I read about a Pantry Challenge a while ago. Parts of it sounded intriguing; I liked the
idea of using up some of the random things that have been on the shelves for a
while, or that we have just way too much of, or that tend to go bad before we
use them. There was a great sale on
canned tuna a while back, so now we have a lot of tuna in the pantry. I recently had to throw away a box of beer
bread mix from a specialty store because it expired before I got around to
using it. I never seem to use up more
than half of a carton of sour cream before it goes bad. I liked the idea of maybe addressing issues
like these. Part of it sounded kind of
annoying, though; I don’t always have the time to get super creative when it
comes to meal planning. Hubby’s work
schedule is weird (to put it nicely) and some days there’s a very limited
window of time to get dinner ready between when I get home from work and when
he has to leave for work. It doesn’t
leave much wiggle worm for extreme creativity or made from scratch
everything. And we like food. A lot.
Neither one of us are terribly happy when dinner isn’t great.
One of the perks of the Pantry Challenge is that in theory
you’re able to save up the money that you normally spend on groceries, or use
it for another purpose. I definitely liked
the sound of that. The bills, even with
insurance, from my medical issues earlier this year are insane. We also had some septic tank issues last
month, so that was a big hit to the savings account. It could definitely stand an infusion.
I haven’t been very diligent about keeping the grocery
spending as low as I can. We’ve switched
to organic milk and organic beef.
Because I’m trying to avoid soy now we’re pretty limited as to which
brands we can buy of a lot of different things.
I’ve found myself justifying a higher grocery bill because we’re trying
to eat healthier and buying more organic foods.
But I need to be more conscientious of checking to see which stores
offer the best deals on organic milk and beef and trimming the cost of other
grocery items to help balance it out. In
an effort to do this we’ve allotted $200.00 for groceries this month. It works out to about $44.45 per week when
you factor in the half week at the beginning of the month, with about $22.20
for the short week.
We’ve also slipped into the habit of eating out quite a bit
more than we should. It started slowly,
but has built into a pretty bad habit.
It’s kind of shifted from “hey our favorite Mexican place sounds great
for Friday night” to something along the lines of “I’m tired/had a bad day at
work/don’t feel like cooking/didn’t defrost anything/it’s just easier/ we won’t
have to clean up the kitchen”, which leads to eating out a lot more than we
should. It’s bad for the budget, and
has brought the weight loss to a halt.
Fortunately we haven’t gained, but restaurant portions aren’t the way to
keep that from happening.
The eating out thing is a little tricky, because as I said
before, we like food. We like trying new
foods, and going new places. We don’t
have much time off together, so we tend to eat out when we do as something that
we both enjoy doing to spend time together.
We talked about it and decided that saying we’re not eating out this
month is just setting ourselves up for failure, so we’ve imposed a limit. We’re allowing ourselves three times of
eating out together this month, and we each get one time of eating out on our
own with friends or co-workers. If we
both don’t use our own option by the end of the month we’ll allow ourselves the
fourth time together.
We’re hoping that we’ll save some money this way, start
losing weight again, use up some of the things that we have too much of right
now, and eliminate a lot of food waste by actually using the bottles of salad
dressing, bunches of herbs, cartons of sour cream, leftovers, and everything
else that ends up languishing in the back of the refrigerator. I’m also hoping to come up with some new
recipes this way; some of the best recipes are born of desperation, so I’m
hoping for some good ones.
One of my other objections to the Pantry Challenge was the
daily blogging of what you eat. Daily
blogging doesn’t seem to happen for me lately.
And I think that kind of daily blogging makes for very boring
reading! Maybe, maybe if you’re
someone like Kate Middleton the world cares what you eat for breakfast on
Tuesday, otherwise I don’t think so. So,
I plan to only post recipes or quick meal ideas, or how to make something
cheaply. I hope that will keep it
interesting.
Basically this all comes down to our very own Save Up &
Clear Out Project; $200.00 for groceries this month and limiting eating out to
four times this month to save up some money, using up things we have on hand to
clear out the pantry and freezer, and sharing recipes and time savers we
utilize to do this. I’d also love to
read about any of your quick go-to meal ideas.
