Sunday, January 16, 2011

Making things stretch

Well, here we are, halfway through the month, and I have already overspent my grocery budget.  Trust me, this should not surprise anyone.  I am the WORST when it comes to grocery shopping - I want what I want, and the list is more of a jumping off place than anything else.  I'm really trying to give the budget some renewed focus, though, so I pretty much need to just stick with buying the essentials till February.

Fortunately, this should be fairly easy.  I did a big grocery shop today, and tonight I sat down and made a list of two weeks' worth of weeknight meals, and I have plenty of food on hand to cover the weekends, too - I was just focused on the weeknights for now. 

My goal is to get through the rest of the month only buying milk and a bag of salad.  Here are a few things I intend to do to help make that happen:

 - bake bread for my daughter and I to eat (we have a loaf of bread in the freezer for hubby's lunches - he won't eat homemade bread).

 - make a batch of cheese crackers for snacking (the white cheddar Wheat Thins are VERY popular around here - we go through about two boxes a week and we're currently almost out).  I have a couple of recipes I can try out, and I've been telling Caitlyn that we'd do this for a while now, anyway.

 - make homemade tortillas for our chicken enchiladas

 - for breakfast, instead of our usual almost-daily yogurt and cereal, we can have oatmeal, pancakes, waffles, scrambled eggs, muffins,etc.

 - for lunch, instead of our usual lunch meat, cheese, and crackers or bread, we can have leftovers, soup (from a can or homemade), lentil-rice balls, or quesadillas (once I make the tortillas, of course!).

Those are just a few ideas to start out with.  I'm sure I'll come up with others as I think about it.  We'll still be over budget, but I'm hoping to minimize the damage as much as possible!

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