Monday, January 28, 2008

Dinners at Home

In an ongoing effort to save money and eat healthy, we have been trying to cook at home as much as possible. This is challenging because we both work full time and we have never quite gotten together the menu planning and grocery shopping part of things. Rather than determine the menu for the week and then shop en masse on Sunday as is recommended by women's magazines everywhere, we come up with dinner plans via e-mail the day of and then shop on the way home from work. Because there is not a convenient store for me to stop at, the shopping usually falls to Chris. Since Chris gets home later than I do, we don't typically eat until about 8 p.m. each night. We're working on this, but haven't made a huge amount of progress.

One thing that does seem to work for us could also be known as the best bargain at the grocery store: the rotisserie chicken. At about $6 this already cooked dish is a lifesaver. Last week we had parts of it for dinner on Thursday night (along with broccoli and mashed potatoes I quickly whipped up). I made a dish of chicken salad for my lunch on Friday. Friday night we had chicken and bean quesadillas and Saturday for lunch for we had chicken noodle soup. So one chicken, four meals. Sadly, one can't live on chicken alone. Or probably could, but who would want to?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Have you tried the crock pot? It was a lifesaver for when I worked and it's really versatile. In fact, the only recipe I've ever tried for pot roast and liked is a crock pot meal. When you get home, you can either make mashed potatoes (I like to use Simply Potatoes though, they are relatively cheap and much easier) or roast some red potatoes in the oven.

I've also bought country style pork ribs, broiled them the night before to get them brown then put them in the crock pot with a favorite bbq sauce and cook them all day on low.