This new shift in the weather has also resulted in this feeling of a fresh start. I know March is an odd time to restart something, but it is better to restart when the urge strikes (at least I think it is). As part of my restart, I want to get back into writing here about food, and life, and just things that interest me in general. The pickled eggs and all you might even say. So here we go with an update since it's been two months (exactly! how crazy) since my last post.
I will start with food! When 2015 started I decided that one of my goals was to be better about the portion of our budget that gets spent on food. Now, the fact that we both have full time jobs, and very few expenses at this point in our lives means that I have a little more flexibility, but I thought: 'If I start these habits now, then I will have great strategies to use later in life'. After reading many "how-to's" on budgeting, the one idea that I really felt I would be able to successfully accomplish is advanced meal planning. That's right, meal planning done in advance of two hours before dinner needs to be made. I used to have the terrible habit of going to the store every other afternoon (sometimes every afternoon) and picking up the ingredients I needed for that night's dinner, and only that night's dinner. This resulted in a lot of extra spending of items that I was hungry for, or craved, or just saw and bought.
My new and improved meal planning happens Saturday morning (typically) and I plan out all the meals for the whole week. Breakfasts, lunches, and dinners (snacks I just restock as needed). Then from my plan, I make a master grocery list, and go shopping once, for the whole week. The only items that I purchase during the week are milk and salad, and occasionally fresh produce if I won't need it until the end of the week. These items can spoil if bought to far in advance and so I buy them as needed, but make sure that these are the only items I purchase when I make my additional trips to the store.
Now, when I say that I plan the whole week, I mean is really plan it. I account for leftovers, and when those will get eaten so that we don't have to throw away food that goes bad. And the part that really has made a difference for me is that I print out the plan, and post it on the refrigerator. This keeps me accountable for what is coming, it helps me not waste food because items no longer go bad, AND it let's Eric know what is coming! I cannot even count how many times he has come home from work and said "I have been looking forward to this dinner all day!" What a great feeling that gives me, and it is nice to know that he was looking forward to it as well.
Since I have been out of the blogging world for a while, I have also dropped the ball on taking as many pictures of my creations, but here are the few that I managed to capture.
This recipe was SO delicious, and relatively easy to pull together. I look forward to making it again, but for now I am trying to limit my number of repeated dishes!
You can of course tell by the picture that I didn't use traditional "Lo Mein" noodles. These are just Great Value brand egg noodles, but they were still delicious. And, this recipe truly is "easy" as the title claims. It was quick too! The hardest part? Cutting up the veggies!
As you can see by clicking on the recipes, most of the ones I use and love have come from other blogs, which I have found by way of Pinterest (follow my boards here!). The internet is an amazing resource, and although I do have my tried and true recipes that I use my cookbooks for, searching on Pinterest is fun!
In addition to meal planning, I have also been trying to find healthier recipes to help with another "reboot" project that I just very recently started. Rebooting myself. For Christmas I was blessed enough to get a Fitbit. For the first two months, I really just wore it, tracked my steps and my sleep, and never paid much mind to "meeting my daily goal". Within the past few weeks (maybe it's cabin fever), I have really begun feeling the urge to get myself in shape. I have goals that I want to reach, but never felt much motivation to get there. With the Fitbit, now I have the motivation. I can typically get about 7,000 steps in a day without too much effort (I teach, so I am on my feet and walking around always), but those last three or four thousand only ever came on a rare occasion.
I am currently riding a three day streak of reaching over 10,000 steps (the first day I made it over 15,000! - this did involve a 6 mile beach walk, but still) and I hope to continue this streak. Although the weather has been much nicer this week, it is still a bit brisk, and so to get myself started I have been doing one of my Zumba DVDs each day. I hope to eventually see results, but I am aware this might not happen right away. With summer quickly approaching, I am just trying to slowly work toward my goal right now. I don't know that I will ever feel comfortable sharing my "numbers", but maybe one day...
For now I will leave you with my recipe for dinner tonight (maybe I will post a picture later). The "recipe" is really just for the mixture of spices, but it is called "Brown Sugar Spiced Baked Chicken". My plan is to put it on chicken wings, so hopefully that will work!
I hope that maybe this has inspired you to renew, refresh, or reboot something in your life! I will leave you with this quote:
"You renew yourself every day. Sometimes you're successful, sometimes you're not, but it's the average that counts."
Until my next adventure,
~C
