One of the things I love about regular meal planning is that I’m never stuck at 5:00 wondering, “What am I going to make for dinner?” And then when I can’t come up with anything to cook, I order in. That’s a terrible way to live frugally.

Instead, by thinking ahead to the week and preparing meals based on how busy (or not busy) our nights are, or shopping and cooking based on what’s on sale at the grocery store that week, we are able to eat together as a family nearly every night, and I’m able to stick to our budget much easier.

They say that it takes at least 21 days to make a new habit stick. It’s long past 21 days since I started meal planning, which is why it feels like second nature these days to start defrosting something for dinner when most people are pouring their second cup of coffee.

Yesterday morning that involved taking chicken breasts out of the freezer. The night before? A pork loin that I’d frozen in teriyaki marinade after getting a great deal on a gigantic pork loin–more like a pork thigh–at BJs before Christmas. Half of that loin fed our entire extended family on Christmas day. I split the remaining parts of the loin into quarters, and stored them in freezer-safe containers filled with marinade. We still have two pieces left, which I’ll probably serve for dinner some time next week.

Tonight, I didn’t need to defrost anything since we were having quesadillas. I just had to doublecheck that I had all of the supplies needed. Tortillas? Check. Cheese? Check. Cheese grater? Check.

Why cheese grater? Because on our way to frugal living, I discovered that the one meal-planning convenience that was busting our budget was buying cheese that’s already grated.

A friend of mine was astonished that I would even consider not buying a hunk of cheese and grating it myself. “Have you ever compared the prices?” she asked. And I had to admit that while I’d compared prices on different brands of grated cheese, I’d never compared prices of block cheese to grated cheese.

Of course, the supermarket doesn’t make comparing cheese prices an easy thing to do. The bags of grated cheese are in one section of the refrigerated aisle, blocks of mozzarella are way down by the ricotta cheese, and blocks of cheddar cheese are way on the other side of the aisle, near the eggs. I’m sure this arranging is all done on purpose so that shoppers in a hurry grab the grated cheese (the most expensive option) and go.

While cheese itself isn’t cheap, until you’ve compared the per-pound price of cheese in its various forms, you probably have no idea how different the prices can be. Recently at the store, the unit price of an 8-ounce bag of finely shredded mozzarella cheese was $7. The unit price for a block of mozzarella cheese was $4. The block was 16-ounces, meaning for only $.50 more than the bag of shredded mozzarella, I got twice as much cheese.

That’s why this week I’m giving the cheese grater my Suddenly Frugal Seal of Approval. One of my resolutions for 2008 was to end my reliance on shredded cheese so that I could save money in the long run. With a cheese grater in hand, that’s been an easy resolution to keep.

Here’s a postscript to tonight’s meal: It didn’t take me very long to grate the mozzarella cheese. And I’ve discovered another kitchen tool that helps me get the most bang for my cheese buck, like the cheese grater does. It’s my George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine, the G5 version, which my husband bought me for my birthday. Before I got this as a gift, I would fry up the quesadillas in a stovetop pan, and it would take a lot of cheese to fill each tortilla. With this new Foreman Machine, which acts like a panini press, it takes very little cheese before all of that ooey-gooey-goodness starts to ooze out from the tortilla. That means that I can make more quesadillas using less cheese, which provides another kind of savings I’d never anticipated.