Food Prep for the Week / Menus for the Week

With two birthdays this month, one party, Mother's Day, driver's ed, and an unexpected washing machine repair, we came to the end of the money in the grocery envelope, with several days of the month left to go, and no available envelopes to "rob" from.  I love challenges like this!  Last weekend I spent considerable time preparing the food we did have for future meals, so as not to waste any.  Also, this makes dinner preparation go much more smoothly during the week if some of the steps have already been done.  I enlisted the children's help, and we got a lot accomplished!

We cooked up the three pounds of hamburger I had in the freezer, then split it into 3 bags and re-froze it.

We chopped up a bunch of veggies for dinner that night, sautee'd the leftover onion and then froze it.  I have not frozen pre-cooked onion before, so this is an experiment!

 

 

We pulled the skin off lots of chicken thighs and drumsticks, marinated some of them for dinner, and froze the rest for future meals.

We had several over ripe bananas, so we mixed up a huge double batch of banana muffins to have at breakfast over the course of the week.

I also baked four loaves of bread for the week!  (three pictured)





With all of our cooking on Saturday, by Sunday we were tired of being in the kitchen, so we made something super fast and easy for dinner ~ scrambled eggs!

Here are our dinner menus for this last week of May:

Friday:  pizza and salad

Saturday: tomato-curry lentil stew (crock pot), home made bread

Sunday:  roast, carrots, and potatoes (crock pot)

Monday:  bbq chicken on the grill, garlic potatoes, fruit

Tuesday: taco soup (crock pot), tortilla chips

Wednesday: poppyseed chicken, steamed veggie


Thursday is payday, which means GROCERY SHOPPING and therefore all new food to work with!!!!!!!!

I'm Still Here! And Cooking Again......

If you read my regular blog, you know that our 4 year old was quite sick with pneumonia last week and some very kind friends took it upon themselves to bring us several meals so that I could focus my attention on our Little Man and not have to cook. Yippee!!!! Thank God for friends! It was a huge blessing and gave me a much appreciated break from the kitchen.

Little Man is now on the mend and I am back in the kitchen. :-)

Today got away from us, school-wise, and we are still finishing up work as I type, so I swapped Tuesday and Thursday night's dinner plans and we are once again having our new standby, taco style lentils and rice. I need a little more time in the afternoon for a brand new recipe, so Lord willing that will happen on Thursday. Check back later for the verdict on my attempt at vegetarian burgers!

Working on New Recipes

Not thoroughly checking ingredients came back to bite me last night. I had been planning to make black bean/sweet potato burgers, but didn't realize until 4:00 P.M. that I had no quinoa which is also called for in the recipe. So that will have to wait until next week. Instead we had a new family favorite, taco style lentils and rice. When the children asked me what I was making for dinner and I told them, they all cheered! Gotta love that reaction!

I am currently researching more new recipes and will post them as I make them! Tomorrow we are having Moroccan Lentil Soup in the crockpot and Saturday we will be having Sloppy Joe's made mostly from beans. Some of you have emailed me with new recipes, which I really appreciate! If you have some wonderful family favorite that is also fairly inexpensive to make, I'd love to hear from you! Email me at gglc_pam@yahoo.com. It's my junk email but I promise to check it! Or leave it in the comments section so others can benefit also. (Of course if you know me in real life, feel free to use my "real" email addy, just don't want to post that here).

More on Menu Planning

Not sure if anyone noticed besides me, but last week was a really blah week in the food department. I didn't make good menus at the beginning of the week and I kindof needed a mental break from the "planning how to use up every single ingredient so I don't waste any money" thing. Our big Mexican feast (courtesy of my cousin and her grown daughter) was the highlight of the week as far as meals went, and the other nights we ate the "old" way ~ chicken and steamed rice and veggies, etc. We ate veggies, but not as the main part of our meal. I just fixed whatever was on hand that didn't require much mental effort or time.

So far I have not shopped as carefully as I did last month. I have spent over half of my food budget for March, and I have lots of food in the freezer, fridge and pantry, but I'm not sure how to coordinate it all into meals for the rest of the month. In other words, do I have everything I need to make dinners for the rest of the month except for fresh produce? Not sure. Obviously I still have work to do this afternoon! The good news is that we are stocked up on toilet paper, pullups, and facial tissue. :-)

This week we will be having soup one night and a bean dish another night. Friday is pizza and movie night. The rest of the meals I am still planning. Check back later to see what I decided on!

Update to our February $500 Food Budget Challenge

Yay!! We did it!!! By God's grace we were able to buy all our groceries, toiletries and pullups for the month with less than $500! I spent a total of $469 this month. About $85 of that was for pullups and toiletries, and the other $384 was for food. I'm not sure we could have done it were it not for the fact that I'd stocked up on some things ahead of time, and we ate lots of beans instead of meat, but we did it! I would never have thought we could if I weren't "forced" to try, and I feel quite empowered to know we can. We ate well this month ~ whenever we were hungry there was food to eat. Honestly, there were a few times that my husband and I felt hungry before going to bed, but we can stand to feel hungry a little, and if we didn't stay up so late that problem would probably be solved!

A double blessing is the fact that although $469 was the total amount we spent during the month, some of that was spent at another grocery store, so we actually have over $100 left on the original grocery store gift card!

I will probably have to spend a bit more in March as I stock up on some things again, so I'm shooting for $600 or less this month. I am hopeful we can meet the food budget challenge again!

Pork Tenderloin in Honey Mustard Sauce

This week I picked up half a pork tenderloin for $8. That was about half price. When I saw the price of the meat in the sale flier, I realized that psychologically I am still thinking/shopping like a meat eater, despite the fact that we have begun to eat vegetarian at least half the time. Even though I could buy bags and bags of beans for $8 (which I already have lots of in the pantry I might add!) I could not resist the lure of purchasing meat for such a good price. I also bought chicken breasts (buy one get one free). So our grocery store gift card countdown has gone down considerably this week. While in the store I actually debated quite a bit about these purchases. Good deals notwithstanding, I *could* use that same amount of money on other items and make it stretch even further. But since we are not a 100% vegetarian family, I decided to be thankful for the good price on meat, thankful that we had the means to purchase it when it was on sale, and just enjoy it! (my husband says I over analyze sometimes ~ and he's right! But in my defense, I'm just trying to make this gift card stretch as faaaaar as possible!)

I cut the pork tenderloin into thirds and used one third tonight to make pork tenderloin in honey mustard sauce for our Valentine dinner. It was delicious! With meat for two more meals in the freezer, that works out to be $2.66 per meal, which is a pretty good price for pork tenderloin!

Pork Tenderloin in Honey Mustard Sauce

Cut pork tenderloin into thin chops (or bite sized pieces - your choice) and brown lightly in a small amount of olive oil. When both sides are browned, add 3/4 cup honey, 1/2 cup mustard, 1/4 tsp chili powder, and 1/4 tsp salt. Stir ingredients and swish pork chops around to make sure they are covered. Cover pan and let simmer for about 15 minutes. This makes a really tasty sauce, so you can serve the pork alone or spoon it and the sauce over rice.

We enjoyed it for our Valentine's Day feast!