What's for dinner?

Not spending a fortune on food isn't terribly difficult, it just requires planning.  Pre-Frugal August, dealing with dinner each night typically consisted of us coming home from work, saying, "what do we want to eat?" and then either making a grocery store run or ordering from Calz' up the street (my goodness their pizza is delicious!).  However, the result of this is that we'd frequently end up buying ingredients for one meal, buying many things on impulse on our frequent shopping trips, and generally not eating as healthily as we could.  Not only were we wasting $$$ on food we didn't eat in the form of leftover ingredients, but we were also spending an hour each night on grocery runs, not to mention the gas to get to the store.  

Lunch was equally dismal - Mr. FA frequented fast food joints, while Mrs. FA would hit the salad bar at the grocery store next to her work, which may be healthy but is quite pricey.  

The solution?  Shopping for a whole week of groceries at once.  Buying in bulk, buying things that are on sale and/or in season (we just got 10 ears of corn for $1.00 at Farm Fresh), and planning meals that share ingredients so that everything gets used up.

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Here are the receipts from our last two weekly shopping trips.  Less than a hundred bucks for each week.  The key here is that most of our purchases are produce, and all of our protein comes from vegetables, nuts, beans and dairy. 

We plan on eating salads for lunch every day, and vegetarian main dishes for dinner.  Rice, beans and potatoes combined with a wide selection of vegetables gives an almost endless pallet for meal choices.

You'll see that we did splurge a little bit - vanilla ice cream and an A&W root beer.  The kid had never had a root beer float, and some things just can't be denied.  We also saved some pennies by bringing our own bags - Farm Fresh gives a $0.05 credit for each disposable bag you bring in.  

So far, this diet has taken some getting used to, but it's also been fun planning our meals out.  We like trying new things, and tonight our beans and coconut rice are introducing us to a flavor we haven't had before (p.s. cooking the rice in coconut milk ups the calorie content, which is important for keeping us full through the day when we're eating mostly fruits and vegetables).  We did go on an experimental all-raw-vegan diet a few months ago, so making half of our intake from fruits and veggies isn't so extreme for us; it might take more getting used to if we hadn't already adopted a mainly vegetarian lifestyle already.  Our salads also contain a lot more than lettuce - they're chock full of chopped veggies like carrots, green beans, broccoli, and celery, and have lots of nuts, beans and cheese in them.  

I do want to talk for a second about beans.  They're a staple in vegetarian diets, but buying them canned is just plain silly.  Buying dried beans gets you about three times as many beans for the same price as canned.  For example, a one-pound bag of garbanzos is $1.99, the same price as a 16-ounce can.  However, that one-pound bag of dried yields almost three pounds of cooked beans.  Another benefit is that most of the canned beans contain a fair amount of sodium and/or preservatives that aren't in dried.  You're also only using a small plastic bag in lieu of three metal cans.  Cooking dried beans takes additional preparation in that they have to be soaked overnight or in boiling water for an hour before you can even start the "cooking" process, which also takes an hour to an hour and a half over low boil.  This 

I think we'll miss the crackers and pre-made hummus from the store, and impulse buys like chips and salsa for a while, but we're doing well at replacing these things with home-made equivalents.  Mr. FA just wishes we could figure out how to make tortilla chips - if anyone's had any experience with this, please let us know!

Well, we're off to our beans and rice for the evening, followed by some good book-reading on the couch.  Have a great night!