Grocery shopping on a fixed budget?

Get a couple of whole chickens and roast them in the oven with some onions and carrots. That will make several meals, even soup from the bones afterward. Oatmeal is a good cheap breakfast. Apples and pears are in season now so you could pick up a lot for pretty cheap.

Those are all great ideas. Also, rice and black beans with some veggies cooked in with them is a great, complete protein meal.

i get the jumpo bag of mixed vegies(store brand) its $1.98 and a bag of tyson frozen chicken tenderloins $9.98 and that feeds me for a week, for lunches and snacks at work, i pre-cook the chicken at home and sperate it to indidual portions and then microwave my veggies at work and mix them together, its not the greatest or most exciting but its cheap and healthy. as far as kid options i can help with that as i dont have kids or know anything about them. but i liked turkey sammichs when i was a kid.

I am not sure where you are living so your cost of groceries might be higher than mine but here are some ideas:

-Rotiserre chicken...you can eat it as is or cut the meat off and use it for wraps, salads, or sandwhiches. I pay $5.00 for one at Wal- Mart and use it for my lunches for the week.
-Ground tukey - one pound will get you four turkey burgers or a turkey meatloaf that can feed 4 people.
-Veggies!! Canned if you need to, not expensive at all.
-Extra lean ground beef - you can make a casserole with mixed vegetables, cream of mushroom soup and potatoes. Something you and your family might enjoy, you could even add some cheese for the kids.
-Salad stuff (lettuce, cucumber, tomato, whatever you like on it)
-EGGS! Do breakfast for dinner. My kids love that and eggs are healthy and filling (lots of protien) with Turkey sausage and hard boil them for snacks with some fruit.
-Greek Yogurt...add stuff to it or use it in place of sour cream.
-Bonless skinless chicken breast - You could cut up bell peppers and have chicken fajitas. When I do that for my family I just skip the tortilla and have the chicken and veggies alone to save the calories but there are healthy tortilla options (a bit more expensive though)
-SOUP, low sodium. You could do grilled cheese and soup but for your "grilled cheese" use low fat cheese and throw some of your rotissere chicken in there for protien.
-Fresh fruit!! Apples, bananas, blueberries, strawberries.
-Oatmeal, nutrituous cheap and delicious.
-Beans, black beans, kidney beans, whatever you like. Throw them in with some rice or cooked Quinoa.

Hope these ideas help. Good luck!!!

Whole wheat spagetti w/ turkey and chilli w/ turkey. I usually have lots of left overs for lunches too. You're in the same boat as the rest of us, it's tough!

your first savings will come from making your menu ahead of time and shopping for 2 weeks of food at once..great start! Also homemade meals vs pre packaged are always less expensive, so you are on the right track. Soups, salads, rice beans etc are all great ideas too. You can take any meat and make it last for several meals, we eat a lot of leftovers for lunches so that is helpful too. I know when I make lasagne or a casserole it lasts for several lunches afterwards ( a family of 4 isn't going to make one meal last a week, but it can make a couple good lunches for all). About once a week we have "left over" night where we eat the misc items that have not gotten eaten up to that point. I know some people also throw them together in a casserole of some sort.

I'm a big fan of rice and steamed tuna and zuchinni. And we shop at Aldi and that has changed my life!! The prices are excellent! Good Luck.

I really have to cut down my grocery budget and it’s so hard to shop for that many people with that low of budget. The one thing you have to make sure of is that your not feeding your children crap to make up the cost difference so you can eat healthy. Look up some stew recipes that go in the crock pot, you can do a lb of stew meat with all kinds of frozen veggies for cheap and eat it for a quite a few meals. I usually put 3 or 4 potatoes in, stewed tomatoes, a bag of frozen spinach, a bag of green beans, and any other veggie I have left in my freezer put some spices with it, and some beef broth(buy bullion cubes it cheaper) and there’s a dinner for probably less then 10 dollars and the family can eat it twice. My go to for my 1 year old is sweet potatoes, they are wonderful for her, and she loves them and they are so easy to make. Put this with some kind of meat or cheese and it’s a full meal. I also feed my 1 year old yogurt and bananas a lot. Do not buy the “kid” yogurt it’s too expensive and has High Fructose Corn Syrup in it. Just buy the regular FULL FAT Yogurt, and mash a half of banana in it. That big thing of yogurt will last 2 weeks for snacks. I also make her smoothies with frozen berries. For breakfast for my child and me sometimes, I don’t make buy any processed food. For a healthy pancake buy some Oat Flour (found in a health food store it $3.30 for a lb of it) and Oatmeal (you can buy this in bulk for .89 cents a lb), with canned pumpkin or ripe bananas, or blueberries and make them into pancakes. With 4 cups oat flour and 2 cups oatmeal, 6 eggs, (and whatever other kind of fruit you decide to sweeten it up with) you could make probably close to 30 pancakes. Take those and freeze them for breakfast, and it’s a cheap cheap breakfast and it’s nutritious This is a good recipe to start with. Just double it, and if you want to add pumpkin or bananas just cut down on the other liquids:
http://www.bobsredmill.com/recipes_detail.php?rid=236

Another cheap breakfast is breakfast burritos, the entire family can eat these also, just use more sautéed veggies in with yours then the other family members would eat for a low calorie breakfast. My one year old every morning has 1 egg, some cheese, and Oatmeal muffin, or pancake (that’s homemade and non processed)

As for lunch. I used to buy a huge bag of green beans, some turkey sausage one can of spaghetti sauce, mix it all together and eat it for my lunches. That 3 days of lunches less then 8 dollars. Do not buy prepacked lunches they are incredibly expensive, your better off doing stir fry for yourself and then splitting into multiple days.

The moral of the story here is stay away from processed prepacked food. Always buy frozen veggies rarely fresh because they are more expensive, and only buy fruit that is season, or frozen berries. Learn how to cook and freeze stuff so it lasts longer. So for dinners try theme weeks, like mexican so all your ingredients are the same but you just use them in different ways, this way you only have to buy one kind of spice or herb. Okay I’m done talking your ear off

"I really have to cut down my grocery budget and it’s so hard to shop for that many people with that low of budget."

Not when you Grocery Game it isn't!! Sales with coupons is the way to go!!!

Use your grocery store's ad circular to make a meal plan. If you can't think of meals that use the produce and meats that are on sale, type in the ingredients into allrecipes.com; plenty of options there, and each recipe tells you the nutritional content of each serving.

Make one night a week vegetarian. Great way to use up vegetables by the end of the week and stretches your imagination for meals. Right now, squashes are in season and on sale. This site has plenty of recipes for spaghetti squash (I'm making it tonight with Laughing Cow wedges for a mock fettucine alfredo, topped with diced chicken & wilted spinach), or try baked acorn squash filled with rice, diced onions/bell peppers/garlic, and topped with cheese, set under the broiler until it melts and just browns.