WIS, WWA | Just the three of us
What I Spent
This week, I've only been feeding Sonia, Zoe, and me.
And my grocery spending has been quite low.
I spent:
- $9 at Harris Teeter
- $20 on Target groceries
- $25 on a Hungry Harvest box
- $5 on a bowl of chili at Potbelly
Then last night Zoe and I went out to Aldi and spent $24.50 on food, but since I still had $42 in my grocery budget, we picked up a few non-food, non-necessary items, such as two hedgehog doorstops.
Do Sonia and Zoe's bedroom doors need doorstops? Not technically, but how could we resist?
They had to come home with us.
October Spending
Week 1: $110
Week 2: $148.50
Week 3: $111
Week 4: $126
Week 5: $108
What We Ate
Since there were only three of us here, I put off trying any crock-pot recipes until next week because most crock-pot recipes make more than three people can eat!
Saturday
I know the girls ate chicken noodle soup, but I cannot for the life of me remember what I ate. I think I probably threw together a bunch of random things from the fridge, but apparently whatever I made was not extremely memorable.
On the upside, if my concoction had been terrible, I would have remembered it. So it must have been at least passably tasty.
Sunday
I cooked some rotini and made this alfredo sauce* to top it. Fresh produce on the side.
*I used oat milk + heavy cream and left the Parmesan on the side, for Sonia's sake. And regardless of what milk I use, I always temper the egg yolk and then bring the sauce slowly to a simmer to thicken it.
Monday
I spied some Swedish meatballs I'd frozen a little while back, and since there was a small-ish quantity, this seemed like the perfect time to use them up.
I made a fresh batch of sauce for them (the meatballs were just frozen by themselves) and cooked some noodles. Fresh produce on the side.
Tuesday
We had frozen ravioli and tomato sauce, with produce on the side (again!).
Wednesday
The girls ate Italian sausages in buns early in the evening, and then while Zoe was at youth group, I ate a bowl of chili at Potbelly and studied muscle terminology.
7
Thursday
I had a small amount of beef au jus in the chest freezer, so I thawed that and made a fresh loaf of French bread so that we could have beef au jus sandwiches.
Friday
I think I'll make some French bread pizzas with the leftover French bread from last night.
Saturday: Tuna patties, mashed potatoes, green salad with vinaigrette
Sunday: Beef fajitas (minus the bell pepper, because it had gone bad--boo), guacamole, black beans, calabaza (a winter squash), chocolate pudding
Monday: Breakfast sausage patties, lentils, rice, green salad with ranch dressing
Tuesday: Shepherd's pie, green salad with ranch dressing
Wednesday: Beef and rice soup, cheese, bread and butter
Thursday: A whole heck of a lot of leftovers, even though my parents arrived for a visit. I figured they hadn't eaten any of these things, so they weren't leftovers to them. 🙂 My mom always brings a ton of food and I needed to make room in my refrigerator. I also made caramelized cabbage, roasted tomatoes, and garlic bread to round everything out. Plus brownies and chocolate chip cookies were part of the leftovers because I made them for the class Halloween parties and they didn't all get eaten.
Tonight: Beef stir-fry and rice.
Regarding Thursday: I think if you make bread and a dessert, whatever else you serve suddenly seems fine. 🙂
I grocery shopped with no meal plan for this week which I almost never do, I realized I wouldn’t have time though and threw together an online order for pickup very quickly, luckily it shows you which items you ordered in the past so that helped. I did make a meal plan with the groceries I ended up with.
Saturday - takeout burgers
Sunday - homemade pizza
Monday - cheesy chicken, vegetable and rice casserole
Tuesday - slow cooker pork carnitas, corn
Wednesday - easy chicken Parmesan (frozen chicken patty with pasta sauce and cheese melted on top), salad kit, peas and corn
Thursday - chili Mac skillet
Friday - my son and I are going to a trunk decorating play date for a trunk or treat event that’s tomorrow and the host is ordering pizza for everyone
Happy Halloween weekend to everyone!
We spent $115 this week at the grocery store, which included $21 for cat food and litter and $15 for chicken. This week's menu was centered around the chicken. I accidentally bought the boneless, skinless version of chicken thighs, which were about 12 cents a pound more expensive, but my arthritic fingers were happy not to have to pull the skins off icy cold chicken.
For Sunday meal that makes a few days of leftovers, I made pan-fried seasoned chicken thighs with potatoes and baked apples, and threw in a small pot of mac and cheese since our adult son with the big appetite was eating with us. When the leftovers ran out, we had sandwiches with pickles, fresh produce, cheese and fresh fruit.
I claimed some of the chicken thighs for my brown-bag work lunches, and added creamed spinach and an ancient grains mix of quinoa, millet and buckwheat. Used the last of the frozen strawberries, some leftover grapes and the last of an opened carton of yogurt to make frozen parfaits for my lunches. Three elderly bananas, the last two eggs in a long opened carton, and the last few spoonfuls of applesauce were turned into banana-bran muffins, which I had as work snacks instead of cookies or granola bars.
Somehow, cold meat feels like the worst kind of cold. It feels colder than ice!
Let's see... I made several meals that also served as leftovers...
Last Saturday I threw 4 chicken breasts in the crock-pot with some grill seasoning and cooked those for making meals all week.
Saturday we had white chicken chili
Sunday we had cashew chicken w/ brown rice and eggrolls
Monday we had...turkey burgers from the freezer and roasted potatoes.
Tuesday we had pasta with mushrooms and a salad.
Wednesday we were camping and had leftover white chicken chili and a salad.
Last night we had leftover cashew chicken, roasted brussels sprouts and eggrolls.
Tonight we're having leftover pasta.
I actually DID make a menu for this past week, and it worked out well. I love having leftovers for meals. I think tomorrow we'll probably make a pizza.
@Julie Norman, we always keep Turkey burgers in our freezer too.
- Clean-out-the-hydrator chopped salad: spinach, red cabbage, carrots, hard-boiled egg, sunflower seeds, raisins, simple homemade vinaigrette.
- Portobello mushrooms filled with marinara sauce and sauteed onions
- Veggie-barley soup
- Green peppers filled and baked with eggs, spinach and sun-dried tomatoes
- Plate of veggies: sauteed swiss chard, roasted squash, steamed broccoli
- Tofu-veggie bowl
- Popcorn and fruit
I scanned over your comment quickly and somehow my brain thought that your Monday meal was a soup and I was so confused as to why you would be putting sunflower seeds and raisins in a soup. Ha!
Those are much better in a salad than in a soup.
@Kristen, although I love unusual combos, even I wouldn't put raisins in my soup!
So, I googled and apparently it is a thing: https://www.vegetariantimes.com/recipes/moroccan-lentil-stew-with-raisins/
@Kristen, also I think Mulligatawney Soup has raisins in it and is DELISH
@Kristen, which reminds me that I actually do put raisins in a soup! They are excellent in Cashew Chili.
@MB in MN,
what is a clean-out-hydrator chopped salad? The words I do understand in Englisch but I can't make any sense of the combination of those....
Your meals of the week sound very appealing to me! So much produce. Yummy
I am wondering if she meant a "clean-out-refrigerator" chopped salad.
@Kristen, hydrator AKA crisper drawer!
Ohhhh! I've never called the crisper drawer anything other than a crisper drawer. Ha.
@Lea, I cleaned out the refrigerator's hydrator bin that had several bits of veggies stored there. So I took them all, chopped them up, placed in a bowl and drizzled with vinaigrette. So delicious and easy!
@MB in MN,
Thank you for explaining. I had trouble with the word hydrator. But now I understand.
We’ve had lots of soup- I made chicken noodle soup and sausage, kale & white bean soup and had it for multiple dinners. We also had canned clam chowder with grilled cheese sandwiches one night because we were at my mom’s house setting up security cameras for quite some time and needed a quick meal. We made homemade pizza with garlic knots one night which was delicious- I’m trying to break our every Friday night pizza takeout addiction. I need to work on the garlic knots recipe- my daughter loves garlic knots and liked these but thought the garlic should be roasted first, not fresh as the recipes called for. I purchased a bag of garlic this week and will try roasting it ahead of time to have for recipes.
I bought sourdough starter from King Arthur Flour and made my first ever sourdough bread- I have quite a bit of sourdough discard in my fridge to use up so I need to come up with a plan and make some things this weekend. I’m thinking sourdough waffles and there is a recipe for breakfast biscuits on the King Arthur website- I could make some breakfast sandwiches and freeze them. I think keeping the sourdough starter going might be harder than keeping small children alive but I’m going to give it a try. I think as long as I have I going, I will need to keep coming up with ways to use up sourdough discard.
Tonight my husband is going to the theater with his mom and my daughter and I will get Cheesecake Factory takeout and watch a Halloween movie. Cheesecake Factory has a promotion where you get a slice of cheesecake with a $40 takeout order so this will be fun but not really frugal.
@Beth, I bake all our bread from a sourdough starter, and I don't discard any starter, ever. If you bake often enough, you can just keep the starter in a jar in the refrigerator without feeding or anything and it will be fine for two weeks or more. Just use the starter to start the process when you bake, and pull some out to serve as starter for next time before you add salt. I have a whole thing about how I bake with sourdough on my site if you want to read it. It really does not have to be as hard as they make it out to be online.
https://going-country.blogspot.com/search/label/sane%20sourdough
@kristin @ going country, thank you so much- I will bookmark that and read it- there are lots of recipes on King Arthur’s site and I plan to try several. The bread recipe I used (from the booklet that came with the starter) wasn’t very tangy so I want to work on that. We have a local bakery that makes amazing sourdough breads so of course that’s the flavor I’m wanting to replicate.
Thank you again for your comment!
@kristin @ going country, Thanks for sharing this link, I totally enjoyed your recipe description... your attitude toward cooking seems to mirror mine, so I am going to enjoy perusing your site and have signed up for your blog. I love it when there is this kind of sharing on the frugal girl
I love french bread pizza.
We had a calico beans with cornbread too for three days. It got better and better. We had a slow cooker chicken curry over rice with asparagus in air fryer one night and left over curry and rice with a red cabbage slaw another night. We are having frozen pizza and Caesar salad out of a bag tonight. We like tombstone pizza in a pinch.
We also had cheesy eggs toast and fruit one night.
The newly cooking for one edition:
1. I had a steak from the box o' meat, with a roasted sweet potato. I got in at almost 8 p.m., so that was all I did for that meal.
2. A burger on a gluten-free bun, with carrot-raisin salad as a side and... something.
3. I made a soup based on ground beef and bone broth, with carrots, mushrooms, celery, sweet potatoes, onions, garlic, chard, etc.
4. Meatloaf with the rest of the carrot-raisin salad and the rest of the chard not used in the soup.
5. Vegetable-Beef soup leftovers.
6. Seasoned ground pork, cabbage cooked in the pork pan and cinnamon applesauce, because I love pork and apples together.
Tonight depends on how late I get home. I will probably have leftovers. This is my off-week for shopping after I leave work (at 3 on Fridays), but I will meet with the Stephen minister and go visit my husband afterwards. The Stephen minister is going to show me how to knit again. I learned how to knit way back in - ahem - junior high, and I never kept it up, so I'm starting over.
This was a meat-y week for us!
Sunday: We has pasta and fish at my parents' house.
Monday: I made a HUGE vat of meat sauce, most of which is frozen. My husband ate some for dinner, and I had the last piece of shepherd's pie from Saturday.
Tuesday: I made hot-and-sour soup. It's one of my favourite quick and easy soups; it's ready in under 30 minutes. I put a handful of raw spinach in my bowl to add some vegetables.
Wednesday: I had my mom and brother over during the day, so I made a triple-batch of meatballs, and we all had spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, with spinach and apple salad. I froze 2/3 of the meatballs.
Thursday: Veggie burritos.
Friday: Hm...not sure. Our fridge is full of odds-and-ends. I think I'll use the half-block of tofu and leftover rice to make fried rice with some vegetables, and use the frozen breaded fish in the freezer.
Tomorrow: We're eating out both meals! Lunch with my in-laws and takeout dinner with some friends.
I see you're acquainted with the Aldi Aisle of Shame, Kristen :)!
1. Vegetarian Lasagna
2. Deconstructed Egg Roll w/Rice
3. Chili w/Acorn Squash
4. Lentil Stuffed Peppers
5. Vegetable/Lentil Burritos
6. Leftovers
7. Planned Date Night-Wendy's (because the Frosty)
Haha, yes, I'm especially prone to going there if one of my kids is with me!
Sat/Sunday: beef and cabbage and mushroom stir fry with brownies for dessert.
Monday: breakfast for dinner
Tuesday: beef stroganoff on ramen, since we were out of egg noodles. Oranges for desert
Wednesday: homemade subs. Oranges for dessert.
Thursday: crepes with mushrooms. More of that endless bag of oranges.
Friday: Filet o' Fish for me, a $5 sub from Safeway for husband. Oranges.
I love oranges in the cold months of the year! And I love putting orange peel into my oatmeal. So tasty.
I tried a few new recipes this week from Magnolia Table and was very pleased. Sometimes it seems like cookbooks get too exciting or weird for our taste, but this book had a lot of things that my kids will even enjoy.
Saturday - Orecchiette and pancetta
Sunday - Chicken fajitas
Monday - Blueberry pancakes and bacon
Tuesday - Whole chicken, yellow potatoes, and zucchini
Wednesday - Cacio e pepe and peas
Thursday - Burrito bowls
Friday - Pizza
We were out of town for a bit, so we had some fun splurge/restaurant meals:
Friday - fajitas & margaritas (out)
Saturday - steak & beet salad + wine (out)
Sunday - chicken fajita skillet + chips/guac/dip
Monday - my dad made beef manicotti & garlic bread
Tuesday - Korean beef & rice
Wednesday - my dad cooked again (hurrah) & made chicken tenders, pasta & salad
Thursday - leftover montage. I finished off the manicotti
Friday - I think I'm driving teens all around (soccer practice & the football game), so I'll likely be eating the last of a frozen lasagna
$41 Market Basket; $8 Shaw's:
Sat: 3-cup chicken; rice
Sun: turkey meatballs in red curry sauce (we added zucchini and epplant to make it a complete dish); rice (modern proper: https://themodernproper.com/turkey-meatballs-in-a-creamy-red-curry-sauce)
Mon: Baked white beans with breadcrumbs. I had some pork scraps that I used instead of slab bacon (used bacon grease from the fridge and added carrots).
Tues: leftovers
Wed: out for burger
Thurs: shrimp tacos with cabbage, avocado and cotija; roasted cauliflower
Fri: out to fancy dinner...
I do love a cute doorstop. And Hubby used to say "you need what you want". Not sure if that's a good saying or what...this week we ate:
Monday - Chicken Parm with lentil pasta, zucchini
Tuesday - White Bean Soup with celery, carrot, and ham, garlic toast
Wednesday - Chili Lime Burgers on whole wheat buns, tomato and avocado, sweet potato fries
Thursday - we had Trader Joe's Kung Pao Chicken over rice, and I added extra bell pepper
Friday - Fried Tilapia, okra, salad {dinner on my own as The Girl went to Happy Hour with friends}
Saturday - TBD but I'm not cooking
Sunday - TBD {Scout's Birthday, and ditto!}
Happy Weekend - if it is cool here, which it will be, I'm doing a firepit on Saturday night to reward myself for getting the patio in shape!
White bean soup, citrus shrimp, chicken & veg sheet pan meal, egg roll in a bowl, and a rotisserie chicken... all with whatever veg and fruit needed to be eaten. And ice cream sundaes on Friday to celebrate a birthday. Yum!
I make slow cooker meals often. Then I either freeze all the leftovers together for another dinner later (like with the white bean soup) or I make up lunches for the 4 of us who take our lunches to work/school. I love the pre-made meals come finals (or other very busy times for teavhers) when I can just reheat meals.
I like reading what everyone eats! You all are broadening my horizons. Alfredo sauce is (to me) heavy cream, butter, pepper, and parsley. Maybe salt if needed, depending on the pasta and the butter. Parmesan added at the end for serving. Easier, and involves no egg, no garlic, no tempering. But I will try this one sometime.
I should write it down. I plan things and then mum doesn't want to eat that. So we muddle along most days. I have cooked pizza, roast lamb and vegetables and curried meatballs.
Monday: We had just gotten back from a long weekend of visiting colleges for my older daughter so we had something easy...tortellini and pesto. I used pesto from the huge batch I froze over the summer.
Tuesday: A new recipe, it was ground turkey sautéed with Indian spices and then served with naan. I made cucumber salad as a side. We all liked this recipe, especially my husband, and I will make it again. There were no leftovers, which was too bad because it would be have been perfect for my husband's lunch box.
Wednesday: Minestrone soup and homemade honey oat rolls. My girls always say they don't like minestrone soup and then they both had seconds. I don't know...but I love minestrone so I keep making it once a month or so in the cooler months. I also froze the leftovers of this in lunch portions which I am looking forward to enjoying in my lunch box.
Thursday: Pulled pork from the crock pot. I served it with slider rolls and spicy slaw. Froze all the leftover pulled pork and I have a plan to use it to make nachos.
Friday: We heated up a frozen pizza before going the high school football game. Both daughters are in the Pep Band. Bought hot cocoa, popcorn and candy apple at the football game.
Saturday: Older daughter was at work and ate there. She had prime rib, mashed potatoes and vegetables. Those of us who were home made panini sandwiches and had them with tater tots and fresh cut up veggies.
Sunday: We always have chili on Halloween, so we are having chili!
I saw this as a “suggested for you to read next” and the picture caught my eye. We have the same hedgehog! My son is obsessed with hedgehogs and I couldn’t resist it at aldi last year. What a fun find.
And I’ll never be able to find this entry again probably so no need to comment. I just thought it was funny.