We’ve been eating way too much delivery pizza (we had Pizza Hut twice and Papa John’s once in the past 10 days, blech!) and restaurant food over the past several months, so I decided I really need to do something about it since it kills. the. budget. Not really the whole budget per se, but you know…the part where we’re supposed to actually be saving more than pennies each month!? I’m trying to be more organized in all areas of my life and meal-planning definitely is a change I can make that will have health and financial benefits.
I spent much of my weekend researching meal-planning (and organizing but that’s another post!) and found a couple blogs I love, one of which is Life as Mom and its sister blog Good (Cheap) Eats. Wow, what a wealth of information. The healthy homemade pizza pictured here really inspired me. Talk about yummy-looking…my homemade pizzas never look like THAT!
I got up bright-and-early this morning (5:20am and those who know me will be shocked to read that yes, I DID actually sleep thanks to melatonin) and I’ve been making two plans; one for freezer-cooking and one for this week’s “fresh” eating. My Weight Watchers cookbook has a tomato sauce recipe that is easy and cheap, so that’s one thing we’ll be making–a doubletriple batch so we can freeze several portions.
While I’m not officially “on-plan” (that went out the window when my mom died in March) I decided that it could only help to cook at least some of our meals from my WW cookbooks and at least get back in the habit of making healthier food. Going back on-plan is something I’ll have to address, erm, later.
The kids love homemade pizza and I do have a case of crust mix to use up before I try my hand again at homemade. I love this mix but making homemade isn’t much harder, especially since I think I could make a bunch and freeze it (but I’ll have to check into that!). We usually make mini- or personal-sized pizzas and let the kids do their own toppings–I just need to get more fresh veggies onto those pizzas! 🙂 Turkey pepperoni and cheese do not a great pizza make!
I can’t believe I’m admitting that I’ve been married almost 17 years and this is only maybe the 3-4th time I’ve actually meal-planned (holidays excepted) and yes, I do feel very inept at being a homemaker right this second. Back when we were first married there was no need to meal plan; we simply went to Pak-n-Save with $40 and bought a gallon of milk, package of bologna, loaf of white bread and as many boxes of Kraft Mac-n-Cheese as we could afford with what was leftover. 😉 Thankfully we now have the means to eat well–I just need to put a little more effort into appropriating those grocery funds!
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