HUNGRY AGAIN?!

So it seems that we all need to eat every day and if you have children, partners, pets this all gets more and more complicated as our lives get more full of activities. I'm not cooking food for my dogs (yet!), but I am the main kitchen lackey for our family of four. My husband had that role for about five years, but he passed the torch to me a little over a year ago when I passed him the torch of working outside of the home. On the dog food note - my friend is making food for her dogs and swears that it's easy and cheap to make healthy dog food at home. She doesn't have kids. I may try it one day just to cut down on the "crap! we're out of dog food again" trips to the store.

When I started cooking again after about a five year hiatus - the food was pretty horrible. I have a background in working in kitchens, so this was a shock to me. I was 8 months pregnant, in pain when I stood and not that into eating, so the meals were uninspired. My husband informed me that I need to use recipes for awhile and stop winging it. He was over the mushy stir-fry. I took his advice and used recipes - found lots of great ones on Gojee.com and even started menu planning. Before the menu planning I found myself running to the grocery store almost daily - I find that I need to hit City Market (local co-op), Hannaford and Costco to get all of the things that we like at an OK price. Food is pricey in Vermont - about 30% more than what we paid when we lived in Atlanta. The likelihood that we'll be mugged or home invaded in Burlington has decreased so it's a wash. Just entering the grocery store, especially without a list meant that for sure I would spend roughly $30 - too much for one day's worth of food at home. The weekly menu planning has cut that down to about $200 per week.

My close friend just started to use the Once a Month Mom site for menu planning and I'm stoked to try it out. I'll update to post what I spent at the store and how long it took to prepare the full month. I have a fairly well stocked spice and pantry cabinet and I plan to modify the recipes to use the items that are in my CSA (Ants in Your Pants in Colchester, VT). You end up with 6-10 breakfasts, 8 lunches, and 14 dinners. The site has a lot of different menus - traditional, diet, vegetarian, gluten free, baby foods, school lunches, and whole foods. The site creates the grocery list that you can modify for the number of servings that you'll need (across the month). The site also provides instructions on how to cook most efficiently on the big prep day, labels for the freezer bags and full recipes. Again - I'm stoked! Now if only it could fold and put away our laundry.

This is last week's CSA delivery!

 
I'm trying to not use my kitchen much, since we don't have central AC and much to people's disbelief it does get hot in Vermont in the summer. Most days are breezy and 72, but we do have the occasional humid and hot (above 80) spells. I'm going with the August 2012 Whole Foods menu first to keep the cooking time to a minimum. It calls for making whole wheat buns and tortillas - not happening. My friend also told me about a site called Ziplist  - it's sort of like Gojee - where you enter an ingredient and the system feeds up recipes, but you pick and choose which recipes you want, then you create a grocery list from there and there is a corresponding iPhone app so you can bring your shopping list with you. I take a long time deciding what to eat. I'm a total foodie and picking meals at a restaurant is kinda excruciating. I want to try the no thinking plan on Once a Month Mom where it just tells me what I'm going to eat.

I found this conversion table on the Once a Month Mom site, they found it on another site and anyways - here it is. I plan to leave it somewhere handy in the kitchen since it's thoughtfully designed and useful  - why isn't everything?!

Salad in a mother f'in jar!

Off topic - salad in a jar is pretty dope too.