Trying Something New

Me? Trying something new? I know, unbelievable, right? I'm just dripping with sarcasm here, in case you are reading this and don't really know me. It's so big, so revolutionary, I just had to share. Ready? Here it is...

I'm planning ahead!

Woo-hoo! That's big, ain't it?

Planning ahead meal-wise, that is. Not just planning out meals for the week--that's nothing new--but actually cooking them ahead as well. See, we have this problem of eating out WAY too much in our family. Unhealthy, of course, but even bigger of a problem is that it is very quickly d-r-a-i-n-i-n-g away our (well, hubby's) hard-earned money. The number of times eating out last week=7. It may be normal for some people, but for us that is just actually unacceptable.

The draw for me is the convenience, pure and simple. You eat somewhere else, that means someone else has to take the time to cook and the time to clean up. You arrive, eat, and leave, and you don't even make a dent in your clean kitchen. It's very attractive, I must say. However, there's the $$$ thing, as I mentioned earlier. Eating out is not so convenient when it comes to balancing the checkbook...

So anyway, after I came to this realization that things needed to change, I figured there was only one of two things I could do: either buy more convenience-type foods at the grocery store or do something like OAMC. The latter was out right away; I don't like a lot of re-cooked food that's sat in a freezer for a month, and we don't have a lot of room with our 1.5 freezers after harvesting from the garden. As for the grocery convenience food, at times it is more expensive than Burger King and more often than not, just as bad for you--or worse.

But then as I was making my meal list for the week, I had a thought. What if I just took one morning a week and pre-prepared (is that a word? it is now...) what I could for the next week's menu? Then everything wouldn't have to come out of the freezer, it would still be mostly-from-scratch meals, and it would be convenient at the same time. Does everyone already do this? Is this one of those things that everyone else just knows but it takes a kick in the head for me to figure out? Don't answer that.

So here's what the oldest three and I did this morning:

-precooked two meals' worth of chicken

-browned ground beef for spaghetti

-prepared the spaghetti sauce

-made 16 waffles

-made one loaf of blueberry bread

-crockpotted (another new word for the day) two meals' worth of pork

-made 15 individual scrambled egg circles for breakfast sandwiches

-cut up an impressive amount of lettuce

So! I'm excited to see how this experiment works this week. And just to set the record straight, yes, I love writing about the mundane happenings of everyday life. Isn't everyone as excited about new tactics for the running of a household as I am? Don't answer that.