I hate shopping

For many reasons, I really dislike shopping.  Especially during summer break.  Not because I have all four of my kids home and have to take them with me (my kids are truly wonderful), but because they like to take their time and look at everything and insist that I push around that honkin' big race car cart that weighs 50 by itself.  It just takes a really long time and I feel like I've run a marathon by the time we're done (okay, I admit it.  I've never run a marathon but I'm always a sweaty mess).  So I've been avoiding going to the grocery store.  We ran out of food that I'd shopped for last time on Friday, but somehow I've been able to avoid going to the store by just being creative and using what we've got on hand: some pasta, a few pounds of ground beef, frozen spinach, cottage cheese...stuff like that. 

I thought I had enough things to make the stuffed spinach shells that I posted about here.  I went to boil the pasta shells and realized that there were only four left in the box.  I didn't want to go to the store.  Aside from gas costing nearly $4 a gallon and that we live a good distance from any store...it seems like I always spend way more money on those "quick trips" to pick up "one" thing.  So I really try to do enough shopping for two weeks in one trip. 

So what do I do when I don't have the ingredients that the recipe requires?  I get creative.  Pasta shells are just pasta, right?  So we cooked some spaghetti, layered it in a 13x9 pan, combined the rest of the ingredients together, spread those on top, and then topped with cheese and marinara sauce.  It wasn't nearly as good as the shells version, but it was still good and kept me away from the store one more day.

Yesterday, I still had no desire to go shopping.  I still had a couple pounds of meat...and then I remembered the recipe I'd seen in the friend magazine for dinner for dad meatball sandwiches.  I had everything for the recipe except for dinner rolls.  Thought about going to the store, but then remembered that I had yeast and flour, so I made my own.  They sandwiches were really good, but I wasn't a huge fan of the rolls.  They were alright, but a little dry, so I'm not going to post the recipe here.  Oh, and we substituted barbecue sauce for marinara sauce over the meatballs. 

So, there you go.  I was able to eek out two more days worth of dinners before having to go to the store.  Honestly, one of the biggest secrets for saving money is to just STAY away from the store!