irrelevant rambling
It is such a nice thing to be able to cook. It makes my grocery bill so much cheaper and its just a nice way to show people you care about them. Like me, for example. Today I showed myself I care by making a bacon mushroom spinach fritata with a bit of fat free mozzerella. I wish there were tomatoes but you know, the bacon made up for it. I need to
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I have a blog entry about grocery shopping, here: http://brokestudentguide.blogspot.com/2011/02/smart-shopping-10-tips-and-tricks-that.html
Mostly what I do is stock up on a lot of things that keep for a long time - frozen meats, several different types of grains, etc - and then I only really need to buy things that don't keep each week, like whatever produce happens to be in season, or deli meat/cheese for our lunches. All my meals are the same basic formula: grain + meat + veggie (sometimes legumes play a large part as well - I'm really into rehydrating beans lately. SO cheap, SO versatile.) So we eat a lot of, say, marinated chicken with grilled zuchinni and couscous. Which is all insanely cheap (I buy my couscous in bulk at my grocer so it's very inexpensive, and I get my frozen chicken either on sale and stock up or at Costco. Zuchinni is essentially whatever in-season veggie is cheapest.) Or we eat a lot of mexican-stuff - beans + meat + cheese + tortilla + in-season tomatoes or whatever. Or pizza with homemade pizza crust, and then put whatever you want on it. When I go shopping, I keep in mind what I already have, and then buy things while planning out meals in my head. I base the meals around 1-2 things so I don't have to remake stuff from scratch each week. Say for example, I have a lb of dried beans. I rehydrate them all at once. Then for that week I can eat bean and meat quesadillas and burritos, bean burgers, bean stew, bean dip, bean stew, chili, etc. Or sometimes I'll base it around a vegetable, or a meat, or a grain, or a fresh spice that's on sale, or whatever. Then I just mix and match. Like I said we have so much stuff stockpiled up in the fridge right now that I'll be able to mix and match for ages! We have potatoes, rice, couscous, quinoa, frozen chicken, frozen ground turkey, beans, a whole bunch of other random stuff and spices galore (I uses spices for EVERYTHING.) So we're all set!
Of course if I didn't enjoy cooking quite so much it might be a lot harder to do this..... luckily, I love it! I have a HUGE recipe file on OneNote that I'm constantly adding to, and I love scoping out blogs for recipes and ideas.
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