What's For Dinner?: The Last January Post

Everything I made so far this week was absolutely delicious!  We had to do a little change up with tonight's and tomorrow's planned dinners, but let me tell you . . . that tomato soup smells like heaven!  I'm just waiting for Mike to come home so we can eat.  I thought it was going to be pricey, considering the fact that I paid almost $5.00 for a bottle of sun-dried tomatoes, but I only used half the jar . . . so actually dinner is costing less than $5.00 total as I will make another batch of this delicious soup in the near future.

Did you know that it isn't necessarily a good idea to scrimp on your grocery budget?  What you may be saving in groceries might reappear as health problems that cost money to take care of down the road.  For example, buying a frozen pizza can be a lot cheaper than making one if you have coupons.  But think about how much sodium they added to the product to help it maintain "freshness."  Sodium can slowly kill you by raising your blood pressure, forcing you to pay for expensive prescription medication (which costs money).  If you made a pizza at home, you could substitute a little white flour with wheat flour, adding fiber to your diet which could save you money when you find that you don't have colon cancer 40 years down the road.  You could also spend a few extra pennies and buy fresh veggies to go on your pizza.  That would be a healthy decision.  Yes, I understand that not every meal I make is healthy.  Trust me, I know.  But on the flip side, we could be going to McDonald's for dinner every night and that, my friends, would save us a little money, but would raise our health care costs.  There are certain things I definitely do not buy at the grocery store: bread, frozen/prepared meals, salad dressings (unless I can pronounce every single ingredient), most mixes (seasonings, muffin, etc.), anything with corn syrup in the ingredient list, packaged cookies, and other stuff.  These little decisions will help us out in the long run when it comes to our health.

Then you think, but you decorate cakes for nearly everyone's birthdays, sometimes using a cake mix and sometimes using  . . . . oh, my . . . dare I say it?  Crisco to make the frosting.  Yes, I do!  But how often do birthdays happen?  Once a year.  And in our family, we often celebrate birthdays by the bunch . . . 2, 3, 4, and sometimes even 6 at a time.  In reality, we have 1.5 slices a cake on average of once per month (September - December are slow birthday months).

Guess what I've noticed?  Today, I came down with my first cold in almost 6 months.  And it's not even a very bad one.  Just enough to make me cranky and a little congested.  In that six months, we've completely changed the way we eat.  Do you see a correlation?  This time last year, I had already missed several days of work because of illness.  To date, this school year I've only missed two.  Once because of the 24-hour stomach flu and today, because of this little cold my voice started to go and I knew that if I didn't take a day to rest it, I would pay for it for a week.

Crazy, huh?

Enough about this wordy post.  Here's the menu for the rest of January.

27- Tamale Night (finally!!)
28- Lasagna
29- Crock Pot Sunday: Orange Chicken
30- Black Bean Queso (I know you can't really make beans into cheese, but this is sooo good.  We substitute the cream for sour cream . . . oh, yum!)
31- Work late . . . no dinner :(
1- Work late, again . . . . . no dinner, again :(
2- Our Best Bites Corn Chowder
3- Hamburgers
4- Pizza (finally!)

I need another crock pot recipe . . . . any suggestions?