One of the best ways to save money and increase quality, is to make/bake/cook/mix it at home. No more prepackaged anything, is our goal.
I've tried my hand at homemade pesto sauce, seasoning mixes, tomato sauces, pizza dough, and so on. Even my husband has made a Chipotle knock-off burrito which is becoming his new staple lunch of choice. No more $10 burrito, hello $2 burrito. And next in line is homemade salsa and (now that we have a breadmaker) homemade bread).
It builds satisfaction, decreases cost, and creates fun challenges. Any premixed/cooked item whether in the grocery store or at a restaurant, we wonder how easy it would be to just make it ourselves. Yes, it does take more time out of our day so we experiment on the weekends, make what we can, and store the rest for during the week (thank you rubbermaid and pyrex storage containers).
The only downside we've run into with this whole Homemade Experiment...are the dirty dishes. Oh the dirty dishes are so many! While I've lived fairly happily in an apartment without a dishwasher for a couple years, this whole "make everything at home" thing is exhausting! Not to mention, it's also discouraging. I avoid cooking sometimes simply because of the dishes it will add to our already dirty pile. :(
So I finally gave in. I was now on the forefront of our search for a dishwasher (which my husband had been on board with even before finding our apartment). For $75 we purchased our very own, brand new never been used, dishwasher! Yup...brand-new....and for $75. Thank you Craigslist and the seller who never installed this dishwasher before they ended up moving. Now my husband is tasked with building an enclosure, and our plumber is finally coming to install it this week. Yay!!!
Homemade food + dishwasher = saving money, saving time, increasing quality, and no more dreading the dirty dishes. This is how you spend money in the right places and get what you want at a bargain price.
Meal Plan Savings
Between the craziness of life and a few bumps in the road, this blog hasn't been managed as much as I would've liked. Still recently married, life is still in adjustment mode and with that comes experimenting that can occasionally end in failure.
A few weeks ago we hit one of those experiments that failed. I enjoyed this money saving concept and only bought what groceries I could get on sale. Great, right? Not entirely. We ended up having some food go bad because we had some miss matched food and had no real plan of how to use it all.
It's a common mistake, I know. But it's a mistake that, when you're on a tight budget, is the hardest mistake to swallow. It's the mistake that makes you want to stop trying. Well we didn't stop trying to save, but I was discouraged from this blog. However, we have bounced back.
I once heard it said that "failure is the manure of life." Yes it stinks, but it also allows growth to blossom where it falls. That's exactly what happened. Throwing out food that went bad hurt, but it was enough to kick us into a routine that wouldn't set us up to do that again. Before every shopping trip we now go through the grocery store circulars, and match the sale prices with recipe ingredients. This time, we have a plan.
It may take more effort up front, but it also makes life easier during the week when we're trying to figure out what to eat for dinner because we already have it planned out. But, we are also signed up for (and have been we just, haven't been using lately) eMeals. Every Wednesday I get 7 dinner meal recipes, cooking instructions, and an organized grocery list emailed to me for a very minimal subscription fee.
Lately we've been meal planning on our own, but only ever planning a main dish...eMeals plans out your main dish and pairs it with a side dish as well. You better believe next week, we'll actually make use of eMeals. Intentional buying, means no more wasted food, which means spending money wisely and that is the entire point of why I write what I write.
For those of you interested in this subscription I'll teach you a little secret to save even more money on the eMeals subscription (instead of $4.80 a month, it's now $2.40 a month). Go to google and search "Groupon emeals" because 70% of the time there is a Groupon in some region of the US for 50% off. Not all the time, but before you pay full price, always check to see if you can save a little more. ;)
A few weeks ago we hit one of those experiments that failed. I enjoyed this money saving concept and only bought what groceries I could get on sale. Great, right? Not entirely. We ended up having some food go bad because we had some miss matched food and had no real plan of how to use it all.
It's a common mistake, I know. But it's a mistake that, when you're on a tight budget, is the hardest mistake to swallow. It's the mistake that makes you want to stop trying. Well we didn't stop trying to save, but I was discouraged from this blog. However, we have bounced back.
I once heard it said that "failure is the manure of life." Yes it stinks, but it also allows growth to blossom where it falls. That's exactly what happened. Throwing out food that went bad hurt, but it was enough to kick us into a routine that wouldn't set us up to do that again. Before every shopping trip we now go through the grocery store circulars, and match the sale prices with recipe ingredients. This time, we have a plan.
It may take more effort up front, but it also makes life easier during the week when we're trying to figure out what to eat for dinner because we already have it planned out. But, we are also signed up for (and have been we just, haven't been using lately) eMeals. Every Wednesday I get 7 dinner meal recipes, cooking instructions, and an organized grocery list emailed to me for a very minimal subscription fee.
Lately we've been meal planning on our own, but only ever planning a main dish...eMeals plans out your main dish and pairs it with a side dish as well. You better believe next week, we'll actually make use of eMeals. Intentional buying, means no more wasted food, which means spending money wisely and that is the entire point of why I write what I write.
For those of you interested in this subscription I'll teach you a little secret to save even more money on the eMeals subscription (instead of $4.80 a month, it's now $2.40 a month). Go to google and search "Groupon emeals" because 70% of the time there is a Groupon in some region of the US for 50% off. Not all the time, but before you pay full price, always check to see if you can save a little more. ;)
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