FeedTheFam.com

Archive for April, 2008

Our grocery and restaurant budget for April was set at $800. You may think that this is not very frugal, but relative to what we were spending before - $1200/month - you will see that it is a drastic reduction! Now, I hadn’t realized until recently that we were spending that much money each month on food. I knew it was a lot but had thought it was more like $1000/month. And with food prices increasing so much these days it seemed prudent to trim away some of this expense.

So far so good. It is already April 24 and we have only spent $660. A lot of our savings has come from not going out to lunch and instead eating left-overs, and not doing going out to eat once a week. We did go out to eat once this month but we had a $50 gift card to the restaurant, courtesy of our Chase Rewards card. Nice! I’ll write more about how I finally discovered how much we were really spending on food in a later post.

Last night’s meal was a chuck roast I found on sale at our local grocery.  When I got home I looked up “chuck roast” on epicurious.com and browsed for, oh, about 3 minutes before hitting on one that I had most of the ingredients for. 

Well, the Pot Roast with Orange and Dates did not start off so well.  I managed to burn it during the searing stage right from the get-go.  I subsequently had to cut some of the burnt stuff off before putting it in the pot with the sauce and sticking it in the oven.  I consider myself a fairly diligent cook and don’t usually burn things (unless we are talking about myself, which is another story), so this calamity took me by surprise.  It just reminds me that one must have a little humility when it comes to cooking!

Nevertheless, it turned out beautifully!  Some of the comments for the recipe insisted that it was too sweet so I didn’t add the dates (didn’t have them anyway!) and used a little less orange juice.  It is a great sauce and the meat was wonderful.  Tonight we will serve the meat inside tortillas for a meat and cheese burrito.  I like to use vanilla yogurt inside the meat and cheese burritos.  Yummy (and less fattening than sour cream)!