Thursday, May 30, 2013

Kiddos pick dinner; grocery savings

May 30, 2013

We all tackled the leftovers today. My daughter packed the rest of the spaghetti, some white beans, and cauliflower (and a tortilla to make a spaghetti taco, ha). My son packed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, cauliflower, and yogurt. My hubby had the leftover fajita. I had leftover spaghetti sauce and made up the rest of a partial box of pasta.

My pre-challenge grocery weekly average was $175. Today I spent $18.65 on toiletries and cleaners. I spent $9.73 on impulse items. Yikes, higher than my new normal. I saw the container for apple crisp and couldn't pass it up which meant I had to get an extra bag of apples. I also saw bean sprouts. I have never bought them before but my hubby and I had a conversation about them this morning. Figured it was a sign to see them so I got them. Also, we actually liked the "fake" chicken we had this past week so I thought we would try another item so I got beefless tips. I spent $113.15 on food. I spent $6.53 on gossip magazines. After adding in their surcharge and taking out my coupons, I spent $152.07 out of pocket. Ouch. Oh well. I got a ton of deliciousness. This was a savings of $22.93. My pre-challenge weekly restaurant average was $80. This week we ate at Subway and Applebees (using a free sandwich from loyalty card and some gift cards) and spent $33.07 which is a savings of $46.93. The kids had three school days off this past week due to the holiday and unused snow days so they only saved $8. Our total savings for this week is $77.86 which brings our grand total savings to $3605.34 in 225 days!

I have a fridge full of food, endless recipes pinned for new meal ideas, and I allowed the kiddos to pick what we eat for dinner. What do they pick? The same thing we had night before last: Salsa corn queso dip. Ha. You got it! I wanted to make it a little healthier than last time (we used tortilla chips). We used dippers as if we were having a fondue night. We had green/yellow/red peppers, cauliflower, carrots, and Italian loaf bread. I made a few alterations on the dip tonight. I didn't have any leftover veggies from the grill so I just sauteed red onion, red/green/yellow pepper, and onion in olive oil then added in some local white wine. I used 1/2 block cream cheese, then a layer of black beans and homemade salsa (that was put through the food processor), a few whole black beans, the veggie mix (put through the food processor to be finely chopped), corn (frozen from farmer's market), cilantro, mexican cheese, and cheddar cheese. Baked for about 15 minutes at 350 and then under broiler to crisp up the cheese. I had a half an avocado in the fridge so that joined in on our little picnic! Delicious dinner that was pretty healthy. Well, healthy other than cheese but who can resist cheese? Certainly not us!

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