow some of our resolutions - to be healthier and to save more money. So far, we have began planning our meals (which is surprisingly easy, considering how picky of an eater Seth is). Our general rules for meal planning (so far) are: 

1. Try to incorporate items that are already in our refigerator/freezer/pantry. This way, we can make sure that we use up things that will go bad quickly as well as things that have been sitting around for a while (like that 12 pack of couscous from Costco that I just HAD to have...like a year ago).
2. Plan at least 3-4 meals per week. I say only 3-4 because with Seth's sometimes crazy work schedule, it wouldn't make sense to make a complete meal (for us, at least) when he won't be home until late (or until 2 AM on Saturday morning, which is his usual Friday night schedule - craziness).
3. Grocery shop every weekend and purchase only what we need for our planned meals during the week and our lunches that we take to work (and breakfasts too, I suppose, but Seth only really has cereal and I make do with fruit and oatmeal which I always have stocked). 
4. We plan on spending $30-75 per shopping trip, depending on what we need. This way, we can leave some leeway for stuff like paper products, toiletries, etc.
5. We will most likely do a larger shopping trip every 2-3 months to stock up on things like canned goods (I guess, we don't use many canned items), toilet paper, paper towel, cereal, oatmeal, and a few other items that will keep over time and that we use on a regular basis.
6. In a typical 4 meal week, we try to plan at least 2 lighter meals (this week it was chef salad and whole grain roasted pecan rice, and light chicken salad sandwiches) and 2 heavier (which Seth prefers), but still semi-healthy meals (steak stroganoff and tacos with ground turkey this week). Also, I've put my foot down and said that pasta is not allowed on the menu more than once per week and we must have at least one salad per week.

Here is our meal plan for the upcoming week (only 3 meals, as Seth is going out of town Tuesday evening and works late Friday): 

• Greek salad with homemade Greek dressing and couscous (breaking into our large supply finally)

• Buffalo chicken sandwiches with a side salad

• Chicken spaghetti (I saw this recipe on Pinterest and it looked intriguing, but not too healthy, so we shall see if this recipe is a keeper or a make-once-and-forgetter). 

I also plan on getting ingredients to make healthy breakfast muffins for me (Seth won't touch the things) to go with my morning grapefruit (newest obsession) at work. 

Obviously we still need to work on a few details (I'm sure there are ways we can save even more money by doing this, and I could probably look really hard and find some even healthier meals that the hubby would eat) but so far this is working and we are happy with it!

Right now, the organization of our meal planning is a little (well, a lot) less than satisfactory. I pretty much just write the meals we are planning on having on one side of a piece of paper and the grocery list on the other:

I'm going to work on this, but I have a few ideas - here is some of my inspiration (from pinterest):

I plan on making a meal planning board for our kitchen (or our family command center - which I hope to start working on soon), so hopefully a DIY post pertaining to that will be on its way soon!

Any tips or suggestions to further/better our money saving/meal planning efforts? Let me know!