Make fruit your go-to snack item.

Get the snack foods, junk foods, and processed easy-to-grab foods out of the house. If it’s not available, you can’t eat it. If you’re tempted to make impulse purchases while you’re out, then quit carrying cash (no vending machines) and leave your debit card in your car or at your desk unless you need it for some other (valid) reason.

Stock up on fruit. Keep lots around; the easy to grab and eat on the goa kind, like apples and bananas, and all the other stuff that makes a great snack any time but requries a little prep. Melons, pineapple, oranges, kiwi. Try frozen grapes. Make a fruit salad. Toss apple in a little lemon juice. Eat citrus fruit for breakfast (with some yogurt or eggs on the side). And whenever you want a snack, have one. Just make sure it’s fruit.

Upgrade your breakfast.

Move your normal breakfast choice up the health-food-chain by at least one level, like this.
If you’re not eating breakfast normally, start. Breakfast kicks your metabolism into gear, gives you energy, and helps you stay alert through the morning.

If you normally eat something horrible like a packaged pastry or a donut from the gas station, stock up on protein bars, cereal bars, and granola bars. Keep a box in your car. Eat a breakfast bar instead of a pastry.

If you normally eat cold cereal, take it up a level. Switch to oatmeal (more filling, more fiber, better for you) or yogurt and granola instead of milk and flaky nothings.
You get the idea. You don’t have to come up with fifteen healthy breakfast ideas, or cook up a quiche every day. Just take it up a notch.

Eat the same thing for breakfast every day.

Once you’ve upped your breakfast to a healthier level, stick to it and make it a habit to eat that same breakfast everyday. Don’t force yourself to make this decision over and over and over again, because at some point you’ll cave. Just find something to eat that’s healthy, stock up on it, and remove all other options. Eat breakfast every single day.

Switch the carb-heavy side for a vegetable side.

Carbs are a staple, cheap, accessible, flling, and easy to make. They go great with a big hunk of meat and a  little speck fo vegetables. They also convert easily into sugar, which, if not used up, converts into fat. We need to eat fewer carbs.

So switch out the carb-laden side (rice, potatoes, bread, pasta) for a vegetable side. Let go of the “rules” of what a dinner plate should look like. Instead of carb-driven food, try one of these:

• sauted spinach
• coleslaw
• green salad
• steamed vegetables
• stifried vegetables
• mashed cauliflower
• roasted root vegetables

Make some dessert rules.

If you like baking, super. Just don’t bake cookies every single day. Choose a dessert day when you make or purchase and enjoy a dessert, guilt-free. Then don’t keep desserts or sweet snacks handy the rest of the time. If you know you’re going to be attending social functions in which desserts will play a role, plan ahead.

Decide you’ll eat fewer calories during the day and enjoy the dessert that night; or skip your normal weekly dessert at home and enjoy one out instead; or decide to skip it altogether, and plan for how you’ll resist. Just don’t leave dessert to chance and last-minute decisions; inevitably, you’ll consumer more sugar than you intended to and undo your healthy eating habits.

Drink water with meals. Lots of it.

Hydration is important not only for the overall health of your body but also to help keep you from over-eating. Many times we mistake hunger for simple thirst, and shove another snack in our mouths when, really, our bodies are craving fresh, clean, pure water.

Indulge your body with as much water as it wants. And make your meal times healthier by drinking plenty of water before, during, and after meals. Have sparkling water, or a slice of lime; whatever tastes good to you. Serve it in a goblet, or with ice, or cooled in the fridge. Just make it readily available and have several glasses with each meal.

Serve a fresh green salad with every meal.

Make it a simple meal time habit to always have a fresh green salad as one of your sides. Okay, maybe you can skip the breakfast meal on this one (how about fresh fruit instead?) but for lunch and dinner, just do it. Stock up on salad supplies, wash a big batch of lettuce, and pre-chop veggies.

It’s easy to grab the amount you need for a single-serving lunch salad or a family dinner salad when ingredients are already washed and prepped. And eating more fresh vegetables gets more vitamins and nutrients in your body, while helping you fill up on fresh goodies and avoid those calorie-rich foods.

Image:
45/365 by 
StuartWebster

Because I know everybody out there is just dying to know what we’ll be eating this week… all my loyal followers! (Hello, you two!)

I hit Wal-Mart last week and escaped under $150 with a big buggy – excuse me, cart – full of groceries. Didn’t have a list, so I am now finding strange discrepancies in what we have (4 loaves of bread, 2 packs of hot dog buns) and don’t have (any meat other than those 2 packs of hot dogs and the 1.5 lbs of round steak). The lack of meat is making me nervous, because, I’ll just be honest here: we eat a lot of meat.

I keep intending to cook less meat-centric meals, and honestly I try, I do, but it seems like whenever I buy one of those gigantic packs of chicken breasts they disappear in one meal. I read recipes that call for “4 chicken breasts” and can only wonder, In what universe does that work?

And I’m not sure what the problem is, since there are not that many of us (5, but 3 of us are under 5 years old) and though we’re carnivorous (obviously) we also are big fans of salad, fresh fruit, vegetables of any kind, and carbs of any kind. I can dine quite happily on crackers, cheese, and a plate of fresh fruit. Or bread and butter. Or a baked potato. Or a big salad without any meat in it. Or pasta with a little a lot of Parmesan and butter.

I think the problem is not our pickiness – since none of us (okay, except for Robbie) are picky eaters. Joe does like having meat at a meal, because it kind of completes it in his mind. That’s fine, and normally I accommodate that, and he’s also super about accommodating my less meat-centric meals, when I do manage to come up with them. But that’s the problem, I think.

I’m not good at coming up with those meals.
My two stand-bys for a meat-light meal are curry and stir fry. both of which we love and both of which I usually make with some meat, just not a lot. But maybe it is a lot and I just don’t realize it? Is 1.5 pounds of round steak a lot for a batch of stir fry that will feed us at least twice, probably three times? I don’t know. I should go look up some stir fry recipes and find out, but that’s the other problem, I guess.

I don’t really follow recipes.

Like, ever. I get ideas from recipes, but I’m not good at shopping for a specific recipe. So I modify the recipes I like to fit with what I have on hand. Usually things turn out fine, albeit different than the original. Sometimes they don’t turn out so well, and I bow my head to acknowledge the greater wisdom of the recipe writer.

Not following a recipe means that amounts are always subject to, er, interpretation. If a shepherd’s pie recipe calls for 2 carrots and 3 potatoes and 1 pound of ground beef, and I have 5 carrots and 5 potatoes and 1.5 pounds of ground beef, guess what I’m going to do? Use everything I got. I figure, hey, we’ll have leftovers. And that’s good, because Joe takes a lunch to work almost every day, and the kids and I need to eat lunch every day, so having leftovers makes that lunch-stuff pretty simple. (I love leftovers that morph, too, like when you make a great beef roast with carrots and potatoes in the slow cooker, and have all the juicy good bits left over to make a fabulous stew for the next night. Everything old is new again.)

Enough rambling about my meat-centric cooking habits. I’m going to try to come up with a menu that will last us for this week without necessitating another run to the grocery store. Fortunately, I do have a bit more, um, meat in the freezer…

Our Menu

• Monday: Chef salad, Asiago cheese bread [I'm going to a Ladies Christmas Party for my church tonight, to which I'll be taking Cranberry salsa, chips, and maybe a caramel cake... depending on how the rest of the afternoon goes, and how much time I spend writing about food vs. how much time I spend actually preparing food.]
• Tuesday: Stirfry with beef, red cabbage, pineapple, and carrots
• Wednesday: Chicken pot pie [church night = one-dish/make-ahead meal night]
• Thursday: Corn chowder, broiled mahi mahi, some sort of veg on the side
• Friday: I’m hoping for eat out or bring-home-a-pizza
• Saturday: Big pot of soup of some kind, egg salad sandwiches.
• Sunday: A birthday lunch at the in-laws! Leftovers for dinner.

Now I don’t feel so bad…

• Pasta Shells for Meat Lovers (2.5# ground beef!)
• Meat Lovers Quiche (more meat than eggs by a long shot)
• Grilled Steak and Arugula Salad (1.5# steak to 1# lettuce)

Image by Alex E. Proimos. Post linked to OrgJunkie’s Menu Plan Monday.

As I see it, there are four food categories that make the Christmas holidays different than the rest of the year. There is…

• social-event food, like the appetizer you’ll take to your sister’s open house or the pies you will make when you have the neighbors over for dinner
• big-family-dinner food, the traditional turkey-and-trimmings or your own version of what befits the holiday family meal(s)
• holiday food, like peppermint fudge and cookies
• gift-giving food, which could be a bottle of wine for a hostess gift or an elaborate arrangement of all those cookies and jars of preserves and summer sausages and your grandmother’s baklava. [I guess Harry & David falls into this category, but if you're giving food to me just go with one of the Etsy selections below (click a photo).]

I love food. I love holiday food, whether it’s candy corn in October, turkey and dressing in November, or cookies and spiced cider in December. The point is that the food requirements go up, way up, during these months. It can break your budget (over and over again) if you don’t do some planning ahead. Okay, it can break your budget if you do plan ahead. But at least it won’t be quite as bad, and you’ll be less stressed knowing you have what you need no matter how many last-minute things come up.

Step 1: Make a List of Pantry Staples

You may already have one, if you are an organized-shopping-list kind of person. Great, if so, move ahead to Step 2. If you don’t yet have one, think about the dry, canned, and frozen items you use often. Most of us tend to cook the same kind of things most of the time, so we purchase the same kind of grocery items repeatedly.

You can also make a separate section for fresh staples: items you go through regularly but don’t store for long periods of time. Bananas, bread, other fruit and vegetables, fresh herbs, juice, dairy products… which ones make your list every week?

RESOURCES

• Laurel Plum Online’s detailed and helpful guide to creation your own Custom Pantry and Grocery List. As she says, there are a plethora of Pantry Staples Lists out there online, but none of us cook exactly the same. I think probably most people don’t have fresh cilantro on their grocery staples list every single week… but I do.
• If you like reading pantry lists anyway, check out The Perfect Pantrys’ 23 pantry items you absolutely positively have to have. Then browse the website. Lots of fun pantry lists, recipes, etc.
• I put together a (short) list of freezer items to keep on hand for quick meals. It works for me. Check out Keep This in Your Freezer (And Save Dinner).

Step 2: Make a (Rough) List of Holiday Events Involving Food

And let me know if you’ll actually take part in any holiday events that don’t involve food. Do they exist? You don’t have to have your entire holiday calendar filled out, so don’t stress about this. Just jot down the things you know will happen at some point during the next few months.

My list: our annual chili party the day after Halloween, 2 birthdays, best friend’s weekend visit, big Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas parties (2), friends over (3), and big Christmas dinner. I’m roughly estimating on the parties and the friends coming over, but it gives me an idea. This isn’t perfection, this is just prep work.

Step 3: Make a (Rough) List of Holiday Food You Want to Make

This list may or may not correspond with the list above; that is, if you want to jot down specific ideas for specific events, have at it. If you want to keep it simpler and just note the things you know you want to make at some point, do that. Also on this list you should include the food gifts you want to give, whether it is a homemade item or a purchased item.

RESOURCES

• Oprah’s got a whole list: cookies, holiday recipes, menus, and more. The appetizers look good.
• I’ve got a Holiday Recipe Round-Up I put together last year, and if you’re looking for the perfect cheesecake recipe, it’s my sister’s. Get it, make it, and you’ll thank me later.
• From Real Simple, check out 12 Easy Recipes for Homemade Holiday Gifts. The Cranberry-Pistachio Biscotti sounds awesome (does it count as a holiday gift if I make it for myself?). Homemade Fudge Sauce? Yes. Yes, please. I’ll pass on the Cinnamon Twists, though. Not sure why everyone thinks puff pastry rolled in some random thing is a great gift, but whatever.
• Also from Real Simple, 24 Make-Ahead Thanksgiving Recipes, which can, of course, be used for holidays other than Thanksgiving. (Say, National Leprechaun Day….) The more you can make ahead, the better. I like the sound of that Goat Cheese Spread, the Cranberry and Orange Relish (it has cilantro!), and the Baked Spinach and Gruyere dish makes me drool.

Step 4: Clean Out Your Pantry

Before you start on this step, read the last line of Step 2 again. Say it to yourself as you clean out the old cruddy stuff, stack things back on the shelves, and wipe up the dirty spots. This isn’t perfection, this is just prep work. Don’t get caught up in alphabetizing spices or laying new shelf paper. Just get things in order. Clean out the out-dated, nasty, never-gonna-eat-it stuff. Wipe out the crumbs, spills, and messy spots. Stack like things with like: Baking Goods, Starches, Canned Goods, Snacks, Breakfast, etc.

RESOURCES

• Just read this one. You’ll laugh: How to Clean Out Your Pantry.
• CNN Living (because that’s where I go for homemaking advice, thankyouverymuch) provides a handy minute-by-minute speed-cleaning routine for getting the pantry whipped into shape.

Step 5: Start Adding To Your Normal List

From now on, every time you make your grocery list, you should pull your other three lists out and confer. Look at the sale flyers. What is on your list of staples, or an ingredient in one of your dishes, or a great deal for a main dish for that party you’re hosting?

Add it to your list, work within your budget, and get all the holiday food you can each shopping trip. You may want to grab some red stickers to mark the food that is to be saved for holiday use, or set aside a separate shelf or space in the freezer, if you have the room. Keep an eye for other items you might not have on your list. Are colored napkins on sale, or sparkling juices, or a specialty coffee that would be a great gift?

Remember, you don’t have to stress about preparation; you’ll be going to the grocery store again before you actually make all this food. And you’ll check your recipes and be sure you have all the ingredients. You will probably need to purchase more when you get to the time, but it will be far less than the full amount. Preparing your pantry spreads both the cost and the stress of holiday food out over a longer period of time, so you can enjoy the actual cooking and eating.

Which explains, basically, why we live on a diet of fresh fruit, cold cereal, BLTs, and lots and lots of cucumbers in the summer. Oh well. I file my Summer Cooking Method away under “great survival experiences for the kids” and move on. At least it’s not Lunchables every day.

But then fall time comes, blessed blessed Fall time, in which the garden no longer needs to be weeded because everything is dead, and the aroma of candy corn is in the air…

Fall, my friends, is for cooking.

Virginia is for lovers (hon, why have we never been there?), specialization is for insects, and fall is for cooking.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve made Manly French Onion Soup, Cheese Ravioli with Butternut Squash, Panfried Tuna Steaks, Bacon Glazed Roasted Vegetables, Spaghetti and Meatballs, Cornbread, Beans and Yellow Rice with Smoked Sausage, Buffalo Chicken Caesar Salad, and…

Well, maybe that’s it.

And in the last couple of weeks, we’ve also eaten fresh fruit, cold cereal, sandwiches… and yes, even a couple of cucumbers. Apparently those items are just staples in our diet. Ah well.

My menu for this week had me making Stuffed Crescent Rolls for dinner tonight, which would have been a perfectly quick-to-eat and delicious meal (ideal for church night) if I had made them. Unfortunately, I kind of forgot about the whole “you have to start crescent roll dough several hours before you intend to eat the crescent rolls” detail.

Oh well. Tomorrow’s another day, it will still be fall, and there’s cooking to be done. Stuffed Crescent Rolls or Corn Chowder? I’m feeling a little crrrrazy. I think I’ll make both.

Tonight, it’ll be leftover spaghetti and meatballs. At least it’s not a Lunchable.

Yuck image by Very Quiet.

I hate dropping a couple of hundred dollars at the grocery store only to realize, a few days later, that I have nothing to cook for dinner. Blech. Where did that food go?
I can’t help it if you have five hungry teenage boys in your house – that’s a different story – but here are a few things I do to stretch the grocery budget and still produce a filling, healthy meal.

P.S. One option I didn’t list here is “don’t cook anything for dinner”; you will save money on your grocery bill but eventually the troops will revolt. You can only serve cold cereal for dinner so many times… (Our personal limit is 3x in a week. Not that I’ve tested that… um… often.)

1. Make a menu.

Basic, I know. Don’t believe me? Check it out:

• OrgJunkie’s Menu Plan Monday & whole section of Menu Planning Resources
• Hillbilly Housewife says you should and you’ll save lots of time.
• SimpleMom says it helps you use coupons and cook seasonally.
• CookingLight has six simple steps for menu planning.
• Even Iowa State Extension is in on the menu planning thing. C’mon, you can’t argue with Iowa State.

2. Shop sales on meat.

Meat is usually the most expensive (single) item on the grocery list. Plan your menu around the meat sales so you’re getting the best deals on meat for the week. Compare prices at a couple of different stores in your area, too. You might find one offers consistently better prices on meat. Shop there.

3. Add a fresh, healthy side to every meal.

Salad, for example, which does not have to be expensive. It will be if you purchase organic baby greens and 27 different gourmet salad add-ons plus one of those $5 bottles of salad dressing. Simplify your salad: make your base a nice mix of romaine, spinach, and iceberg.

I know, I know, iceberg has no nutritional value, blah blah blah. It’s hefty and crunchy and I like it in my salad, so there… not to mention it’s super cheap. I wouldn’t recommend a salad composed entirely of iceberg, but hey, if that’s your thing…

4. Have a leftover night.

Otherwise you’ll have 7 Tupperware containers of aging food that you end up throwing out a few days later. That’s a waste. Leftover night means you save money and it also means you don’t have to cook. Wheeee!

5. Eat vegetarian once or twice a week.

Our vegetarian meal this week is spinach-stuffed shells, a recipe from this lovely lady, and I can’t wait to eat it. There’s nothing wrong with a vegetable soup, meatless pasta, or big bowl of spicy black beans and rice. In fact, those are some of my favorite meals. They work great as leftovers for lunch, too.

6. Try some ethnic recipes.

The point being to branch out into recipes from cultures in which meat (a huge hunk of it for every meal) has not been so readily accessible. Thus, the cookbook from “Cattle Ranchers of Australia” probably won’t help you out here, even if they do include a genuine aboriginal side dish or two.

Think of dishes like stirfries and curries, which can incorporate meat but in small amounts. I love Jeffrey …. cookbook for a great selection of doable ethnic dishes that you won’t think to search for on the Internet.

7. Double the veggies, halve the meat.

You’re making spinach lasagna, say, which calls for 1.5 pounds of ground beef and 8 ounces of spinach. Switcheroo: 16 ounces of spinach and more like 3/4 of a pound of ground beef. Spinach is cheaper than beef. The trick is to watch your proportions, overall. Keep enough meat so you get the flavor and texture, then amp up the other stuff. You’ll be healthier, too.

Our Menu This Week:

• Monday: garlicky chicken soup, homemade crescent rolls, big green salad
• Tuesday: spinach stuffed shells, big green salad
• Wednesday: bacon-chicken mac & cheese, asian red cabbage salad
• Thursday: Leftovers! Wheeee!
• Friday: mozzarella meatloaf, mashed potatoes, fresh fruit
• Saturday: Soup of some sort, egg salad & chicken salad sandwiches
• Sunday: lasagna, spinach salad

I should probably throw a dessert in there sometime… makes my husband happy.

This post is linked up with OrgJunkie’s Menu Plan Monday. Go there for lots of great menus and recipe links.

Image courtesy of  stevendepolo.

…that IS the question.

Our menu for the week

Sunday: (as in, yesterday) Joe made us a huge pot of garlicky, warm smoked sausage and potato soup and french bread.
Monday: green salad with baked lemon chicken (it was going to be grilled, but it’s raining, so never mind), garlic-butter breadsticks.
Tuesday: cheesy, ultimate comfort food: homemade mac’n'cheese {recipe below} with ham, on the side we’ll have stir-fried cabbage and fresh fruit.
Wednesday: we’ll have smoothies for dinner (kids will get leftovers), then snacks with our home Bible study group. I’ll do a tray of olives, prosciutto, cheese, and crackers and either the oatmeal cookies or these oh-my-goodness chocolate butterfinger cookies from Rach’s Blog Bite. Oh my goodness. Chocolate + butterfinger + cookies.
Thursday:So I’m indebted to Rach again for another great recipe: the tortellini salad that sounds amazing. Yum. I’ll do some dill-marinated cucumbers on the side.
Friday:Fajitas with green peppers and onions, pineapple salsa and chips, and some fresh guac if avocados aren’t outrageously expensive. Mmmm.
Saturday:either homemade pizza or grilled brats, potato salad, and red beans.
Sunday:a big pot of chicken and dumplings sound just right. Salad, a tray of fruit and cheese, and maybe some apple pie for dessert, unless I can talk Joe into making some of his amazing chocolate mousse. I think I’m gaining weight just thinking about this meal.

Let’s talk about homemade mac’n'cheese. Actually, let’s talk about any luxuriously comforting creamy baked pasta dish. It all comes down to the sauce, my friends. The homemade, creamy, and, yes, easy to make sauce.

Basic White Sauce

1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup all purpose flour
In a large saucepan or saute pan, melt the butter until it is all liquid; immediately sprinkle the flour on and start whisking until the flour and melted butter are mixed together in a lumpy, doughy looking thing. Yum. Looks promising, doesn’t it? Don’t panic. Turn the heat down to very low, or pull it off heat for a moment, and get out
4 cups of milk
Pour in about a cup of the milk, more or less, and whisk away until the lumpy-doughy butter/flour mix has made a saucy mixture with the milk. Keep whisking to get the lumps out. Keep the pan over low heat so the milk won’t scald. Now pour in another 1 or 2 cups of milk, whisk, and then let it bubble until it starts to thicken. Now pour in the rest of the milk, whisk, and keep it over low heat. Give it a stir every now and then. You want to let it just cook on very low heat so it thickens. This would be a good time to season the sauce, so pull out
1 tablespoon salt
1 teaspoon pepper
Stir the salt and pepper into the sauce. Now, if you want to, you can add more seasoning. For example, I might add
1 teaspoon dried parsley
1 teaspoon dried chervil
1 teaspoon lemon zest
if I want a creamy sauce with some good herby flavor and a little zesty kick. Something a little lighter, good for Spring, to pour over pasta with peas, mushrooms, and Parmesan shavings. But today I’m making mac’n'cheese, so light and springy is not exactly what I’m going for. Instead, I’m going to add
1 tablespoon (okay, I’ll probably add 2) minced garlic
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon dried parsley
Now, once the seasonings are added, you just want to let the sauce simmer a bit so all the flavors meld together and the sauce bubbles away and gets thicker. You’ll want to taste it and add more salt and pepper as needed. (If it’s a bit too salty, don’t worry; you’ll be pouring it over pasta, so you want it to have a good, intense flavor. If it’s much too salty, add another cup of milk.)
That’s it for white sauce. Since I’m turning this into mac’n'cheese, though, we need to add…. cheese. Glorious cheese.

to make the mac’n'cheese

I generally just use whatever I have in the refrigerator. This week I have cheddar and monterey jack, so I’ll grate enough to make about 2 cups of cheese total and then dump that into the sauce, stirring so the cheese doesn’t stick on the bottom. Once the cheese is melted, the sauce is finished. Now, set the sauce aside and continue on:
Cook 1 pound of pasta (shells, macaroni, mostaccioli, whatever you like) according to package directions. Drain and pour into a 13×9 baking dish or a 3 quart casserole dish or whatever else you have handy that is oven-safe and will hold 1 pound of pasta plus sauce.
Fry up 1 pound of bacon or a couple of big slices of ham, or saute 1 pound of chicken breast, or cook 1 pound of ground beef, or any combination you like, or just leave out the meat altogether. It’s superfluous, as far as I’m concerned, because I’m really just interested in the cheesy pasta, but my husband really likes his homemade mac’n'cheese with chicken and bacon.
Once the meat is cooked, drain it if needed to get off the excess grease, then let it cool enough to handle. Chop it up into bite-sized pieces, then dump it in with the pasta.
Get your sauce and pour it over the cooked pasta.
Now you have options. You can cook it right away, or you can cover and refrigerate it until just before dinner time. Whenever you’re ready to cook, uncover the pasta and stick it in a 350-degree (F) oven. Cook it for 20 minutes, then sprinkle about 1 cup of grated cheese on top (any kind) and let it melt.
Serve. Eat. Don’t count calories for this one.

This post is linked up with OrgJunkie’s Menu Plan Monday.

Sometimes I complain about living on a budget, but really, I like* the challenge of coming up with good meals for my family without spending a fortune. I find that the limits actually help me to be a little more creative in the kitchen.

We do a lot more meatless meals, which is healthier anyway. I’ve resurrected some old Southern favorites that I kind of forgot about, and they are so good. And I’ve found that the more I make myself the more money I save, plus it all tastes better.

I’ve started grocery stopping once every two weeks instead of once a week; it works better for us, overall, schedule and money wise. Sometimes I have to make a run for fresh produce, and we get fresh raw dairy (milk and eggs) every week.
I’m finding some keys for cooking frugal without sacrificing. See, I’m kind of food-obsessed. I read cookbooks for fun. M.F.K. Fisher is one of my favorite authors, right up there with C.S. Lewis. So if being on a food budget means I have to eat low-quality food, I’m going to rebel. But that’s not what it means. A food budget just means you need to get a bit smarter.

• Quit centering your meals around meat. Meat should be part of the meal, not the main attraction.
• Eggs are one of the best all-purpose, frugal, and versatile ingredients you can use.
• Presentation matters. Make it look good.
• Serve a little of the more expensive stuff and a lot of the cheaper stuff. Small serving of dairy or meat, large serving of beans, rice, pasta, or seasonal vegetables.
• Buy seasonal!
• Love it? Grow it yourself or buy it in bulk.
• Keep it simple; you don’t need all the variety that you can get at the grocery store.
• Fresh garlic, fresh onions, and a couple of fresh herbs (cilantro and parsley are my favorites) can help you turn the most basic staples into a gourmet meal.
• Borrow from other cultures, those which have built their cuisines on non-wasteful lifestyles.
• Processed foods are the enemy of the frugal cook! Try to buy things in their most basic form.
• Homemade is cheaper! And better!
• Save desserts for the meatless nights.

Here’s my last 2-week menu, that came from a $125 grocery trip. Of course, we had some leftovers and pantry staples already plus our milk & eggs.

dinners:

fried ham, biscuits, cheese omelet and oven fries
beef goulash with peppers and onions, egg noodles
cheesy baked penne with cauliflower
white bean and chicken chili, salad
jerk chicken with rice, black beans, and pineapple
black-eyed peas with ham, cornbread, scalloped potatoes
thai soup with rice noodles
broiled tilapia, salad, 3-cheese crustless quiche
butter-sauteed gnocchi, roasted tomato soup
chicken fried rice
french onion soup, homemade garlic breadsticks
salvadoran stuffed masa flatbread

lunches:

leftovers, boiled eggs & salad, apples & peanut butter, tuna salad, soup
(we get really fancy around here for lunch…)

breakfasts:

ham biscuits
cold cereal
breakfast casserole (make with leftover scalloped potatoes)
muffins (apple cinnamon, cranberry-oatmeal)
homemade granola bars?
homemade raspberry cheese danishes

desserts:

chocolate chip-cranberry-oatmeal cookies
from-scratch chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream frosting
madeira cake
anzac biscuits
homemade graham crackers?

*…but in a recent conversation with my husband I did explain that, to me, being truly (monetarily) rich meant I could go grocery shopping and buy whatever looked good, whatever I wanted to cook for my family, without thinking about the cost. He said that financial riches, to him, meant a huge bathroom with a huge soaking tub & built-in computer & tv for movies…  We all got dreams!

-

This post is linked up with OrgJunkie’s Menu Plan Monday.