Welcome to the United Kingdom! I am happy that you stopped by! I have been asking readers to leave comments at the end of the posts so that I might get to know you but then I started getting reports that people have been trying to comment but their comments disappear. I believe that I have fixed the problem but if it happens to you for some reason, please send me an email and I will go back in and see what the problem is.
Today is my Husband's Birthday. We just spent the day at home, eating and watching movies. He isn't one to celebrate his birthday. He does not like parties and he does not like it when I make a big fuss over him. He prefers to spend his special day quietly with his family and that is fine with me as long as it makes him happy.
Tomorrow will be busy so taking today to just rest and recover from the storms has been a nice change of pace. I have an entire list of things that need to be done, but with the way my body has been behaving, I will just go down my list and feel content to accomplish one task at a time. Normally when I make a list of things to do, it ends up being a very long, very complicated list. I always think of things that I have put off for too long that probably don't have to be done right now but I am one of those people who gets a whole lot of satisfaction in checking off each item on the list.
Tomorrow those check marks are not going to add up very quickly. I have to do the one thing that I dread doing -making the meal plan for another month. I hate, hate, hate making that meal plan! I like to use my crockpot as much as possible. It keeps me from spending a couple of hours a night in the kitchen. I do my best to plan meals that have similar ingredients that are also on sale, that I also have a coupon for. Then I have to go through the ingredients in every recipe and check to see what I have and what I have to buy. Then there is the shopping and when I get home and unload everything, I spend the following day slicing and dicing and chopping and adding each recipe to it's own gallon sized Ziploc bag and labeling and freezing it until I am ready to choose a meal to pop in the crockpot.
From finding new recipes so that we aren't getting bored with the same meals over and over to making the shopping list to going through the sales flyers to matching the coupons to the sales to preparing and freezing the meals; I usually end up spending a total of three days from start to finish. Those three days are time well spent because then I don't have to cook a meal from scratch for the next 34 days but this time will be different. I am spoiled by having two refrigerators. I can stock both of them and not have to shop for a month. Last week, one of them died and until I can get a repair person here, I am down to one fridge which means that I can only plan meals for a week at a time. Ugh! That means more shopping later. I don't like grocery shopping.
With the recent awful weather, many people had their water pipes freeze and break so the repair people are super busy and my refrigerator is not high on the priority list. I am not going to whine about it too much. I am grateful that our pipes did not freeze and break so I will shop week to week and pray that everyone has their pipes fixed soon. Make no mistake though, I will be one happy girl when I have two working refrigerators again!
I have found that by planning out our meals the way that I have described, I am not only giving my family a home cooked, healthy meal every night but I save one hundred and fifty dollars a month. Once I realized that I was saving so much, it made the three days worth of planning and prep work worth it. Plus, I have around two extra hours in the evenings to spend with my family without being stuck in the kitchen.
If you want to look into preparing thirty days of home cooked meals and save some money, Pinterest has several great tutorials. I look for new recipes on http://www.dlife.com They have a nifty little tool that allows you to put in an ingredient that you want to use and it pulls up hundreds of recipes with that ingredient. It is a diabetic recipe site but you don't have to be diabetic to use it. The website is diabetic friendly but the recipes are also heart healthy and help with weight loss and maintaining a healthy weight. I use it because I had a heart attack four years ago and the recipes allow me to take care of my heart and they taste good so no one complains that the food is bland.
I also use a site called http://www.momswithcrockpots.com and http://www.penniesandpancakes.blogspot.com Both of these sites have thirty day menus with recipes and I have never had a complaint from my family about the taste of the food. I know that there are many sites with crockpot recipes, I just haven't had the time to search them out yet. Maybe I should go do that now and get a jump on tomorrow. If you know of any good recipe sites let us know! If you know of ways to save the grocery budget, please speak up! Every little bit counts and I am doing my very best this year to gather up those little bits and put them away for a rainy day. I am off to start my search for new recipes. Go enjoy your crockpots!
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