Grocery Budget & Meal Planning

I continue to struggle with a way to keep my grocery budget in check and still have some resemblance of meal planning. I follow a lot of blogs that discuss their various words of wisdom on this topic. I try, but it doesn’t work for me. So, here I am, at the end of a month with no money in my grocery budget left and about 20 recipes that I want to try. I made promises to all of you to try several recipes soon, including that one crockpot recipe with Thai chicken. Unfortunately, these will have to wait until next month as I don’t have the money to buy all the fancy ingredients.

Don’t get me wrong, we aren’t going to starve in the next week and a half. We will be just fine and will even have a bit of variety to what we will be eating. The problem is that it isn’t necessarily what I want to make or eat. Anyone have great suggestions? I’m wondering about schedule an entire month of menus in advance so I can have some variety at the end of the month? Anyone done that before? Does it actually work?