A new mission

Last week Trent, Kinley, and I went on a little vacation out to a friend's lakehouse.  It was a great week of relaxing and reconnecting after a super busy youth ministry summer. 

(Sidenote: I somehow always forget that summer is not a season of slowing down, but rather a CRAZY season for ministry.  I'm thankful for the extra time to invest in students, but I'm also a little grateful when the summer is over and we get Trent back!)

So anyways, back to last week.  We're in a season of frugality at the Thompson house.  Which means keeping a pretty strict budget and not so many splurges.  All that to say, we decided that since we'd been blessed with basically a "free" vacation, we'd splurge a bit on groceries.  I got a bottle of wine, a carton of Trent's favorite orange juice, salmon for dinner one night, and a few other things we don't normally get.  But I also managed to swiftly blow our entire grocery budget for the first half of the month on meals that lasted less than one week!

Coming home I had literally $11.00 left and it was August 5th (we re-up the grocery budget on the 1st and 15th). 

Yep, $11 for 11 days. 

We knew we'd have to go over budget, but I decided it would be fun to figure out just how frugal I could be.  I spent most of Saturday and Sunday perusing different websites I found by searching things like "really cheap meals" (more on those later).  I even found some youtube video's of a sweet 90+ year-old lady cooking meals she remembered from the depression!

All of it got me to thinking...

I want to learn to cook cheaply.  I mean REALLY cheap.  I know this month is the exception, but it feels like I can never quite make our grocery money stretch far enough. 

So I've developed a plan of attack (dorky, I know)

1)  I'll set some goals/criteria for how I plan to shop and cook in case it's helpful to anyone else
2)  I'll share my grocery experiences, what I learn about smart shopping etc.
2)  I'll layout the meals and recipes I'm cooking (as well as where I got them all from...there are some GREAT blogs and websites out there completely devoted to this sorta stuff)
3)  Any other tidbits of knowledge I gather, I'll share that too.  (so if you happen to read this and want to pass along some wisdom, PLEASE share!)

Goals:
1)  Get our grocery budget down to $50/week -This means breakfast, lunch, and dinner for 7 days a week! 
2)  Make relatively healthy meals - I've pretty much thrown the idea of eating all natural or organic out the window on this budget, but I think healthy well-balanced meals is still a major priority. 
2)  Learn to not waste food - so many times I'll buy an ingredient for a recipe and end up throwing the last little bit away. 
4)  Learn how to cook without a recipe - this I think is key...especially for learning not to waste food.  I look at my refrigerator and pantry so many times knowing there's a great meal in there somewhere, I just don't have a clue how to make it up on my own!

So that's it!  Here we go =)