Feeding Yourself at Home Pt. 1
Feeding Yourself at Home Pt. 1
The Basics: Figuring out what you like to eat, grocery shopping, and figuring out when to cook what dinner
I’m so excited to kick off this new series! I had originally planned to have this be part of my Money Talks series but the topics on this one expanded once I asked on Instagram what questions there were about cooking at home. This series will be several parts and I’m excited to dive deeper into each of the topics with you!
Cooking has always been a big part of my life and a way to connect with family. I’m not trained in any official capacity, but I have learned so much about cooking from the people in my life.
My great-grandmother was an incredible cook and owned a restaurant way before I was born. She is the one who instilled a passion for cooking and food at a young age.
My friend Melissa taught me what it meant to cook for your family, explore recipes in this modern era with the internet, and how to zhuzh up a meal by adding an item from takeout. I’ll never forget when steaks were on her menu and she picked up a blooming onion from Outback as a side.
My husband loves to explore different cuisines than me and has introduced me to so many methods and helped grow my confidence in the kitchen. I was such a recipe follower (and still am to a degree) but I feel much more confident making little changes with the knowledge the meal will turn out.
My mother-in-law also used to own a restaurant and she has so many delicious, easy go-to meals. They are family favorites. I love that none of her recipes are fussy but they are all delicious and bring the whole family together.
Back when I was single, meal delivery kits were just taking off and I subscribed to one to outsource the need to find delicious meals and to have to shop for those ingredients. It ended up being a great way to learn more about how to cook, especially cooking foods that were new to me. I grew up in the south and there were not a lot of fresh vegetables happening as we often opted for canned vegetables instead. The meal delivery kit was the first time I used different techniques like making my own salsa by roasting tomatoes, onions, and peppers. It’s also how I learned about prepping chicken and other little techniques that help take your meals to the next level.
Now, cooking is a way for me to flex my creativity and feed my family. I love that it’s creative and practical at the same time. It also helps us save money. These days, groceries themselves are expensive but not as expensive as going out to eat. Even though I have two toddlers, they still eat quite a bit so we’re already buying two kid’s meals when we go out to eat. So it’s quite expensive for us to eat outside the home. And not to toot our horn too much, but the quality of the food from restaurants just hasn’t been as good as something we can make at home. Part of that is having the right ingredients on hand like the little condiments that make the experience of going out exciting and delicious.
Alright, enough rambling… let me give you something practical.
Figure Out What You Love to Eat and Keep it Stocked
When it comes to cooking at home, the thing that has helped us the most is to keep our pantry and fridge stocked with the ingredients we need to make the meals we love. We honestly weren’t super intentional about this at first, but over time we have built our pantry to support making our favorite cuisines. For us, that is Japanese, Tex-Mex, Southern, and Italian. That means that we always have the core ingredients for those cuisines stocked. We typically buy these items in bulk to save on cost and because we are using them so often. For example, I made an Asian dish last night and we already had ground pork, rice, sesame oil, rice vinegar, soy sauce, ginger, etc. The only items I had to buy to complete the dinner were green onions and a head of broccoli.
When searching for meal ideas, I typically look among these cuisines. They naturally catch my eye so I don’t have to do too much to seek them out. But this helps us cut down on the cost of our groceries every week. We have built out the items we keep on hand over time, so don’t feel like you need to go out and buy a bunch of everything so you can cook at home. Figure out what cuisines you and your family enjoy and start there. You can always search “core ingredients for ____ cooking” and you will find lists to help you stock your pantry and fridge.
My Meal Planning Routine
I don’t think that I’m super sophisticated when it comes to meal planning at all. I don’t use a rotation (i.e., Meatless Mondays, Taco Tuesday, etc.), my only goal is to come up with four meals for us to eat each week. This helps us cut down on the amount of food waste we create a ton. Let’s look at this week for example. Our planned meals are:
Brats
These Asian meatballs with broccoli and rice
This lemon orzo chicken
And Salisbury steaks with potatoes
Grocery Shopping
I order all of our groceries for pick-up or I have them delivered. I started this during the Pandemic and then kept it up because I have little kids. And at this point, I just really don’t enjoy grocery shopping in person in the traditional sense. I never know where items are located and I feel like we end up buying extra stuff anyway, so ordering everything online has been great from a time-saving and money-saving perspective for us.
In addition to the ingredients we would need to make our dinners for the week, I also have a list of other items we like to keep on hand that need to be restocked regularly. So I make sure we have those items on the grocery list too and I would say that’s about 95% of our grocery list. For the dinners above, the only items I needed to get from the grocery store were:
Lemons - $1.98
Potatoes - $3.97
Basil - $2.50
Orzo pasta - $2.58
Shallots - $0.47
Broccoli - $1.58
Mushrooms - $2.28
Ricotta cheese - $4.79
Green onions - $0.69
Beef stock - $2.98
Bell peppers - $2.50
Total for dinners: $26.32
Once I get my full list together and look at the price, I might take out something if the order is too expensive. I look through the ingredients to see if something can be substituted with what we already have. Since potatoes are one of the more expensive things I am buying, I would look at that to figure out if I want to cut out the potatoes for the Salisbury steaks in favor of using rice I already have in my pantry. Some weeks I make these cuts, other weeks I don’t. It just depends on the total. I try to keep the cost of my grocery trips to be under $110 for the week.
One important thing to note here is that we don’t typically buy meat from the grocery store. We get a box of meat each month from a local farm. Sometimes we will get something extra from the grocery store but it’s rare.
Deciding What Meals to Cook When
At this point, I look at the ingredients to see what needs to be made first. So for this week, the Salisbury steaks need to be made first because it has mushrooms and mushrooms tend to get a little weird after they have sat in the fridge for a few days. This helps us cut down on food waste too because you don’t want to get to Thursday and realize that you have slimy mushrooms in your fridge.
We reserve meals that have more pantry or freezer items for later in the week because if those don’t get made, they can just be moved to the next week. For example, the brats are frozen. They won’t go bad if we don’t make them this week so making those first thing during the week wouldn’t be my go-to strategy. However, if we really wanted to eat the brats on Monday then we would.
I also know that anything high effort needs to be made either on Sunday or later in the week. Mondays and Tuesdays are not for high-effort meals. We just don’t have the energy. The kids tend to be a bit crankier at the start of the week too so our goal is to get dinner on the table fast. Monday and Tuesday meals are quick meals that take less than 40 minutes to assemble. I also tend to want to take more time to enjoy cooking later in the week. It’s a nice way to unwind and savor it all a bit more. This may be different for you, so ask yourself when you’re willing to put in the most energy to cook and when you just need something easy.
More to Come!
This newsletter is lengthy already so there is more to come! Some other topics I’ll touch on are:
Favorite recipes/who I get recipes from
Last-minute dinner ideas/easy recipes
Meal prepping
Cooking while managing kids
How I stay motivated to cook at home
Lunch ideas
Food items we always have stocked in our pantry
Time-saving tips in the kitchen
Please leave a comment and let me know if you have any questions or if there is anything else you’d like to see!
I am also a recipe-follower and married to a “let’s wing it and see what happens” type of cook. I am always envious of people who can just look at a recipe, “get the gist,” and do their own thing. I wish I had that level of confidence! Maybe one day when my time isn’t so valuable and groceries aren’t so expensive 😆
I'm impressed at how low your grocery budget is! I need more tips to cut our costs. I love cooking but lately, I'm getting burnt out because I'm not entirely sure what my kids like to eat other than goldfish and applesauce. It's a little discouraging when I've spent 30 mins cooking something to hear them immediately complain about it... even if I enjoy my meal!