A Look Back at Our Food Journey {Eat Well, Spend Less}

by Mandi on April 19, 2012

homemade garlic focaccia

source: Mandi Ehman

It’s been a year since Jessica from Life as Mom approached us all with the idea of participating in the Eat Well, Spend Less series to share tips and ideas for saving money on groceries without sacrificing nutrition or quality. At the end of that first month, we decided to continue the series with monthly themes, and it’s been really fun — and inspiring — to tackle various areas of this topic.

This month, we’re taking a look back at how our food philosophies, spending habits and menus have changed over the past year. Since our family has been taking baby steps toward healthier eating habits, it’s exciting to see how those tiny changes have added up over the past year.

Meal Planning

Although I’ve always been a proponent of meal planning, it’s only been in the past few months that I’ve gotten really good at being realistic about what I will be able to do in a given week. In the past I’ve been one of those people who wants my meal plan to look healthy, so I would plan lots of great meals even on busy weeks when I probably would not have the time or energy to actually prepare them. Unfortunately, although I’m learning to enjoy cooking more, it’s still usually the first thing I want to give up when I’m feeling overwhelmed. By being unrealistic, I’ve set us up for fast food runs way too often in the past.

Now, my goal is to be realistic and choose simple meals, without sacrificing nutrition. For example, this week my grandmother is visiting us. I knew the days before her visit would be very busy with getting the house ready and getting ahead with work, so our dinner menu included pancakes, smoothies and popcorn and crockpot lasagna, which are all super easy to prepare.

More Produce

Produce still plays an important part in our grocery budget, but I realized this winter that I let that slide during the colder months. We don’t eat as many winter veggies as we could, and I’d like to incorporate more salads year round. I’m going give these salads in a jar a try because I think having them prepared and ready will help that goal.

Although we didn’t have the best luck with last year’s garden, I’m going to try again this year (hopefully with more success!). I love how excited my girls get about veggies grown in our very own yard!

More from Scratch

The biggest area where I’ve improved this year is simply making more from scratch. After debating with myself for several months, I decided to ask for a breadmaker for Christmas, and it was such a good decision. I now make homemade bread several times a week, and I even find pizza dough easier since the breadmaker takes care of most of the mixing, kneading, rising for me.

Although I am still cautious about filling my kitchen cabinets with small appliances, I’ve got a new appreciation for how some of them make cooking from scratch more realistic for a busy mama like me. In fact, I asked for both an ice cream maker and yogurt maker for my birthday. The yogurt maker is the more realistic of the two purchases, since making homemade yogurt has been on my to-do list for ages but I can’t ever seem to get my act together to actually do it, while the ice cream maker is a fun gadget so that we can enjoy fresh, homemade ice cream without concerns about the ingredients or preservatives used.

I’ve found that making more from scratch makes it easy to avoid the unhealthy ingredients that are found in so many processed foods, so that’s a definite bonus.

Pantry Staples from Scratch

In addition to cooking from scratch, I’ve been spending more time making pantry staples from scratch as well. This week my kitchen has seen homemade pasta sauce and chicken stock, and I’d love to start making fresh butter each week as well. I especially like the pantry staples — like the pasta sauce and chicken stock — that I can make in large batches. Right now I’m freezing the extras, but I am determined to learn how to can this year!

In the coming months, I’d also like to try making sugar-free strawberry preserves, ricotta cheese, and some more healthy snacks, since we tend to rely on “healthy” snack food like Clif Kid and Annie’s Homegrown a little too much!

Taking Food on the Go

Another area where we’ve made huge improvements is on packing a lunch or picking up healthy “fast food” when we’re out and about. Because of the distance between our house and “town”, we often get stuck in the car during mealtimes, and I’m a little embarrassed to admit — given our focus on healthy eating this year — that there were weeks when we’d eat McDonald’s more than once.

I was inspired last year by Shaina’s grocery store “fast food”, and I’ve been trading the drive thru for a quick run through our local store for pre-sliced fruit and string cheese, which doesn’t cost much more and is definitely healthier!

Getting the Kids Involved

Although I’ve always known the importance of having the kids in the kitchen from an early age, it has not been something I’ve really enjoyed — I think mostly because we had so many littles so close together and it can be stressful to have them all in the kitchen at the same time. However, I’ve been enjoying having my youngest help me cook while her big sisters play outside, and I’m doing better about having the big girls help me one at a time so that we’re able to spend that special time together and they get a chance to help in the kitchen.

Coming Up…

The biggest change we’ll be making in the coming months is eliminating processed sugar. I’ll be inviting Life Your Way readers to join me in a Kicking the Sugar Habit Challenge, and I’m already making lists of things we can still eat during that challenge, which I’ll be sharing with you soon!

Other than that, I’ll just be focused on more of the same…realistic meal planning, incorporating more seasonal produce, cooking from scratch, making and preserving my own pantry staples and inviting my girls into the kitchen more often.

Read the food journeys of the other Eat Well, Spend Less bloggers here:

What food changes have you made during the past year? What’s been your favorite Eat Well, Spend Less topic?

Mandi Ehman is the founder and publisher behind Life Your Way and the co-author of All in Good Time, as well as a wife and the homeschooling mom to four beautiful girls. She lives with her family on a little slice of heaven in wild, wonderful West Virginia and loves coffee, chocolate, easy meals, beautiful things and minimalist spaces.

  • http://www.katesgreatcrafts.blogspot.com/ Katherine

    My husband and I got married almost 5 years ago.  Before that, I had cooked a little bit for my family, but since we married right out of college/dorm living, I hadn’t really had the opportunity to cook much.  I DID plan meals: a week of dinners consisted of 4 Hamburger Helpers, 2 Chicken Helpers, and 1 meal out.  Lunches were pb&j sandwiches, or lunch meat sandwiches, and we didn’t really eat much for breakfast. Snacks were whatever we picked up from fast food or convenience stores.  It was pretty horrible.

    As I learned more about cooking and couponing, we started having more variety in our meals, but they still weren’t great.  I was told by my doctor that if I wanted to get pregnant, I needed to lose weight, so we both started trying to eat better, although our idea of “better” at that point still wasn’t the best, and, as luck would have it, I got pregnant about a month and only 10 lbs. in, and was not the healthiest pregnant eater either.

    We decided about a year and a half ago to try out eating vegetarian for a month in an effort to eat more vegetables in general.  It completely worked for that goal.  Since then, we’ve been eating vegetarian for probably 75% of the time. 

    I’ve been experimenting with cooking and baking more from scratch, which I love.  I have a breadmaker now, which I use to make all sorts of breads, along with doughs for other baked goods.  I make my own vegetable broth from our produce scraps.  We eat mostly homemade pizzas.  I’m making much more of an effort to have a balanced diet with lots of fruits and vegetables, in part because we have two toddlers (ages 2.5 and 1) now, and I want them to eat better than we used to.
    We’re still struggling with eating out and snacking on things that aren’t so healthy, but we’ve made a lot of progress from the Helper dinners and frozen pizzas we used to have.

    • http://lifeyourway.net Mandi @ Life Your Way

      It definitely sounds like we’re on a similar journey, Katherine! I think that our kids seeing and being part of this journey does more for their own healthy eating habits than we can imagine. I want my kids to understand why and how we do these things without healthy eating rising to the level of a moral issue, and I think seeing our steps forward (and back) helps with that!

  • keitai

    I find that vege soups take the place of salads in winter.  I was never much of a soup person, I started making them for my husband but now I realise there are so many good things about soup. I can make it ahead of time & reheat when we eat (its always ready when kids are hungry – they can have the soup first instead of a snack if dinner isnt ready yet),  it really helps to up the vege quota & although my kids arent much of salad eaters I think soup is really easy for kids to eat.
    I keep them very simple & the favourite one is just cabbage, potato, garlic, salt & sliced chorisso sausage. 
    I also got a pressure cooker about a year ago & used that for soup a lot over winter.  I think that this is one of the reasons none of us got sick with colds or flu this winter.

  • Sarah

    I think one helpful gadget (and I hate extra kitchen gadgets!) is a rice cooker. Long grain rice is a cheap side, and brown rice is super healthy. But brown rice takes forever on the stovetop, and you have to kind of babysit it. A rice cooker is great b/c you don’t have to watch it, and it gets perfectly done, so you don’t waste burned rice. Also, lentils can be cooked easily in it, or you can mix lentils and brown rice in it, since they take the same amount of time and water to cook. Sometimes I even throw broccoli in with the rice while it cooks, so I just add cheese and butter when it’s done. Anyway, you can tell I love my rice cooker!

    • http://lifeyourway.net Mandi @ Life Your Way

      My mom has and loves a rice cooker as well. I’m not sure we eat enough to justify it, but maybe if I had a rice cooker, we’d eat more, LOL!

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  • http://www.delishiono.com/ Michelle | delishiono

    If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that menu planning is a learning process! I think over time, as we understand our cooking habits and our individual family’s eating preferences, it gets easier to make meal plans.

    I’ve also been making more and more of my family’s bread from scratch. I have a breadmaker that I adore but have lately been using a no knead, no fuss artisan bread dough recipe that I mix up once on the weekend and use for bread throughout the week. So easy and quick and I can totally control what goes into it.

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  • http://savingbymaking.com/ Diana

    I love the idea of being realistic with menu planning. I always make a menu, but it doesn’t always get followed. Thanks for clarifying one of the big reasons why–it’s not always realistic! Love having a word for what I’m trying to do :)

    • http://lifeyourway.net Mandi @ Life Your Way

      Glad that helped, Diana – I know it was a lightbulb moment for me too when I realized that I was doing it to myself!

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  • http://lifeyourway.net Mandi @ Life Your Way

    Ooh, thanks – definitely going to try this!

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