Welcome

Welcome to my new adventure! I spend a lot of time online looking at recipes and meal planning and soon realized I couldn't find what I was looking for. There are tons of food blogs and meal planning sites, but nothing for a single person that didn't need a college student's budget, but also didn't want to spend two hours every night cooking. I also wanted to have breakfast and lunch ready to go in the morning. So, I've decided to start blogging my own adventure in money saving, better eating, and better planning for one. Mine is not of necessity, I could afford to eat out all the time if I wanted. But, that's a waste of money...we all know that. I started experimenting with this last year by doing a large cooking on the weekend - usually a large meat item in the crockpot - and then trying to make this carry me through the week. It sort of worked. But it got boring. I'm building on that foundation to expand this. I'm sure there will be hits and misses. Times that I do really well and times I get Egg McMuffins a few times a week...but, I'm here to share all of that with you. Maybe posting will make me more accountable and motivate me. But maybe it will help someone else find what I couldn't!

Summarizing - this blog is not for the crisis budget or the dorm room student. I like to cook when I have time and have a fairly well stocked kitchen (equipment wise) and I LOVE to bake so there will be some baking posts. This is for someone who cooks for one person, has a somewhat demanding job, and wants to be able to spend the weekends cooking and prepping for the week. I like a bargain but have set a fairly liberal monthly grocery budget of $150. But, $150 for 90 meals is not a lot, really.

So, let's dive into weekend #1!

I spent a lot of my grocery budget this week. But, there were good sales! I got about 5.5 lbs of ground beef, a 2.5 lb beef roast and a 4.5 lb pork shoulder. This will build the base for my meals this month. I'm doing this blogging kind of retroactively, so on Friday I cooked up about 2.5lb of the ground beef, used about .5 lb in chili and then froze the additional 2lbs (cooked). Chili for me is super simple - a little ground beef, some kidney beans, a little tomato sauce/paste, spices...that's it.

Saturday, I was making the roast. I had purchased some celery (1.48) and potatoes (5 lbs for $2) and the roast (2.5 lbs for $10). I didn't have my usual onion soup mix so I used some real onions (previously purchased 3# for .69 at Aldi), some carrots (no idea what I paid), and a cup of beef broth (probably $1.50 for the carton). I added a cup of wine ($4.99 a bottle) tossed in the roast and turned on the crockpot. I let this cook on low for about 6 hours and then tossed in some more baby carrots (I don't like overcooked carrots - the initial ones were to flavor the stock) and about 2# of potatoes (yes, I was planning for leftovers!) and I let it cook for about two more hours. Pretty tasty and no artificial anything (did I mention I wanted to cut down on packaged food?).

I should probably mention at this point that I made corn meal mush for breakfast/lunch. It's delicious and I made the leftovers into polenta cakes to go with the chili from Friday and to go with the yet to be made beef ragu. So, at the end of the day Saturday I had a big container of beef, a big container of potatoes and carrots, and good sized container of beef broth. I also had 8 mini loafs of polenta.

Sunday (today) comes along and I decide I'm going to start on my New Year's plan to learn to make biscuits. I love biscuits, especially with apple jelly or apple butter. I found a recipe online that worked really well and made fluffy biscuits (I'll share some other weekend). No lunch was needed. Dinner was ham and swiss quiche. And 7, yes 7!, breakfasts were made. Again, I'll share the recipe later (spoiler alert - check the Fannie Farmer cookbook). Then I turned my roast leftovers into a Shepherd's Pie for tomorrow's dinner...maybe you're starting to get the picture...I now have 7 quiche slices in the fridge/freezer for breakfast. I have a Shepherd's Pie in the fridge ready to bake tomorrow for dinner. I have chili over polenta for lunch tomorrow. This is what this blog is about...pre-cooking, pre-planing. Real food for a real (single) adult!