Vacation countdown = food budgeting? It does ’round these parts.

Who has two thumbs and just bought groceries for an eight-serving dinner for under a sawbuck? This girl! (Also, a sawbuck is ten dollars, youngsters. Shame on you for making me feel old!)

Our vacation countdown is on. Thirty days, to be exact. We’re looking forward to the trip. We’re seeing family, taking my parents on their first-ever flight, spending time on the beach, visiting Disney World and The Wizarding World of Harry Potter and seeing Kathleen, one of my dearest friends and the lovely cook behind “More than Easy Mac.”

We’re also being pretty budget-conscious as the days tick by. We’re trying hard not to eat out this past month and I’ve been cooking in for us most nights. We aren’t great at eating leftovers but we’re working on that and I’m trying to find recipes that can easily be switched up to feel like a new meal with very minimal cost.

Tomorrow night, we’re doing Sloppy Lentils in the slow cooker—eaten on rice cakes that I found in the cabinet (no, they’re not expired). Mechanic made a face when I told him what I was making but the recipe sounds tasty and I’ve been looking for a use for the lentils sitting prettily in our cabinet. I’ll blog about the Sloppy Lentils and let you know they are (including picky Mechanic’s reaction)!

I’m interested to see how this month goes. I’ll confess that we’re not big food budgeting people. I love to cook and try new foods and as a result, we spend a good chunk of change on food.

How do you keep your food budget in check? Do you have any budget-friendly recipes you recommend?

Honey Garlic Pork

Do you know that close friend you have who is amazing and hilarious and comes up with the craziest ideas (swinging in the park in the rain? who does that?) that always leave you laughing hysterically? But then, after a straight week with this friend, you just want to lock yourself (her, actually) in a closet and have some time alone?

Chicken is that friend for me. I get so. Sick. Of. Chicken.

Mmm. Garlic.

Today I decided to give another white meat a try and made pork in the slow cooker. Mechanic and I are going on vacation in 35 days (but who’s counting?) and want to save money so we’re not going out to eat as often. He also spent the morning fixing my car and I wanted him to have something hearty when he was done.

Enter Honey Garlic Pork. I got the basic recipe and inspiration from Rachel’s Nest (hers was with chicken) but changed it up a bit to suit our tastes and my love of indiscriminately throwing spices into whatever I cook. And also to make up for the fact that we were almost out of honey yet I had decided to make a dish with “honey” as the first word in the title. Oops. The amounts I used are below.

Ingredients

1 pork tenderloin, cut into six pieces, fat removed
½ cup reduced sodium soy sauce
½ cup organic catsup
3 tablespoons honey
6 cloves garlic (adjust for the non vampires in your life)
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 tablespoon red pepper flakes
½ tablespoon onion powder

(As an aside: Do you call it “catsup” or “ketchup,” folks out in blog land? I’ve never taken a stance before but I suppose I just unofficially took a stance by siding with Big C in the ingredients list. I reserve the right to change this in future recipes although, come to think of it, I rarely use tomato-based condiments known mostly for hot dogs. Moving on….)

Mix everything but pork together. Throw pork in the bottom of your slow cooker (I used a 6-quart but a 4-quart would have been more than sufficient). Pour the ingredients over the pork. Cook for 4-5 hours on high or 7-8 hours on low. I went 7 hours and it was perfect.

When the pork is done cooking, take the sauce out of the crock pot. Throw it in a saucepan on the stove and bring it to a boil. While you wait for a boil (it won’t take long with such a small amount of sauce), mix a tablespoon of cornstarch with a tiny bit of water. Throw that into the sauce while it’s boiling and stir continuously for a minute. This will thicken the sauce up and make it more substantial when you pour over the pork.

This recipe was completely amazing. Savory and sweet with a big garlic kick. Mechanic made yummy noises all through dinner (and hopefully forgot that he spent the first four hours of his morning fixing my car in 90-degree heat).

With more substantial sides, this could feed four or five people. We served it with zucchini and got three servings out of it. For three servings, our nutritionals were: 326 calories, 3 grams of fat, 36 grams of protein, 39 grams of carbs. Disclaimer: Sodium counts in the recipe builder were sky-high (2,121 mg per serving) but I would estimate that we ate only 10% of the sauce in the recipe; sodium is a little bit of a mystery here but probably around the 500 mg range.

Oh, and another tip? Try not to lick the crock pot. You’ll burn your tongue but this sauce is so tasty, you’ll be tempted. Resist.

Menu Planning = money saving and waistline whittling

Non-fancy menu board, made for all of $5.

Mechanic and I eat 1,000 times better when I take time to plan our meals and shop in advance. If we don’t have something that sounds tasty ready to go for dinner after a long day of work, we’ll look at each other, look at the clock, put on our shoes and go out for Mexican. And a basket of tortilla chips. And then probably another one.

So every Sunday morning, I sit down at the computer and plan out our meals for the week. Yes, I realize this makes me sound like a little old lady – but it makes a huge difference to our checkbook and our waistline when I take the time. I’ve been slacking at this lately and I can tell.

After I plan our dinners, I make our grocery list. I found an incredible app called “Buy Me a Pie” that allows you to make a grocery list on the computer and then synchronize it to your smartphone, so I can carry the list without trying to keep track of paper and pen to scratch everything off. This app is incredible.

The final step (other than cooking, obvy) is to write our menu out on a dry-erase board I put together out of a cute picture frame and a pretty piece of scrapbook paper. The informal calendar sits out in our kitchen so we both know at a glance what’s for dinner.

I try to cook Sunday night and two other weeknights and make enough for leftovers on the other nights and for lunch (although I often cook something special for my weekly lunches—can’t wait to tell you what I made for this week’s lunch!). We try new recipes pretty frequently. I know most people associate the slow cooker with cold weather but I use it just as much in the summer. It’s a great way to put a lot of flavor into food without turning on the oven or standing in front of a hot stovetop or grill. Although we love to grill too!

Here’s what’s on deck for this week:

Sunday: Applesauce Chicken from Crock Pot 365 with grilled veggies

Monday:  Basil Chicken with Feta from Crock Pot 365 with whole-wheat couscous and grilled veggies

Tuesday: Leftovers

Wednesday: Cheesy Taco Pasta from Emily Bites

Thursday: Leftovers

Friday: Date Night!

Do you menu plan? (Yes, I totally verbed that!) What method helps you stay on track?

Foray into Crock-Pot kingdom with a Mediterranean stew

Chunky stew.

You obviously don’t have to scroll down to the author tag at the end of this post to realize Amber is writing this. Hi! Ashley’s got me beat on being a super-user of her Crock-Pot (that looks odd written properly), but I am coming up the rear! OK, not really. I’ve only otherwise used a slow cooker once to make meatballs, as a vegetarian, while Ashley’s probably making hot soap and butters by now.

I can’t help being awkward when talking about this Slow Cooker Mediterranean Stew recipe from Allrecipes.com because I’m tired yet can’t sleep and Arrested Development season four comes out in two weeks. Maybe that’s why I’m still awake.

Check it here, and baby — you will have a stew goin’.

Stats?

The original recipe is written in kcals, and I couldn’t figure them out, but I’m going to just pretend it’s American. It’s all vegetables, so, I think we’re safe here: 122 “k” calories, 0.5 g fat, 30.6 g carbs, 7.8 g fiber and 3.4 g protein per serving.

Appearance?

It’s difficult to get a picture of something in a slow cooker and make it not look like last night’s regurgitated meal plus cocktails, but, anything that has at least three colors of veggies is always going to look pretty in real life. Unless it’s put in a food processor.

Taste?

This stew was hearty, but perhaps a little too watery. I like my soups and stews light on the broth, heavy on the substance, but I could have also had too much water in there to begin with. I didn’t use the okra the recipe called for, and instead of tomato sauce and the ripe tomato, I used an extra big can of diced tomatoes in water, drained. Otherwise, I love that this recipe calls for turmeric, because I bought some over a year ago and this is the first time I’ve used it. The raisins added a slight sweetness, but kind of had that reverse effect of when people take a bath and turn all raisiny — raisins soaking in a hot stew for eight hours just get weird and bloated. (Sorry, raisins. You tasted fine?)

Verdict?

I would make this again, and probably keep to the same alterations on the recipe. I’m bad with measuring cups of vegetables — I just cut what I have available and try to use it all. So I did end up with a bit of leftover eggplant and zucchini after stuffing the pot with squash first, but I just used those extra veggies in a side dish I whipped up later in the week. Plenty of leftovers for a healthy lunch fuel.

Shivering my way to a balanced diet

There’s a funny little Pinterest drinking game that says you have to take a shot when 1.) you see a crock pot meal or 2.) see a freezer meal. Prepare your booze goggles, people, because Mama’s about to combine these two buzz words.

Putting out a healthy meal every day is hard. Seriously. I’m a DINK (that’s marketing speak for “double-income, no kids”) but I find it challenging enough to find time to work, go to the gym, spend quality time with Mechanic (my husband) and our four-legged kids every day. I don’t know how people with two-legged children who require more than kibble handle it. But I’d be shocked if many of them don’t have a freezer meal or two in their repertoire.

Here’s the skinny on freezer meals: You prepare a meal in advance and freeze it. Easy, yes? It becomes more difficult when you add multiple meals to the mix but the concept is the same.

I’ve been intrigued by freezer meals for a while. 1.) The slow cooker is our main method of food preparation and this type of cooking lends itself very well to freezer meals. 2.) I am terrible, terrible at using all the fresh beautiful produce we buy every week and something has to be done about this. Who will think of the zucchinis, people?

Assembly phase, complete.

The freezer cook-a-thon (can three hours be an –athon? Let’s say yes.) began on a Friday night, when I began compiling recipes that I would freeze and typing out a list of ingredients for them. I printed my shopping list and recipes and on Sunday, bought all the groceries I needed. It was a seriously, seriously big list. I felt like a pioneer heading back to my wagon. Six bell peppers, five zucchinis, an entire bag of onions, three pounds of beef, two pounds of chicken breast. I never shop like this for the two of us.

My game plan on Sunday was to make a pot of chili for dinner and, at the same time as I poured ingredients in to the stockpot simmering on the stove, pour those same ingredients into a freezer bag. I browned the meat and let it cool before adding it to the freezer bag as well. While the chili simmered, I chopped vegetables and prepared spices for the other bags I was making.

By the end of the three-hour span, I had:

Tomato Beef Stew (good for three meals for both of us)
Healthy Mama BBQ Chicken (two bags worth, each good for two meals for both of us)
Stephanie’s Goulash (good for three meals for both of us)
A big bag of my own chili
(Giant virtual-hat-tip to Mama and Baby Love, creator of half the above recipes and a fantastic tutorial on freezer cooking)

I’ve only had one of the bags so far (BBQ chicken) but it was flavorful and tasty. And not chopping any vegetables the night before to make it happen (or washing any knives, cutting boards, etc.) was pretty sweet. And being able to use all the beautiful produce I bought feels fantastic for me, my budget and the planet.

Pretty maids, all in a row.

My experience has won me over to freezer cooking. Let Extra Snark know if you give it a go and, if you do, keep these tips in mind:

1. Don’t underestimate your time. You may have mad chopping skills but prepping all those vegetables will take some time. I thought it would take me an hour, tops, but it took just under three.
2. Prep like ingredients at the same time. I labeled each bag at the beginning, kept each bag open and cut all my bell peppers and distributed into bags, all my zucchinis and distributed into bags, etc. Try to choose items that have similar produce so you can buy in bulk. Save your meat for the end so they can stay cool in the fridge as long as possible.
3. Label your bags with whatever you need to add when you actually cook the meal, so when you toss into the crockpot, you don’t have to remember to add herbs, etc.
4. Thaw the bags 24 hours before you intend to cook them.
5. Please know that, the day after you finish this, your power will go out and leave you panic-stricken. Luckily, ours was only out two hours and our bags were still frozen solid.

Happy freezing!