What We Ate April 9 - 15

There are some big changes afoot at our house and they’re affording us an opportunity to expand our grocery budget.  I’m very grateful because, after eating mostly from our pantry and freezer for five months, our stock of food on hand has been seriously depleted.  It’s good to know that we now have an opportunity to begin restocking.

We spent $98.73 on groceries this week: almost as much as we have previously spent in a whole in a month.  It hurts my frugal nature to pay out that much extra money, but I don’t feel secure with a near-empty pantry.  I want to fill the shelves again so we have something to fall back on should we need it.

Despite being out or nearly out of many pantry items, we still have a surplus of onions and potatoes on hand.  Our Good Food Boxes always includes quite a quantity of those items, so we decided to skip this month’s purchase.  Instead, I’m using up the onions and potatoes we still have on hand and shopping produce sales for the rest.  We’ve been enjoying the change.  There’s certainly more variety available to us when I can shop the grocery stores.

The benefits of restocking the pantry are overriding my inner cheapskate at the moment, but that doesn’t mean I’m spending willy-nilly.  I’m still shopping very carefully, looking for manager’s specials and working hard to minimize waste in my kitchen.

Here’s what we ate last week:

Monday:

• Breakfast – Peanut butter, marmalade and raisin sandwiches on whole wheat bread
• Supper – Brown rice and lentil casserole, salad or romaine lettuce, shredded red cabbage and carrots, onions, and homemade thousand island dressing, canned peaches

Tuesday:

• Breakfast – Lemon cornmeal pancakes
• Supper – Carrot and red lentil soup, wheat and white biscuits, pears in brown sugar syrup with ginger

Wednesday:

• Breakfast – Leftover brown rice and lentil casserole
• Supper – Apple and cheddar frittata, colourful coleslaw with honey mustard dressing, peanut butter cookies 

Thursday:

• Breakfast – Oatmeal and applesauce
• Supper – Chicken thighs baked in mushroom soup, spaetzle, baked carrots, pumpkin spice chai lattes for dessert 

Friday:

• Breakfast – Eggs, toast, applesauce
• Supper – Pub grub pasta, sautéed dandelion greens, steamed corn, canned cherries 

Saturday:

• Breakfast – Rice and beans
• Supper – Spinach omelettes, cucumber and red onion salad in yogurt dill dressing, oranges

Sunday:

• Breakfast – Almost whole wheat pancakes, canned peaches
• Supper – Cabbage, carrot, bell pepper, and onion stir fry in garlic black bean sauce, brown rice,  yogurt and pear sauce