Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Motherhood 101

Most of you know that I hate cooking....or at least I used to. Every time a sign up sheet in church came around, I signed up to bring paper products or dessert (dessert is easy to buy). I can go on forever about food that I have ruined trying to make.....jello, boxed brownies, and I've even burnt toast!

Now, don't laugh...this is probably something everyone does....and it is something we are told over and over in Relief Society to do....but I have realized that if you plan your meals ahead of time, and go to the grocery store for the ingredients, it not only saves you money, but creates less stress. One of the main reasons I hated cooking was trying to figure out what to cook. I would think of something to make, but we wouldn't have all of the ingredients and would have to go to the store. Or, we would have all but one, so I would try and do without....and that never tasted good. I think my mom tried to do that, but it was hard with 8 kids. I remember her getting mad at us because we would make something to eat and she would go to make dinner, and half her ingredients would be gone. But since my kids are little I don't have that problem.

I started this little money saver idea about a year ago, when I was pregnant with Gabby. With both pregnancies, I had a Gaul bladder problem. With Charley I just got frustrated a lot about what I couldn't eat. With Gabby, I was determined to eat as normal as possible. I did a lot of searching online and in books for very low fat/no fat recipes.....and with us heading into the last semester of school and knowing that summer Ben wouldn't be working a lot to study for the bar, we needed to save money. At the time, it was a necessity, but now, I like it.

Every Monday I sit down and look at my cook books and on-lone, pick some recipes out, write down what I need to buy, and head to the grocery store. No more headaches trying to figure out what's for dinner, I know what we are going to have, and I know we have everything to make it.

I'm still not an amazing cook, but I'm not horrible anymore! I have no idea why I didn't do this before! It only takes a little bit of time on Mondays to plan everything out, but its worth it!

2 comments:

Emily Bartlett said...

and i thought you would share some of your recipes on this blogpost---where are they?!?

bmz said...

You should see about subscribing to the Sunday paper. I do it just for the coupon. I easily have made my money back. My paper had a special running-$1 a week for a year. Just this Saturday I got $150 of groceries for $60!