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My Precious Pennies

I will be AWAY until late February as we do this moving thing...again.

Ginger from Attention Target Shoppers & Tricia from 1stopmom
will be holding down the fort in the meantime - thank you so much, ladies!

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Menu Plan for 10/26 - 11/01

complete with recipes & my shopping list

Sorry, but I don't have a "total cost of food" count this week, since I haven't been shopping yet.  This weekend was supposed to be a leftover weekend, but instead we had McDonald's all three days (yes, I know...not exactly healthy and a COMPLETE budget buster).  The commissary is closed on Monday, so we will go shopping at first opportunity on Tuesday.  I have some spare chicken breasts, so I'll probably just make that tomorrow and save Monday's meal for another day.  It's starting to get REALLY cold here, and I think I need to start taking the weather into account when I do my menu plans.

It is currently 10pm, and it's only 38º out.  There's a rumor going around that there will be snow on the ground tomorrow morning.  For a California girl, this is completely absurd.  My Californian mother-in-law was just telling me how it's 100º out on Wednesday, and this morning my best friend told me it was 80º at 7am.  I am not used to having to take a jacket out of the house with me in October, much less be prepared for SNOW.  This entire week I have been wanting to do nothing but crawl under the blankets and hibernate.  I tore a ligament doing sports back in high school, and recently my knee has really been acting up from the cold weather.  Combine all of this with the commissary's crazy hours, and it makes life interesting.

I am starting to consider menu-planning two weeks in a roll to minimize our commissary trips.  It's not like the commissary is all that far away, but it's hard to get to the store during their hours.  Now that the baby's older, she's also harder to keep entertained while shopping.  Ideally, I would love my husband to go with me so I can focus on saving our pennies, but with his schedule the only possibility is on the weekends.  And on the weekends it's just suicide.  For a couple of weeks there we tried going on the weekends, but even though there was two of us to entertain baby and shop, baby was hysterical.  Mainly because it was so crowded and everytime she was content or about to fall asleep, someone would bump into the cart and set her off again.

Before I go the bi-weekly menu-plan route, we're going to try a couple of things.  First, we're going to try having hubby stay at home with the baby while I go to the store myself on the weekends.  It's crazy, but I can deal with crazy if I'm just by myself.  Hubby might also get a schedule switch at work, and if it goes through we should have a chunk of time in the morning.  If the switch happens, it would be the ideal time to go commissary shopping.

We're going to be here for at least half of the winter, so eventually I think I will have to switch to the bi-weekly menu-plan just to minimize trips out of the house, what with the snow and all.  This shouldn't be too big of a problem though, considering I don't really use much "fresh" ingredients in my meals.  As long as it'll freeze, I should be good.  This is completely new territory for us since this is our first winter EVER in snow-country, so please bear with my menu-planning craziness until we figure something out.  And if there are any snow-country veterans out there, I would appreciate any words of advice!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Your menu is just so pretty to look at! I keep saying I want to do something similar! Maybe someday I will!

Have a great week,

Sherry

 
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