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!

Pinterest

I have been loving Pinterest lately for recipes!  We had a few really poor months there, and lived mostly (and repeatedly) on the recipes already on this blog.  Needless to say, we're pretty darn tired of them!  It always makes me nervous to try new foods, because I'm not sure how much they'll end up costing.  It is not like me to just make a menu and then buy the foods accordingly.  But with a newborn, I haven't had a lot of time for planning.  I did, however, find a few recipes that use similar ingredients and ended up spending about $80 for two weeks on my grocery bill (that includes ALL food, not just dinner).  That's about $30 more than I usually try to spend, but still a pretty good deal! Last week was spring break for my kids.  They always eat like crazy all day and I usually try to make one fun snack with them a day, too, so we did end up spending more for that reason, too.  I did not use coupons like a crazy person.  I mostly just bought what was on sale and used a couple of coupons that I already had on hand.  Don't underestimate the power of Kroger (Smith's in Utah)!  They send me TONS of coupons on great things.  Yesterday I got coupons in the mail for free diapers and wipes.  Today I got coupons for $1.50 off store brand chicken and $1 off produce.  These are the kinds of coupons that you're not going to get anywhere else.  I started receiving my coupons after shopping there for about 6 months.

We used this taquitos recipe and doubled it.  We froze half to save for a meal another day.  We changed the recipe slightly, though, and added more lime juice and halved the spices. 
This recipe for avocado chicken salad also calls for cilantro and lime juice, so I added that to the list.
Knowing that I'd have some extra avocado, I added this black bean avocado and rice wrap.  It looks so yummy.  Asparagus was on sale, so we made some of these (with regular breadcrumbs instead of panko.  I didn't know what those were a week ago, but now that I do, I think it would have made a difference.)  My daughter ate them up and had really rancid urine later that night.  But hey, if the asparagus is cleaning her system, I'm totally okay with that.  We paired that with some leftovers to make it a more complete meal.  Last night we had skinny chicken and broccoli alfredo to use up the rest of the broccoli from the potato soup we had last week.