With how tight our budget is right now (and getting worse), I thought I'd share what I'm doing to help mitigate against meals getting too boring or too unhealthy. For a short while there, I was buying a lot of frozen (and as minimally processed as I could find) food, but those items quickly went up in price and it got to the point that Alvah in a horrible mood or not, I had to come up with other alternatives around here to make sure we had snacks (or the husband develops a nasty vending machine habit at work), easy breakfasts and the like. So, I thought I'd go through the meal prep I managed to do for this week (before Alvah went into meltdown mode).
1. Recently, I was offered a really good personalized price on a new product that has cottage cheese on the bottom compartment and fruit on the top and you add the fruit to the bottom and then you have a high protein snack. Traditionally, I'm not really a fan of cottage cheese...remember eating it a lot as a teen as my mom liked it and it would be in the house, but I've never been like, "Yay!!! Let's go and eat some cottage cheese!" type of person. But, I did find I was the only one who was eating the cottage cheese snacks because I didn't want to waste them, whether I was thrilled with cottage cheese or not. Oddly, I found that while the texture wasn't something I would actively seek out, the protein in the snack did help to keep me satisfied in the afternoons and was making it so I wasn't falling asleep on my feet by 3 pm. When I looked at the normal price on the cottage cheese snacks, however, there was NO WAY I was going to pay like 2.50 each for teeny little snack packs.
So, instead this week, I bought a container of cottage cheese, separated it out into containers and then added a can of diced mangoes I had in the pantry to the top of the cottage cheese so I could just pull them out and have a high protein snack. It works well, although I doubt I'm going to purchase diced mango again anytime soon as there was a LOT of pulpy mango in the can I had. I'm going to try canned peaches next time as that is a favorite around here.
And yes, I'm doing my grandma's habit of recycling plastic containers from the store to store food in. I'm using a dry erase marker to keep what is in them straight. I find the small sour cream containers I buy are the perfect size for snacks. The glass bowl was actually the last portion that I ended up eating for a light lunch.
2. I bought fresh strawberries on sale on our last shopping trip, but the strawberries this season haven't been very good and these were really sour tasting. So, I ended up cutting them up, added in a bag of nearly empty frozen strawberries, macerated them in sugar and turned them into a jug of smoothy mix to drink over the coming week. I like to add greek yogurt for the probiotics (for the sake of the daughter's gut health), a bit of milk and the fruit with the syrup included and blend it all together. I also added some collagen peptides I bought on a good deal a while back to help with my husband's and my health (and heck, the daughter will benefit too).
We have all been drinking a small glass of smoothy with our breakfasts all week and it's been a nice change of pace.
3. I took some of the various things of sausage I had found in the freezer and made a big pot of sausage gravy (if you look at the menu for the week photo from a few posts down you'll see a half gallon of milk in the photo...I bought that on sale for cheap with the express purpose of using it in baking and meal prep and it worked FABULOUSLY!).
I then separated out the sausage gravy into four, individual servings for my husband for breakfast for the week. It worked great and kept him from grabbing things from the vending machines at work.
4. With the gravy, of course, I had to make biscuits. I made plain ones for the husband for his breakfasts and the daughter as well (she loves biscuits). I used the food processor to mix the dough to make life easier and made the plain ones first and then the cheese ones, so I didn't have to clean it between recipes. I decided to make them square this time to just make my life easier as that way there was no wasted dough and no re-rolling the dough. Worked great. I did make them super huge by accident as it had been a while since I had made biscuits, but ah well. I also made a big batch of cheese biscuits and we had some with dinner that night and I put the rest in the freezer to turn into cheddar bay biscuits with future meals.
5. I make all my own bread now a days for the most part (I do buy the son hamburger buns to destroy as he's less likely to choke on the all air store bread), and I love making the dutch oven style sourdough bread that I've made for a long time now, but the daughter asked me to make some loaf bread so the bread would fit in the toaster better and sandwiches would turn out more uniform. I found that Farmhouse On Boone's Sourdough Sandwich Bread was a great recipe to use. I make it exactly as written, but I end up adding about 1/2 cup extra flour to make the dough into a soft, workable bread dough and also add 1 TBS of SAF instant yeast. The dough only takes about 1 hour to rise in the first rise, and then I found you need to separate the dough into 3 loaf pans, not two, or you end up with super huge loaves that might nor might not get jammed into the top of your oven (ask me how I know). I then let the dough rise for about 1/2 an hour longer, split the top to let the steam escape in a controlled way, add the egg wash the recipe calls for and bake at 375 degrees F for 35 minutes. The loaves turn out perfect every time, the sourdough adds the best flexibility to the bread so you can cut it into really slim slices without any crumbling and it is wonderful stuff. I end up freezing the third loaf most weeks to pull out when bread is getting short, which works great when you end up with a few loaves in the freezer that way from different weeks and don't have the time to bake bread for a few days one week.
On weeks where I don't want to look up a recipe or have time to soften butter and stuff, I do just make my go-to dutch oven sourdough recipe, but it is nice to have a good sourdough sandwich loaf as well.
I had other plans for meal prep, but life got in the way this week. So, that's all I got done.
Enjoy!
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