The bad news is October is kinda sorta over. The good news is the beauty of planning your meals seasonally is most of the produce in this month is still cheap. You can go back a month, or forward a month last year, and still choose frugal, easy, from scratch meals. There are a lot of pantry recipes in this meal plan, and some of the first tier recipes could be pantry if you left out the one pepper. I also put in a couple of slow cooker recipes, I’ve found myself going from my regular recipe and making it crockpot when I don’t have time to cook later. The offbeat holidays we are using as an excuse to celebrate something are: National Homemade Cookies Day (Oct 1), Mad Hatter Day (Oct 6), and Devil’s Night (Oct 30).

Ideas and resources for menu planning in October, many seasonal fall and real food recipes. Very simple ingredients, from scratch. As always, these are all frugal recipes intended for a tight budget. Real food/from scratch/traditional diet/nutrient dense/whole food/blah blah blah. My monthly meal plans use an alternative meal planning method, recipes organized into tiers based on how perishable the ingredients are, not sorted into particular days.

*Attention real food purists/whole foodies – the recipes I link/pin are all from scratch, but some of them you may have to make substitutions or modifications. For example, I link recipes that have sugar, but you can substitute whatever your favorite sweetener is.

*Don’t forget to read about how I meal plan at Frugal, Flexible Monthly Menu Planning!*

In this post: Seasonal Produce ~ Recipes ~ Download PDF ~ Pinterest Boards ~ Other Plans