Meal Planning Monday

This week is going to be really crazy/busy. Then Christmas. So I'm going to try and make really simple meals this week.
Tonight: Chili dogs and salad
Tuesday: Honey ginger pork chops (from freezer) with rice and veggie sticks
Wednesday: Linguine with alfredo sauce and chicken. garlic bread (and probably more salad)
Thursday: Not sure if I'll be here or gone yet, plans are still tentative.
Friday: Off to California for Christmas
Saturday: Still in CA

Not quite meatless

One of the first budgeting tips you'll find is to go meatless at least once a week. And I really love reading Cate at Budget Confessions chronicle her meatless meals.  I'm really bad at planning meatless meals. Mainly I switch between either French toast or soup and grilled cheese. Honestly, we don't go meatless very often in this house. But this week I've tried another tactic. I made One pan taco dinner with one pound of ground beef.  The recipe says it feeds 4 but it really makes a TON on food. Not only did I freeze half of it, I had leftovers! To those leftovers, I added diced can tomatoes and stuffed the mixture in roasted red peppers and topped with cheese. Yum! So it may not be meatless but it's only 1 lb a meat that made (at least) 2 dinners to feed 2 people. Then tonight I made BBQ chicken sandwiches. I put 1 chicken breast in the Crockpot and poured BBQ sauce on it and let it cook. So simple and the smell brought me right back to an annual work party/picnic at my dad's work that my family and I LOVED! When it was cooked through, I shredded the chicken and added a bit more sauce. Then I served it on hamburger buns with homemade potato wedges. Probably the easiest dinner ever and since we only need 1 chicken breast (instead of the usual 2) it was frugal too.
The whole point? It may be hard for me to go 'meatless' but that doesn't mean I can't stretch out the meat! I'd normally use 2 chicken breasts or 1 lb ground beef per meal.  By cutting those in half I saved approx 2.85. K, not a fortune, but everything adds up, right? Isn't that why we do this?

Food Waste Wednesday

Not the best week for me. I cleaned up my kitchen earlier in the week and honestly didn't want to make dinner and mess it up! I've learned my lesson. This week waste:
Packaged salad- about half is left
2 tomatoes
1 lemon
1 pk thyme- I bought this specifically for a chicken recipe and never made the chicken!
I gotta stop doing that!
Not in the picture is 3 green onions that I thought I could just peel off the top skin part and use, but when I went to do that for a salad I was making, I saw that they were too far gone.
I gotta stick to my meal plans!

Meal Planning Monday

K this week my goal is to use up what's in the freezer/ pantry and to buy as little as possible.

Monday: Chicken fettuccine with salad and garlic bread

Tuesday: Chili dogs

Wednesday: Teriyaki chicken, rice and corn

Thursday: Fish fillets, broccoli and cheese

Friday: Honey Garlic Pork chops, rice pilaf, veggie sticks

Saturday: soup and grilled cheese

Food Waste Wednesday

So the only food I wasted this week were the 4 chicken thighs I had to throw out after my Spicy Honey chicken fiasco and then some leftovers of a foil dinner I had for lunch that didn't turn out that good. I ate half of it, and then just threw the rest away. I feel pretty proud of this actually- especially compared to last week. Next week is gonna be tough; we have a lot of things that could go bad, so I'm gonna have to be pretty watchful. Lots of dairy products that need to be eaten.

P.S. I FINALLY organized my freezer! I have a deep chest freezer that I absolutely love but it gets so messy and disorganized and everything gets lost in the bottom. So now it's nice and organized and it turns out I have SO much food! Next week, I'm really gonna try and use up a lot of that food.

Meal Planning

Ok, so last night I finally made spicy honey chicken I've heard everybody raving about, and I don't know if I messed up major, or if everyone else is crazy but it was awful! It tastes super weird and made a HUGE mess. So I wasted 4 thighs and I'm not happy about it! Plus, I was so concerned about the chicken I forgot about the rice, which turned into a soggy mess. We gave up and went to In and Out.
My goal is to find a good oh 20 recipes that I can just rotate, cuz right now I'm pretty much scouring the internet for a recipe that sounds good and sometimes it is. Sometimes it's just ok, not 'rotate worthy' and sometimes it ends up like last night. So here's the plan
Monday: Chicken/ bacon swekers
Tuesday: Biggest Loser Finale!
Wednesday: (I work till 8 so it's gotta be something quick...haven't quite thought of it yet)
Thursday: Sweet and Savory steak
Friday: (ok I had a whole plan for this, and bought all the ingredients, and just went to look for the recipe to know the title and I can't find the recipe!)
Saturday: chicken and rice pilaf

Food Waste Wednesday

This was a bad week for us! It all started when I got sick on Tuesday night.
In this picture:
 1 apple
just over 3/4 of an onion
almost a whole yellow peper
2 greek yogurts
1 yoplait yogurt

The onion, pepper, and one of the greek yogurts was supposed to me made into a dip for thanksgiving, but I was too sick to make it. I haven't made dinner at all in these past 2 weeks, and I really haven't been eating much of anything, so a lot of things went bad. I'm almost back to normal, so hopefully next week won't be so bad.