Why I refused to cook and grocery shop this week!

I started out this month with grand plans to meal plan, cook and budget. Since groceries and eating out consume so much of our budget, I thought this would be the easiest way to cut back. The plan was simple enough: inventory food in house, create meals, buy food within budget and cook lovely meals for the week. Everyone should be happy.

The reality was quite different. No one ate the food I made last week! Well, they ate it once and didn’t want to eat any more. My husband said he enjoyed my meatloaf and creamy shrimp. My son always eats my quinoa, but not this week (in hindsight, I added cumin for the first time). For some reason, I ended up eating most of the meatloaf on my own for every meal until it was gone. Gross! And a day after I slaved in the kitchen, I found my husband cooking chicken despite all the food that was in the refrigerator.  Even though I carefully shopped within our budget for week, my husband went out 2 days later and brought $66.21 worth of food! I felt defeated and discouraged.

This week I refused to grocery shop! We had plenty of groceries. I also had a feeling my husband would find himself at a grocery store in his days off (Monday and Tuesday). I decided that instead of double shopping, I would let him have at it. I cooked 2 smaller portion meals: chicken parmesan (well, we had no parmesan)  and baked some stewed beef. I was simply over it!  My family decided they liked my cooking this week. Since there wasn’t much for leftovers, my husband cooked some baked chicken and shrimp pasta on Monday and then made us chicken fried rice yesterday. On top of it all, he didn’t go grocery shopping either! The results have been wonderful; great food and zero spending!

When I decided to meal plan, I forgot that my husband enjoys cooking and has been doing most of the cooking for the family for the last 10 years. My goal moving forward is to come up with a good way to share the responsibility. I think I’ll make a plan to cook Wednesdays and Friday-Sunday when I am off, and let him have at it on Mondays and Tuesdays. Thursdays will be leftover days since we both work and are busy with kid activities. I also need to stop trying to feed an army and make smaller portion sizes! I don’t mind eating leftovers, but I am finding my family to be pretty picky!

2/10 – Zero spending Day #6

So Much for Planning!

I decided to start out slow by creating a wonderful meal plan (see below) that focused on my son’s lunches and family dinners. Sunday was spent cooking the meals for the day as well as the next day. When I returned from work on Monday, the kids were eating french fries, my husband had decided to pick up a few things and had also cooked chicken drumsticks (yes, just chicken and nothing else to go with it). I still don’t know how much he spent because my credit card is being glitchy and no longer showing me pending transactions. This morning I woke up and thought, “Might as well treat myself to Starbucks!”  Its not looking good people!

On the bright side, I am really working on my family’s nutrition. I have been offering a vegetable or fruit at every meal. I have been hiding pureed vegetables in my son’s favorite meals. I also purchased some vegan protein power that I have been sprinkling on everything my son eats. As for myself, I have increased my daily intake of vegetables and fruit tremendously. As always, you have to take the good with the bad. I am also doing a free 30 day trial of the meal planning software Plan to Eat. I’ll probably write a review after trying it for a week or two.

Meal plan for January 11-17

	Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
Son’s Lunch	Southwest Quinoa	quinoa with rice and green beans	Southwest Quinoa	Pasta with “beef”	Southwest Quinoa	quinoa with rice and green beans	Mac N’ Cheese w/ peas
Dinner	Turkey Spaghetti w/ broccoli	Leftovers	Asian stirfry	turkey burgers w side salad	Leftovers	Jambalaya – crockpot	leftovers
Son’s Dinner	Mac N’ “Cheese” w/ peas	Pasta with “beef”	quinoa with rice and green beans	Lentils and rice	Mac N’ “Cheese” w/ peas	Pasta with “beef”	quinoa with rice and green beans

The Bad, the Good and the Food

Here’s our food spending so far for January. Eek! Our current total is $485.81 which is more than 1/2 way through our monthly budget of $850. To be honest, I haven’t meal planned or made any significant changes to the way we spending money on food and dining. So I am not surprised at all. My husband has been doing quite a bit of social eating surrounding all the football games. My poor son has been on a campaign for pizza for the last 2-3 weeks so I caved and went to local vegan/gluten free restaurant yesterday. Overall, bad, bad, bad!

My goal for this coming week is to meal planning based on what food we actually have (I hope to post that tomorrow). Hopefully that will make up for what we have over spent thus far! The good news is that we seem to have enough groceries to make decent meals. We will be eating lots of chicken, but who doesn’t love chicken, right?! Since I am off work, I plan to make most Fridays my new recipe day. Now to find some good recipes!

Making Sense of Our Food Spending

This post was supposed to be the first of weekly posts highlighting my meal planning for the week. I was going to share my shopping for the week and what meals I was going to try out on my family. Life has a funny way of laughing at plans. On Wednesday, our brand new heating unit that we are still paying off decided it didn’t want to give us any warm air. My family and I have been sitting in a cold home since then. We called the place that installed it; they came out and said they have to order a part from the manufacture to repair it. In the meantime, we’ve actually used our fireplace and purchased $100 worth of space heaters. Home-ownership woes. At least it is still under warranty! With that, I have not felt like investing any time in cooking or prepping. Also, my husband has been absent due to the end of the football season. I’m going to leave the cooking to him next week since he’s off on Monday and Tuesday!

So instead of grocery shopping, I thought I’d share a few numbers courtesy of mint.com. Last month my family spend $1,189.42 in food-related costs which is about $300 over budget. Here are the numbers:

Groceries	$653.78
Restaurants	$362.84
Fast Food	$91.83
Food & Dining	$43.46
Coffee Shops	$37.50
Total	$1,189.42

Using mint.com, I found that our monthly average for food-related expenses was $1,183 which is almost exactly how much we spent in December 2014. What is our budgeted amount, you ask? Our budget is $650 for groceries (which includes food for my gluten-free, nut-free, soy-free, vegan son due to allergies) and $200 for eating out (mostly for my husband who refuses to brown bag it even after years of me complaining). No wonder we were always over budget! So far we have spent $211.95 in January (although some of this was end of December that posted in January):

Restaurants  – $108.43 (celebrated my husband’s birthday)
Groceries – $58.48
Fast Food – $25.99 (hubby lunches for 3 days)
Coffee Shops – $10.00 (Starbucks – all me, I’ll admit)
Food & Dining – $9.05 (hubby brought me cookies to cheer me up and vending machines at hubby’s work)

Not starting off that great, huh? My hope is that we can stay on budget this month of $850!

 

Retraining

I realize that I have stopped doing the things I know help me to be successful financially. There are major holes in my budget and identifying them was pretty easy. I have been overspending on food, eating out and social activities. Since going part-time, I find myself running from the kids’ schools to activities with little time. I have managed to pack their schedules. This in itself is not a problem. However, I am not doing the proper planning that lends itself to healthy budget conscious behaviors. The temptation to pick up dinner on the way home or treat the kids and their friends to snack is hard to resist when you are not focused.

To get myself back into better habits, I am banning my use of the credit card until October 1st. And since our checking account is needs some serious help right now, this means I will be completing a low/no spending challenge for the next few days. In light of this goal, I brought one banana for $.37 today. I don’t recall if I ever brought a single banana in my life before (other than if I was traveling). But I really was craving a smoothie and decided I could easily make one for a fraction of the cost than buying one! I used some loose coins in my car to purchase it!

Well boo!

I was excited to share that I found a pizza brand my son could eat! Tonight both kids had Daiya’s cheese lover’s pizza. Personally, I feel like the taste is a little bizarre, but they enjoyed it. Add one to the “can eat” pile, I thought! A few hours later, King has been itching pretty bad and his skin looks like its reaction to something. So much for that! Looking back at the ingredients, I am assuming his seed allergy didn’t like the milled flax seed and/or expeller pressed safflower oil. I wish his body would stop thinking food is the enemy!! Grr! One step forward, one step back!

Day #5 of no spending. In fact, my husband came home to eat lunch instead of eating out! How amazing is that?!

Successful day

My husband shared last night that he was going grocery shopping today. I asked him not to buy a lot and wait until Friday before buying his normal amount of food. He like shopping for 2-3 weeks whereas I find I spend less and waste less when I focus on a week at a time. His answer to my question was “Why?” I explained to him our ridiculously low balance. I urged him to spend less than $100. Then I added, “Get some fruits and spinach for smoothies.” His response was, “I thought I’m only supposed to buy necessities.” Different definitions.

Anyways! Today, I peaked at our online banking and was pleased to see only one charge for $60.38 at Trader Joe’s. He listened!! While I would have probably made different food choices (he brought Spinach, but no fruit), I was happy to see him being somewhat budget conscious. This did emphasis the need for me to go back to meal planning and grocery shop within budget. I had been doing really good at this for a while, but then I got off track. Its an easy category to monitor and reduce waste. Its better when I do it. (okay, that sounded very controlling)

My husband did make other purchases outside of groceries, but it all was for under the 100 dollar limit. I am calling this a success and am hoping to see more of it! 

Side note: Day number 4 for no spending.

Not a gluten for punishment

(Okay, that’s the last of my cheesy wheat-themed titles, I promise)

I can totally do the gluten free business! The other day I decided to google “recipes for kids’ allergic to everything”.  That search led me videos and articles about kids who really can’t eat anything at all. My son might have quite a few allergies, but there are still so many thing he can eat. Definitely counting my blessings.

Food for King can be divided easily into three categories. The first are the food that my son either spits out or just refuses to swallow. The main victims in this category are veggie and fruits. We have had a quite a few moments of those recently. Then, there are the food he’ll only eat if I spoon feed him. Today we discover a new addition to this list: Amy’s kitchen lentil soup. He ate about 1/4 of cup of it before he realized he “didn’t” like it. I was pretty surprised since I myself thought the taste was a bit odd. Last are the things he loves and will ask for seconds and thirds. Tonight, he kept asking for more gluten free fish sticks and ketchup. It thrills me to witness my son happily eating. This truly has become the highlight of my day when it goes right. King’s appetite has been incredible. In fact, his teacher asked me today to pack more for him to eat during lunch. The shock of the new allergy has worn off and we are in the thick of it. I’m finally feeling like its going to be alright.

Wheat, I can barley hear you?

My husband is a wonderful person. (I am either reminding myself or trying to convince myself at this point.) On most areas we agree. But when we disagree, it seems like we are light years apart. Topic of today’s disagreement: my son’s allergies. He is upset that I am trying to remove gluten from his diet. He doesn’t understand why I updated his allergy chart at school. In his words, “We can’t keep him away from all the foods that he’s allergic to!” Umm, yes we can! Why as a mother would I purposely give my child food that I know makes him miserable?! My husband said that I am babying him and he needs to get use to the itching. Excuse me!?! I don’t even know how to respond to this foolishness. I realize that he grew up with allergies which makes him feel like he’s an expert (and knows more than say a doctor and some lab tests?!?). So, I guess we agreed to disagree with out agreeing really, but just disagreeing. The joys of married life.

Luckily I am the mom in this situation and the one who mostly feeds him. My plan is to get a solid 14 gluten free meals that I can use for lunch and dinner. Here’s where I am at:

Lunch options/good cold

1. Rice and Quinoa mix
2. Quinoa and black beans

Dinner options

1. Amy’s Dairy Free Rice Macaroni & Cheeze
2. Daiya’s Cheeze lover’s pizza
3. Rice pasta and marinara sauce

Obviously, I have a quite a few more to come up with. I can do this, even if it’s all by myself.

So worth it!

Remember how I brought all those wonderful veggies the other day for 10 bucks and I was wondering if it was a good deal? It sure was! This weekend I finally got around to cooking them. Spending some time searching for good recipes that included two types of squash, eggplant (I brought this week), peppers and cherry tomatoes, I only found super hard recipes for the Disney inspired ratatouille. So I thought to myself, “I am just going to throw them all together in a pot call it a day!” I tried to hand smash the cherry tomatoes but then realized there are modern appliances like blenders that would do the trick. For kicks, I added some leftover vegetable broth and simmered for about 20 minutes. I finally got around to tasting it today. I was a bit scared since I usually only cook off a recipe, but it was super good! No one in my family believes me however and they refuse to eat it. Doesn’t matter! More for me! I’ll probably freezw some and have with rice for lunch for the next few weeks! Yummy!