Keeping Track

Tuesday:

BREAKFAST: Oatmeal

LUNCH: packed for the girls, Spicy Split Pea Soup for me & Alan

DINNER: PB&J and apples on the run for me & girls (had a family gathering that was dessert-only), and Alan ate leftover quiche a friend had kindly brought over earlier in the day.

Wednesday:

BREAKFAST: Oatmeal

LUNCH: packed for me & girls, Alan ate leftovers

DINNER: Alan sauteed chicken in olive oil with rosemary and margerum & steamed broccoli and cauliflower. The girls had little dishes of vanilla ice cream for dessert.

I have to pause here & praise my husband, who gets a lot of credit for going along with our gradually shrinking meat-menu. He used to look at the dinner and say, "Where's the meat?" Now he is simply pleased when there IS meat. Cutting way back on meat has helped the budget a lot, and has made room for the organic food we buy. We eat meat a few times a month.

Evelyn and I did a little grocery shopping yesterday--had to buy a little toy for a friend, so stopped by a Dollar Deals store to get it, and ended up buying some cereal and canned goods there. The latter were really not that great a deal, since the grocery store had the canned beans I'd bought priced at .89 instead of the dollar I'd paid. Oh well. Live and learn!

So, with our Dollar Deal stop, a pause at our local hole-in-the-wall natural food store to get our organic, bulk spices, herbs, couscous, rice, and carob-covered pretzels, and a genuine grocery run, we spent $104.43. Let's see how far that takes us!

Monday--CSA Pickup Day

From June-November, Mondays are a day of hurrying up to use any leftover vegetables from last week's Community Supported Agriculture pickup via One Straw Farm.

BREAKFAST: We finished the Honey Nut Cheerios & milk & I drank the last of my coffee.

LUNCH: Husband & I each ate leftovers, & we made our kids' lunches (sometime we need share ideas about packing healthy school lunches--challenge!)

DINNER: Since I had to start dinner prior to the CSA evening pickup using what was still left from last week, it was not my most stellar meal: Curried Split Pea Soup, to which I added eggplant, mustard greens, & Swiss chard, all chopped. I added the greens too soon & they were overcooked, but I'll blend the soup to make up for it. A box of Jiffy corn bread rounded out the meal (more not-quite-eliminated processed food, but oh so easy!)

Once we were at the dinner table, though, reality set in. I ate my soup alone, and Alan served himself and the kids leftover pasta & sauteed veggies he'd made yesterday.

Tonight's CSA pickup will dictate this week's menu: one head each of bok choy, purple cabbage, & red leaf lettuce; four purple peppers (never seen those before!); three turnips; rainbow chard. And Alan bought me some more coffee beans at Zeke's, our local roastery.

While we pay for our CSA all at once each winter, it breaks down to about $20 a week, so with the coffee stop (for which Alan has no receipt--said I can look it up when the credit card bill comes :), we're up to about $40 this week, but we'll need to buy groceries soon.

However, I didn't stop at 7-11 today--I even resisted buying a pack of oreos from the vending machine at work because I knew I was going to be keeping track. :)

Getting Started

I've been thinking about doing this for a long time. I'm a working mom and wife living in the city with the crazy schedule that seems indicative of our modern culture. I admit liking fast food (in spite of watching all the gross-out documentaries that have, thankfully, led my husband to give it up--so proud of him!), and liking my share of bad food. I also have bad habits that are side-effects of my busy schedule--I stop way too often at convenience stores for bags of pretzels, rice krispie treats, and powerbars to feed my kids & me when I've not planned well enough to have a real meal. I also allow those stops (and the fast food stops I am ashamed I still make!!) to soothe and pacify the racing, frantic person in me that's just looking for an emotional quick fix--something that feels good right this minute.

But our family HAS made some changes over the past few years (in spite of my admission of emotional food issues!) that have made a healthy difference. Here are a few of the biggest:

1. I read "More with Less," a Mennonite cookbook from the 1970's that's really a textbook about food and eating. It led us to eat much less meat and explore recipes and meal ideas from around the world that we've come to love. My other favorite cookbook, "Simply in Season," is the follow-up and organizes recipes by when their ingredients are in season. Eating in season has become one of my favorite changes.
2. We cut way back on processed food. We still buy cereal, hot chocolate in packets, boxed granola bars and chips & salsa, but no more frozen burritos, ready-made meals, or mac-n-cheese from a box.
3. We planted a garden. We're still not great at it, but it's awesome to dig in the earth, compost our vegetable scraps, and scratch out a little of our own food a few months of the year.
4. We started paying attention to where food comes from and eating locally. Shopping at our local Farmers' Market and joining a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) have proven to be BIG changes we really love.

However, I feel like I'm kind of at a place where I need just a little extra accountability, encouragement, creativity, and inspiration to keep moving ahead with our aim for healthy and budget-friendly eating. I want to improve my skills at planning ahead so I can quit my convenience-store addiction (a total waste of money & calories.) I want to keep better track of what we're really spending on food and what we're eating--a sort of food/menu/budget diary--and I guess there's no better time to start than right now (since I've got non-pariels next to me as I type and I ate hard pretzels in the car with my kids today. May as well admit it!)

So here's what I'm going to try to do this week:

- Post all my grocery & food spending

- Post as much of our menu as I can

- Refuse to feel guilty if I fail to do any of the above, because life is short and healthy, economic eating is really just one little piece of The Good Life pie.

Here we go!

Oh, and while I'm at it, I may as well credit my husband for coining the blog title. We were having company a couple years ago and serving a Middle Eastern lentil dish we love. When asked if we were vegetarians, Alan replied, "No, we eat meat. We're just budgetarians."