Snow Day!

Today is a snow day, so I have some unexpected time to update this, meal plan, and get other things around the house done (now that all the work that had to get done before tomorrow morning is finished).

The finally tally for January grocery shopping is in - $1.85 under budget! Maybe I'll try to spend even less this month. The tally for eating out - $5.96! I managed to eat almost every meal at home last month and it was actually pretty fun.

The one thing I think I made a lot in progress with was using up leftovers. Not only did I spend less, my food waste was basically zero. One of things I was most proud of was leftovers chili - leftover enchilada sauce (replacing the tomato sauce/paste I usually put in), a few tablespoons of refried beans just to use them up, a little bit of leftover roast (pulled out of the freezer), spices, and two cans of beans (.50/each) - topped with some sour cream, homemade queso fresco, and avocado (.38/each on sale this week) - it was delicious and cheap! The leftovers are getting repurposed as chili mac and chili baked potato.

Other things I did that helped use up/plan better - I made pizza sauce for tortilla pizzas with the other half of the can of tomato paste (enchilada sauce) and then I used the sauce in some pizza pasta (vaguely this, but no meat - https://www.spendwithpennies.com/pizza-pasta-bake/). I scaled the recipe down (~6 oz pasta) but cooked the whole box and immediately separated it out for a chili mac lunch (2oz)  and mac and cheese (4oz).  Mac and cheese would be a good snow day lunch! It made it really easy to scoop some chili over the already packaged noodles and have lunch ready for the next day. Before, I probably would have cooked the whole box of pasta and either made the whole recipe and then been bored with it and thrown some away, or put all the leftover pasta in a big bowl and then would have to separate out the stuck together pasta when I was trying to put the lunch together (which isn't really hard, but laziness wins out in the evenings some times). 

Up next week - since none of the grocery stores have very good sales this week and I just inventoried my freezer - freezer eating week. There's a lot of stuff already in containers for lunch - chicken orzo soup, vegetable soup, leftover ribs, sesame chicken, tamales (regular and breakfast), frozen fruit for smoothies.... I'll figure out the meal plan this weekend and (hopefully) post here this weekend.

Comfort food....

Today I'm posting about comfort food. I think we look at the delicious comfort food we grew up with and think - butter, flour, milk! They're bad for me! But, I've discovered a lot of my childhood comfort foods are not that bad for you. We look at the ingredients and not the dish as a whole and also - portion control. So tonight I'm revisiting one of my favorites - cream dried beef. I've seen a lot of hate for this dish online (also called SOS) but the version I had growing up was delicious, and inexpensive (and had veggies!). 

Tonight I made this for dinner with:
1/2 stick of butter
1/4 c flour
2 cups of 2% milk
1 package Budding meats (judge me, but this is how it is supposed to taste!)
1 cup of frozen peas
salt and pepper
toast (I did use low calorie 35 calorie a slice, whole grain bread)

And you know what...one serving was 312 calories (including two slices of bread)! Warm, creamy, salty nostalgia for 312 calories!  And since I'm trying to be both healthy and frugal - and the frugal is hard because I stock up when things are cheap and forget what I paid - but 1/2 stick of butter (.35), a bit of flour (no clue..), maybe .50 of peas (max), .30 of milk, .66 of bread,  and .56 for the package of corned beef...so let's round up and say $2.50 for the recipe for four servings - .63 a serving! That's pretty frugal and low calorie...and delicious and comforting! (It's a bad picture but I was hungry!)