Another New Year's Resolution

Another one of my New Year's goals is to get our grocery spending under control. We spend an embarrassing amount of money on groceries and I know that we can cut it down a lot. To start I'm going to try and spend $400 this month on groceries - that might seem like a lot to some people but its quite a cut for us. My strategy has two main pieces 1) use cash only for our grocery purchases and 2) make things from scratch as much as possible. I guess there is also a third component which is to cut back on our meat consumption. We've been in a rut lately of meat being the main component of our meals so I'm going to try and get it down to an accent or a smaller piece of the whole instead of dominating the meal.

Today I'm making a savory strata to serve for dinner, using a rosemary rustic loaf and some leftover ham and feta cheese, plus some of the overabundance of eggs from the dairy delivery service we use. I'm making up the recipe, since every recipe I looked at had different proportions of eggs to bread to milk, so we'll see how it goes. I think it might be delicious though - if it turns out well I'll post a recipe either here or at my other site. I'm not sure how the kids will like the strata, so they're getting english muffin pizzas. 

Meatless Monday - Leftovers to the rescue!

Last night we had a delicious Meatless Monday dinner! I was unprepared (as per usual) so I had to rely on the pitiful contents of the pantry and refrigerator. Luckily I had one last leftover from the weekend - about two cups of homemade olive tapanade. I boiled some pasta (angel hair and regular spaghetti) and tossed it with the tapanade, along with some of the reserved pasta water. Topped with fresh shaved Parmesan, it was a real treat!

To go along with the pasta, I cooked up some carrots with a bit of butter and sugar for some caramelized goodness.  The kiddos got plain pasta with Parmesan, which they gobbled up along with the carrots. I never know what they'll eat - they've turned up their noses at this exact type of carrots before, but this time they would have gladly eaten more - to bad for them I didn't make very many anticipating that they wouldn't eat them!

A big win on Meatless Monday

Wow! Last night I made a mushroom spinach lasagna that was out of this world! Of course Gabi turned up her nose at it, but Papi and little Buddy ate it right up and asked for more. I was pleasantly surprised at the way it turned out; I had a vague idea of what I wanted, but once I started cooking and throwing things together that strange alchemy occurred that transforms a mess into magic.

Follow me below the fold for the recipe . . .