Week 19: Exercise

I alluded to this last week, but this is the week I'm taking the plunge.  I WILL start exercising.  I have several obstacles that I must overcome, but it's really time to start.  First, I don't like exercising at home.  I liked going to our local YMCA and working out there, but it costs money and I need a babysitter-both are things that are in short supply.  Second, it is so easy to put exercise on the back-burner when the kids are in activities or errands need to be done and then it is 10 pm and I'm supposed to be in bed (which I'm failing at also).  Third, Hubby is working a second job and while the weather is great for getting outside, it is hard to really get a decent workout in when you are trying to watch all three kids to make sure they don't wander into the road and they can't keep up the pace for very long, so I slow down and the benefits are lessened. 

I could make excuses all day, but that is just what they are, excuses.  Each evening I will do something active.  I have a neighbor that wants to do the Couch to 5K program, so I will try and get set up to do that, but I also want to get out and do things with the kids.  If I can't be without them, I might as well include them.  The girls want to practice sets and serves for volleyball and I can play ball with little man, so an increase in activity has to be better than the status quo.  I'm also going to try and get in a little 30 day Shred at least a couple times a week.  It's bought and paid for, I need to use it.

I am also in the process of revamping our meal plan for this month.  Last week, after a lot of agonizing reading, I decided to drastically cut the amount of grains we eat and replace them with vegetables and fruits (fresh where possible).  This leaves the budget is a bind, as I spent over $50 in produce this week and another $75 in meat to get our stash built back up again.  Also I just bought another 50 pound bag of flour that will be getting a lot less use.  Also with food prices going up, I'm having trouble making the changes I want (and need) to make without just ditching the budget completely.  At this time, I'm thankful that I do have the opportunity to take an extra daycare kid occasionally which is really helping to supplement my food budget. 

Right now, I don't feel like I'm meeting the thrifty aspect of my blog/personal goal, but I'm trying to do the best I can for my family the cheapest way I can.  Could my budget always be less?  You bet, but would we eat as well as we do?  Probably not.  I will be heading out to the farmer's market next weekend to see what is available there, maybe there will be deals to be had.

I made an oops!

This morning I got ready to finalize my grocery list for next week.  We are headed out of town on Saturday morning and probably won't be back until later Sunday afternoon.  I wanted the list ready to go, so when we got home, I could just run out and pick up the few things (produce and milk) that we needed.  The problem?  I didn't make a menu.  When I did my initial menu for the month of March, I made it for four weeks and needed it to be for five.  Oops!

Since I have no money coming in next week, it meant that I had to do a "from the pantry" week.  This wasn't be too hard since I have several staples that I purchased in bulk.  My biggest thing was to use up what we already have so I don't have to buy much.  I think I did a pretty good job.  You will notice several of what would be considered to be more convenience meals.  They will still be from scratch, but they are made from the basics that we always have on hand.  Also, there are a lot of "eggy" dishes.  I have 9 dozen eggs.  I purchased 10 dozen at the beginning of the month, my father-in-law has brought me another 6 and we've been/will be out of town for two weekends, so there is no shortage of eggs in this house.  That's ok-we love 'em and eggs are very versatile.

So, here it is:
Monday-3/28
Breakfast:  Oatmeal, Strawberries
Morning Snack:  Veggies and Hummus
Lunch:  Spaghetti, French Bread, Clementines, Salad
Afternoon Snack:  Smoothie, Graham Crackers
Dinner:  Taco Salad, Spanish Rice, Corn

Tuesday-3/29
Breakfast:  Pancakes, Smoothie
Morning Snack:  Almonds
Lunch:  Cheese Pizza, Green Beans, Cantaloupe
Afternoon Snack:  Carrots with Peanut Butter
Dinner:  Fried Rice, Teriyaki Chicken

Wednesday-3/30
Breakfast:  Egg Muffins, Apple Juice, Toast
Morning Snack:  Smoothie
Lunch:  Chicken Strips, Broccoli, Blueberries, Breadsticks
Afternoon Snack:  Squash Oatmeal Muffins
Dinner:  Ham & Beans, Cornbread

Thursday-3/31
Breakfast:  Granola Bar, Oranges
Morning Snack:  Raisins
Lunch:  Waffles w/ Cranberry Syrup, Smoothie, Apple Slices, Corn
Afternoon Snack:  Popcorn
Dinner:  Cheese Omelets, Bacon, Toast, Fruit (whatever misc. fruit is around)

Friday-4/1
Breakfast:  Freezer muffins (I have a few of several different kinds hanging out in my kitchen freezer), Orange Juice
Morning Snack:  Cereal
Lunch:  Egg Salad, Peas, Banana, Crackers
Afternoon Snack:  Brownies
Dinner:  Grilled Cheese, Pretzels, Cut up veggies

Saturday-4/2
Breakfast:  French Toast Casserole
Lunch:  Meatball Sliders, Pea Salad
Dinner:  Chicken Lasagna

Sunday-4/3
Breakfast:  Leftovers
Lunch:  Leftovers
Dinner:  Will pick up when doing monthly grocery shopping or we will eat out if I do well budget-wise while shopping! :)

Grocery List
Strawberries $1.18
Carrots $1
Broccoli $3
Grape Tomatoes-if I can find some at a reasonable price $2
Lettuce $7 for 2 pkgs.
Spinach $4
Apples$5
Bananas $2
Mushrooms $1
Crackers-one of our stores has these B1G1Free $4
Sour cream-for making ranch dressing and for taco salads $1.25
Organic tortilla chips $3
Small container plain yogurt (to use as starter-I forgot and ate all of my batch without saving some to start the next batch) $.50
3 gallons whole milk (2 for drinking/baking, 1 for yogurt) $10

Total = almost $44

This is about average for what I spend on "off" weeks.  Plus, grocery prices are increasing every week it seems.  It is getting harder and harder to spend less on groceries and still maintain quality.  I am trying to justify the cost with the hope that eating better will mean less spent on medical.  Of course, as I type this, I'm dealing with a horrible sinus infection and have spent well over $150 treating it in the past two weeks and I'm no where near healed.  Ugh!

Updates on the baby steps

I just thought everyone might like to see how the project is going!

1. Eliminate soda:  It's going pretty well.  Hubby brought how 5 two-liter bottles from work one day last week and I've had a couple glasses.  Both times it tasted sickening sweet and I had to have a glass of water to combat the sugar.  I'm definitely over the addiction.  I drink mostly water and tea with the occasional glass of orange juice.
2. Salads:  Still buying organic lettuce and making my own Caesar and ranch dressings.  I'm not overly thrilled with the 1000 island recipe and need to do some more searching.
3. Crackers:  I'm making all graham crackers, cheese crackers and animal crackers.  I've given up on the snack cracker for right now and I'm buying Kashi 7-grain crackers.  They are a little pricey, but so is using pound upon pound of flour for crackers that are ok, but not "to die for."
4. Eliminate GMO sugar:  I finally purged the last of my cheap powdered sugar stash over the weekend.  I am now buying evaporated cane juice (and trying to use less overall), and C&H brown sugar and powdered sugar.  Eventually I'll probably get rid of brown sugar and add a bit of molasses and extra cane juice in substitution in recipes, but for now C&H is cane sugar so no genetically modified sugar beets and that's good enough.  Down the road, when I have more money to devote to groceries, I'll buy large quanitities of Rapadura, but right now that's not an option.  I will make this change knowing that there is better, but what I'm doing is better than nothing at all.
5. Organic apples have been reasonably priced, so not buying them hasn't even been a consideration.  As of yesterday, they were within $.10/pound of conventionally grown apples.  That's not enough of a difference to justify buying the cheaper ones.
6. MSG and nitrate(ite) free meats:  I'm doing reasonably well.  Yesterday I bought nitrate/nitrite free deli meat and bacon.  I like the Hormel deli meat (if not the company), so 2-3 packages/month will work there and I bought Applewood Farms Bacon.  It's on the menu for tonight, so hopefully it's tasty.  For now, we are really limiting ham.  In the past months, I purchased a whole ham and we used it for 4-5 meals.  I'm steering away from that.  There isn't a nitrate free version that is remotely affordable, so we will still eat it on holidays or family gatherings, but not as part of our normal meal rotation.
7. Following superfoods recommendations:  Meal planning was a little harder than I imagined, but not too bad.  The food that I found getting skipped most often (and it really surprised me) was tomatoes.  Hubby's digestive system doesn't do too well if he eats a lot of acidic foods, so we try to only have tomato-based foods every third or fourth day.  Therefore, we are lacking there.  Since canned tomatoes have BPA in the lining of the cans, not consuming so much might not be a bad thing anyway.  We'll see what happens with our garden this summer.
8. Meal planning:  I did a lot better last week and with this month's plan, I tried to incorporate several easy meals and easy alternatives.  I also bumped up the budget back to $500/month (including any eating out).  If I were feeding just the 5 of us, I don't think $300 would be unreasonable.  Feeding the daycare kids and providing the variety of options is proving more difficult than I had imagined, especially since food prices have gone up even in the last month.  Additionally, I've added a consistent morning snack which increases the cost as well, but I think it helps the little ones focus more and play together better, which is important for their development.  I'm hoping (fingers crossed here) that once I start buying in bulk and get the garden going, that I can bring that number back down.  We'll see.

Overall, I've fallen off the wagon a couple times, but not too bad.  I've got to go.  I'm off to make mac 'n cheese for snack and an apple salad for dinner.

Menu Planning: Part 1

I started working on March's menu plan this morning.  I printed my list of superfoods from last week in an attempt to try and incorporate them more fully this coming month.  I'm a little overwhelmed.  It is easy to get several of the foods in one or two meals, but to try and get the daily/weeky requirements in over the course of every week has proven a bit more challenging than I though it would be.  I've decided that even though we probably won't meet the goal every week, a good attempt is better than no attempt at all.

This month I'm also changing a few things in regard to how I do my menu.  First, I'm writing all of our known obligations on the menu (under the date), so I don't forget that I need an easy meal on "x" day because I have a meeting at 6 pm and hubby has to get dinner for the kids.  Ya know, that kind of thing happened a lot last month.  It almost always resulted in picking up something processed from the store or hitting a drive-thru.

Second, I am planning full meals, both entrees and at least 2 sides for every meal.  Last month I just did the entree and figured I could come up with the rest as I needed it.  What happened was me standing in the kitchen with a ready to serve entree and I didn't have a clue what veggie or fruit was going with it.  I have four bags of veggies (5 pounds each) that haven't been opened becuase I forgot about using them.  Good news, this month, I won't be buying many frozen veggies!

Third, I am adding a morning snack to my menu.  I typically give the daycare kids something to munch on as I'm getting ready to prepare lunch (or tide them over if a little one decides he/she needs to eat NOW!).  I have been just grabbing whatever out of the cabinet and I've found that when I go to make a dish later in the month, I don't have enough of some ingredient, almonds in this case, because I've been using them for morning snack.  Same with boxed cereal.  I had used it a few times for morning snack for the kids and then my girls didn't have any cereal for breakfast this week because I had used it all.  Oops, sorry girls!

So far, I have the first two weeks done and I'm planning on putting them up on the menu plan page.  I'm hopeful that I can get the plan done tonight and then make my list in the morning.  I won't get to do my bulk grains shopping for a couple weeks, so that is throwing things off a bit too.  I think I'll just go ahead and buy another 5 pound bag of flour and be done with it.

Cream Cheese Radish dip

Since this week is dedicated to the quick and easy, stay on plan, meal ideas, I had to include this.  I love this dip, and while it's not a meal in itself, it goes well with soups or sandwiches and it is an excellent dip to take to a potluck. 

I feel dumb that I let my dislike of radishes keep me from trying this dip for so long.  My husband's aunt brings this dip to almost every family gathering-it's her signature dish, and rightly so.  It's creamy, a bit salty and doesn't taste of radishes (which is a good thing if you are me).  I like to serve it with cut-up veggies or Kashi 7-grain crackers. 

*Sidenote:  I haven't given up on finding the perfect cracker recipe, but I am taking a break.  I was using 2-4 pounds of flour a week and the budget just can't handle that kind of experimentation right now. :)

Cream Cheese Radish Dip
1 cup radish, finely chopped (I usually just chop the whole bunch b/c I have no other purpose for it and it ends up being about 1 1/2 cups.)
8 oz. cream cheese, softened
1/4 cup butter, softened
1/2 tsp celery salt
dash paprika (I go a little heavy on this as I like paprika)
1/2 tsp Worchestershire sauce
1/4 cup green onion, chopped (Again, I chop the whole bunch, unless I have another dish for it to go in.)

This can be done by hand, but I really like my food processor for this.  Toss the radishes in (I cut the tops and bottoms off).  Pulse until chopped to your satisfaction.  I like them very fine.  Add softened cream cheese and butter, celery salt, paprika and Worchestershire sauce.  Pulse until the mixture is completely mixed together.  Stir in green onions.  You could use the food processor to mix them in, but it pulverizes the onions and I think the onions give the dip a nice splash of color, so I like to leave them as is.  Refrigerate the dip for a few hours to allow the flavors to blend.  Serve with veggies, crackers or even spread on bread in a tortilla as a sandwich spread.

**I'm so excited.  I hadn't thought of the sandwich spread until just now.  I want to make some more dip and put it in a tortilla with a couple slices of turkey, lettuce and tomato.  Wow!  That is soooooo going on next month's menu plan!  Just to make that a little sweeter, I used 4 superfoods!  Meals like this almost make up for the fact that I ate  junky fast food most of last week.

Week 8: Stick to the meal plan

I've fallen off the wagon.  Bad.  Horrible.  I feel both guilty and poor.  For the past 4 months I've been doing monthly meal planning and for the most part it has been working well, at least until this past week.  I've found that a problem quickly develops when I make all our food from scratch and suddenly I don't feel like cooking.  Since cooking equals meals in our house, if I don't cook, we have nothing to eat (unless flour, oil and frozen meat appeals to you).  Last week was one of those weeks I didn't feel like cooking, we had a meeting one night, I picked up Girl Scout cookies one night, planned our library night, etc.  Add to this that for most of the week the weather was unseasonably hot.  There were 2 days that the afternoon temperature reached 80 degrees.  Do you think I felt like making ham and bean soup on either of those days?  Nope, not a chance.  So we ate out.  A lot.  Like 4 days in a row! (insert fainting smilie here!)

We haven't eaten out 4 days in a row for over a year.  We typically eat out once or twice a month and never consecutively.  We've spent a week's worth of groceries eating out (and remember I've blown the budget already) and when I think of the junk we've eaten I feel so ashamed.  So, this week's change is to stick to the meal plan.  I have to make it through this week and I have several choices left since we didn't eat hardly anything that I planned for last week. 

Since this is the last week of February's plan, I'm going to plan March a bit differently.  I am going to try to include a couple easy alternatives each week so if I have a lazy day I don't feel the urge to eat out.  Also, I'm going to get a couple packages of lunchmeat and freeze them.  That way if what I've planned doesn't match the weather, I have the ability to pull out the deli meat and we can have a sandwich and cut-up veggies and fruit.

Look for March's menu plan and grocery list toward the end of the week.  This week I'm focusing on simple recipes to get me through when I don't want to cook.