Category Archives: Cooking

Menu Plan & Grocery Round Up: 1/10-1/16

Unfortunately, as much as I didn’t want it to, adding my mid-day snacks to our grocery list has also added about $10 to our normal grocery spending. I’m hoping that this is just an adjustment period, and that soon I’ll learn to snack more frugally.

We spent $63 at the grocery store this weekend. That includes healthy snack foods like yogurt, apples, and granola.

Here’s our weekly menu plan. Some of these meals may not sound like diet foods, but I stress the fact that for the less healthy meals, I adhere to strict portion control guidelines.

Sunday: Shrimp and chicken paella
Monday: Sandwiches/leftovers
Tuesday: Chicken fajitas and refried beans
Wednesday: Taco salad
Thursday: Whole wheat pasta with marinara
Friday: Homemade pizza

For more menu plans, check out OrgJunkie.

Frugal snacks to avoid mid-day cravings


photo by JenWaller

As I try to eat healthier, one of the biggest challenges for me is the office break room. Whether it’s a birthday cake, baked goods from a generous colleague, or treats from grateful clients, there is always something to munch on, and it’s seldom healthy.

Frugality and weight management go hand in hand. Unhealthy snacks are generally a drain on the grocery budget anyway, so I never have them around the house. Unfortunately, I can’t control what comes into the office break room.

In the office, I’m particularly vulnerable to succumbing to temptation. As the afternoon drags on, not only do I feel the urge to get up from my desk and do something to give my eyes a break from the computer screen (like snack), but I also feel increasingly hungry now that I’m eating smaller portions.

Two years ago when I lost 40 pounds, I ate six times a day — three small meals and three healthy snacks. Eating small portions frequently not only increases metabolism, but also helps me to avoid the temptation of unhealthy snacks — if I’ve never hungry, I’m not as tempted to eat unhealthy foods.

Unfortunately, adding snacks to my grocery list — even healthy snacks — will mean higher food costs, especially since we’ve cut virtually all extra snack foods from the budget to maintain lower food costs.

I wanted to avoid the extra cost, but now that I’m working out right after work and eating smaller portions, it’s a struggle to make it from breakfast to lunch and lunch to dinner without eating something in between. If I don’t plan ahead and bring healthy snacks, I’m more likely to eat the cakes and chocolates around the office.

Two years ago I filled my cart with pricey convenience foods, like those delicious (and expensive) 100 calorie packs and granola bars. Now that I’m living frugally, I can’t see paying that kind of money for convenience. Even non-convenience foods like fresh fruits and nuts are too expensive.

I spent some time brainstorming for snack ideas that won’t cost a fortune. Here are some of the options I’m considering:

  • Apple slices with peanut butter
  • A slice of bread with a tablespoon of peanut butter
  • Homemade granola with yogurt
  • Homemade apple sauce
  • Raisins
  • Fresh vegetables (purchased on sale)

Can anyone give me any good ideas for frugal healthy snack foods?

Menu Plan & Grocery Round Up: 1/3 – 1/10

Well, it’s back to reality, which means menu planning and grocery shopping. We cleaned out our refrigerator and pantry before heading out on vacation, so we had to restock meats and some staples. No worries, though. Our grocery store had chicken breasts on sale for under $2 a pound, so we stocked up with enough chicken to last us more than two months.

After replenishing our freezer and pantry, our grand total was way over budget – about $85. Yikes! But with all the meat and several items like coffee and cheese that we buy in bulk each month, I’m not too worried about it.

For almost two weeks we’ve been eating holiday foods and restaurant meals while traveling (including an entire day of fast food yesterday as we drove 14 hours in one day — yuck!). We’re both really looking forward to getting back into the kitchen to cook some healthy homemade meals.

Here’s our first menu plan of 2009:

Sunday: Roasted chicken and red potatoes (We’ll make chicken stock with the leftovers.)
Monday: Chicken quesadillas
Tuesday: Chicken fajita tortilla soup
Wednesday: Chef’s salad
Thursday: Bean and cheese burritos
Friday: Homemade sushi (more on that later :) )

Now head over to OrgJunkie for more menu plans!

Guest post: Cook an elegant meal for 6 for $30

This is a guest post from Chris Ambrose. His cooking and entertaining blog, This Guy Cooks, is full of great tips for entertaining and cooking gourmet meals on a budget. If you’re struggling to come up with last minute meal ideas for Christmas or New Year’s, this great menu could be your solution.

First I would like to thank Karen for letting me guest blog on her site over the holidays. I know that this has been a tough Christmas financially for lots of people this year. With all the doom and gloom out there about the economy, just about all of my friends and family are tightening the old belt over the holidays.

As Karen wrote in one of her previous posts, the holidays are supposed to be about being with your friends and loved ones and the wonderful memories that come from those times. In my family, it’s not Christmas without my Mom’s sticky buns. Both my sister and I are in our early 30s, and to be totally honest that’s all we really care about. I have no idea what I got for Christmas when I was 8, but I can tell you that we didn’t have sticky buns that year because Mom burned them.

While things are a bit tight for everyone this holiday season, please don’t pass up on to spending time with your friends and family because you think you can’t afford it. I have come up with a elegant dinner menu for 6 people that you should be able to do for under $30. Hopefully this helps you continue to have those wonderful memories and experiences over a great meal.

Dinner Menu

Roasted Pork Loin with an Apricot Glaze

Roasted Sweet Potatoes and Onions

Spinach Salad with Mandarin Oranges and a Honey Mustard Dressing

Vanilla Ice Cream with Caramel Sauce

Sweet Potatoes

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Peel and cut 2 large sweet potatoes into 1 inch cubes. Slice a half of a onion into roughly quarter inch slices. Toss the onion and sweet potatoes with salt and pepper, cumin, red chili powder, a dried herb of your choice (rosemary goes nicely). Place on a cookie sheet or roasting pan and put in the oven for 45 minutes to an hour until the sweet potatoes have finished cooking and are soft to the touch.

Pork Roast

Mix together a dry rub for your pork loin (about 3 lbs. roast) consisting of salt, pepper, dried oregano, and cumin (remember with cumin a little goes a long way!).

Heat a tablespoon of olive oil over medium high heat in a skillet (love to use my 12″ case iron pan for this). Place the spice rubbed pork loin in the skillet and brown on all sides.

Once it’s browned on all sides, place it in the oven for about an hour or until you have an internal temp of 150 degrees.

For the glaze, take about a half a cup of apricot jam (peach also works well), and heat it in the microwave or on the stovetop. After the pork has been in for 30 minutes, brush the pork with the jam. Repeat this again after you take the pork out of the oven. Once the pork is finished let it rest for 10 minutes before carving it.

Salad

For this salad I normally just get a bag of pre-washed baby spinach and a can of mandarin oranges in light syrup. For the dressing just whisk together Dijon mustard, olive oil, red wine vinegar, and honey.

Dessert

This is just a simple dessert. Pour a caramel sauce over a good quality vanilla ice cream. Feel free buy the sauce at the store or go ahead and make your own. It’s pretty easy.

Wine

I think that a Syrah would stand up nicely to the pork and fruit flavors of this dish. One of my favorite value Syrah blends is the 2006 Penfolds Kanooga Hill Shiraz/Cab blend. You can normally pick it up for about $7.99.

Check out Chris’s blog for more recipes & entertaining tips!

Menu Plan & Grocery Round Up: 12/13-12/19

This week we finally saw a decrease in our grocery spending resulting from our monthly menu planning experiment. Our total was $51! That’s about $9 less than what we typically spend.

Because we bought many items earlier in the month, our list was pretty short this week. We also didn’t need to get any meat for this week’s meals, because we already had it. Even though we weren’t spending more than normal in the beginning of the month, our advance planning helped us spend less this week.

This is only one week, so I don’t have enough information to know for sure if monthly menu planning will be cheaper in the long run, but I’m certainly feeling encouraged enough to try it again in January. Most importantly, it made menu planning and grocery shopping a lot less stressful on the weekends. For that reason alone, I liked it.

Here’s this week’s menu plan (my final full week before our holiday vacation!):

Saturday: Chicken wraps and oven fries
Sunday: Steak fajitas
Monday: Dinner party with friends — we’re bringing chocolate chip cookies for dessert.
Tuesday: Bacon wrapped chicken (We’re using Monterey jack instead of blue cheese and omitting the pecans to reduce the cost of this recipe.)
Wednesday: Chicken noodle soup
Thursday: Broccoli chicken stir fry
Friday: Black bean quesadillas

Looking over this menu, it actually looks a lot more expensive than my typical menu plans. That’s why I’m so excited that we spent less than normal this week. Without monthly menu planning, this menu would have cost a lot more.

I hope you had a successful week at the grocery store!

Visit OrgJunkie for more menu plans.

Think a month ahead to save time & money

Each week, I plan a menu and a to-do list. In an attempt to reduce stress and plan ahead for the holidays (including a 2,000-mile road trip), I decided to try monthly planning.

In addition to using Mint to plan a zero-based budget based on our income (which I do every month), I also mapped out a month’s worth of meals, a pre-holiday/vacation to-do list, and I’m still working on planning a month’s worth of blog posts.

Using Notepad, I saved three documents on my computer desktop last weekend: December budget, December menu, and December blog schedule.

When it comes to my blog, I’m not so good at planning ahead. Between my full-time job, spending time with my husband, and home management, the blog typically takes a back seat. It’s not uncommon for me to sit down to write the next day’s blog post with absolutely no idea what I’m going to write.

This month, I’ve been pushing myself to stay ahead of the game. Not only am I attempting to plan ahead for blog post ideas, but I’ve been writing more on the weekends and scheduling posts ahead of time.

I have to say, monthly planning has made my life a lot easier.

In the past, I’ve tried similar planning using calendars and date books. For some reason, these simple little Notepad documents have worked better than anything I’ve ever tried. Maybe it’s because I spend so much time in front of my computer, or maybe it’s because they’re so incredibly simplified, like a little electronic Post-it note.

I finished my budget and menu plan last weekend. Even though my blog post schedule isn’t finished, I have a head start on the month’s posts. Most importantly, I have a place to put those ideas that randomly spring into my head.

My premature new year’s resolution is to keep it up. I tried this method to make the holidays easier, but I can see how it could save me tons of time and money the rest of the year, too.

Having a monthly menu plan has made it easier to take advantage of grocery sales on nonperishables. For example, we’re making vegetable beef stew in two weeks, so when we found beef stock on sale for 50 cents a can last week, we picked up four cans. It saved us $2.

In the future, I plan to use the previous month’s menu plans to simplify my planning process even further. Because we have many favorites that we like to make over and over, I can refer to old menu plans when I need ideas for the next month’s meals.

My monthly to-do list has made it easier to manage my time. I know what I need to finish each week, so I won’t end up with a million things to do the week before we leave town.

It’s also made my weekend a lot more enjoyable. I didn’t feel stressed Saturday morning before grocery shopping, because I knew our menu plan was already finished. I also didn’t feel rushed or guilty thinking about what I should be doing. My to-do list dictated a few tasks I needed to finish to stay on track. Once they were done, I was free to relax.

I can’t wait to perfect this monthly planning process to maximize my savings and productivity. That definitely works for me.

Menu Plan & Grocery Round Up: 12/6-12/12

I’m just going to come out and say it: I love monthly menu planning. Shopping this week was so simple. We already knew what we needed, and even bought some of it last week. That freed up some of our budget to spend on sale items to use in coming weeks. I think we might continue planning monthly instead of weekly from now on.

Our spending isn’t lower (we still spent about $55 this week which is pretty average for us), but planning for the month has saved us a lot of time and hassle.

As you may remember from my post’s last weekend, this month we’re on a food & financial diet. Monthly menu planning is part of that, but we’re also trying to eat healthier without spending more money.

Here’s our menu plan for the week:

Saturday: Sandwiches
Sunday: Grilled tilapia fillets and squash
Monday: Chicken and rice soup
Tuesday: Grilled chicken salad
Wednesday: Garlic chicken with broccoli and cheddar
Thursday: Chicken wraps
Friday: Bean and cheese burritos (recipe below)

Bean and Cheese burritos (from the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook)

8-inch tortillas
1 cup chopped onion
1 tbsp. cooking oil
16 oz. fat-free refried beans
Shredded lowfat cheese
Shredded lettuce
Salsa

Saute onion in oil until tender. Add refried beans. Heat through. Fill warmed tortillas with 1/4 cup beans, and cheese. Roll up and bake in 350-degree oven about 10 minutes until heated through. Serve with lettuce and salsa.

Check out OrgJunkie for more menu plans.

Menu Plan Monday & Grocery Round Up: 11/29-12/5

As part of my Holiday Food & Financial Diet this month, we spent Sunday morning planning out three and a half weeks worth of meals to last us until we leave for Christmas. These menu plans were especially tough because I’m also putting some restrictions on my diet to ward off holiday weight gain and hopefully cancel out the damage I’ve already done.

We originally planned to reduce meat consumption, but I’m also limiting my wheat and carbs consumption (to an extent) for the next three weeks. Trying to come up with vegetarian meals with pasta and bread off limits was pretty much impossible. So we planned a pretty chicken-heavy meal rotation with a few healthy carb-heavy meals (like red beans and rice) and lots of soups for the next three weeks.

Chicken wasn’t on sale this week, but we have enough in the freezer for this week’s meals. We’re crossing our fingers that it will go on sale next week so we can buy enough to carry us through the month. (Cross your fingers for me!)

This week’s total was $52. That total isn’t necessarily true to what we spent for this week alone, though. Because we already have meals planned for the next three weeks, we picked up several sale items that we know we’ll need in the near future.

Here’s the first installment of our December meal plan:

Saturday: Thanksgiving leftovers
Sunday: Turkey sandwiches
Monday: Chicken fajita tortilla soup
Tuesday: Chef’s salad
Wednesday: Red beans & rice
Thursday: Vegetarian chili
Friday: Grilled chicken wraps

I hope you’ll come back for week two of my month-long menu plan!

Now head over to OrgJunkie for more menu plans.

Introducing the “Holiday Food & Financial Diet”!

Photo by rwhitlock

I don’t know about you, but the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are a dangerous time for my waistline and my bank account. The holiday spirit tempts me to overspend on entertainment and gifts, and the holiday parties and meals tempt me to eat and eat unhealthy foods.

This has been a weekend of gluttony, and with our trip home for the holidays coming up in a scant 24 days, I’m looking ahead to another week of overeating, overspending, and expensive travel. This year, I want to nip it in the bud. I don’t have the will power to resist on the holidays themselves, but the least I can do is control myself in the weeks in between.

So how are we controlling our diet and spending in the next few weeks?

1. We’re reducing our consumption of meat.

We have a couple steaks and a few chicken breasts in our freezer. We’ve decided to pick up some extra chicken breasts to last us through the month, and then ration our consumption for the next few weeks. This will not only reduce the amount of meat we’re eating and buying — it will also ensure that we’re not leaving a freezer full of meat when we head out of town for Christmas.

2. We’re trying month-long menu planning.

I typically only menu plan on a week by week basis. This month, we’re going to try planning out our meals for the next three weeks in one fell swoop. This will allow us to maximize purchases, ration our meat consumption throughout the month, and clear out the pantry before our trip.

3. We’re cutting our entertainment spending and staying home instead.

With our big trip back to Indiana coming up, we’ve decided a few weekends at home won’t hurt us. This will not only free up some extra money for travel and gifts, but it will reduce the temptation to overeat at a restaurant or splurge on movie theater popcorn.

We’ve cut our usual $50 for entertainment out of the budget. Typically this goes to the occasional movie or meal out. This month we’ll stay home on the weekends, utilize the library, and revisit some movies we haven’t watched in ages.

4. We set a budget of $50 each to shop for each other — and we’re sticking to it.

Both of us were willing to give up receiving gifts from the other, but neither of us wanted to give up the fun of shopping for the other. Finding that perfect gift for the person you love most is so much fun. The trick is to avoid the temptation to go overboard. Last year, we were limited to $50 each, and we had a lot of fun finding small, practical but thoughtful gifts to put under our tree. We decided to maintain the tradition. Nothing big or flashy, just small tokens.

5. We kept our Christmas shopping list short.

It can be so tempting to shop for anyone and everyone in your family this time of year. I firmly reminded myself that the people I love who love me will understand that we’re not in a place financially where we can buy flashy gifts for our extended family. We used an Amazon gift card I received through MyPoints to shop for our nieces and nephews who are 5 and under, and we’re putting together gift baskets for immediate family.

I’ll revisit this topic throughout the month to let you know how I’m doing. I hope you’ll join in, too! The holidays themselves may throw off your financial and fitness goals, but if we can control ourselves for a few weeks in between it might not be so bad!

If you’re planning on joining in, please leave a comment and let me know how you’re cutting back for the next three weeks!