Weekend Update

Friday

A few days ago I decided to institute Fend For Yourself Fridays. Usually we have a family activity planned for the evening (this Friday it was the StoryTelling Festival at school) and there's not a lot of time for intensive meal prep. So, Friday's a good night for everyone to eat what they want, with in reason. Here's how it went:

What we ate: Breakfast - cold cereal (we're still doing pretty good on real milk, it seems to go a lot further when I bake and cook with the powdered stuff)
Lunch - early day home from school, kids ate fresh fruit and chicken nuggets
Dinner - Hannah & Caleb - Campbell's chunky chicken soup (the kind from our 72 hour kits that I'm glad I rotated out, tastes like baby baby food bland). Brennan & KC - Top Ramen spiced up and added to for a palate pleasing meal. Don & I - Instant Chow Mien, also rotated from our 72 hour kits, but MUCH preferable to the chunky soup.

Saturday

What Today was family fun (and cleaning) day and Mom & Dad's date night.
What we ate: Breakfast - Everyone did their own thing for breakfast.
Lunch - We had cheese and crackers and carrot sticks, courtesy of Don. He made some dips (remember, we're all about sauces at our house) and arranged some cheeses on a plate along with carrot sticks and pita crackers. Everyone loved it and it filled us nicely before the movies. We are going to be sad when we run out of cheese and sour cream.
Dinner - We made a meal to take to a new neighbor who just moved in today. They have a small family, so we were able to keep half the food we made to feed our kids. Bren made a butter and herb pasta, I made a salad, and we also took some "Warm Delights" (mentioned in a previous post) and bread that we picked up at the Health Food Store (which is not a supermarket). Don & I went to our favorite fresh mex cafe. We just ordered soup and tortillas, plus some sauce to take home and the whole date cost us $13.26. We ran into a neighbor who's read my blog. She hugged me and said, "You're here. You're not at the grocery store, you're here." I showed her that we were still very good and frugal and only got the soup (we're also a bit under the weather which is closer to the real reason for our frugal order) and she had lots of encouragement for us. See, I paid with cash, ordered cheap, I'm sticking to it. But, that leads me to -

A tips from Don & Mariah's date night:

If you have a favorite item from a restaurant, like a dip, dressing or sauce, talk to someone there about ordering that item as a side for take-out. We used to have a favorite Caesar salad dressing we loved getting from a local Italian place. They let us order it by the pint and we'd take it home in a paper cup with a lid. It was a lot cheaper to do it that way than to come back repeatedly ordering the whole salad. In today's case, this cafe makes an amazing tomatillo dressing that is difficult to duplicate, believe me, I've tried, and while sometimes close is good enough, there's nothing like the real deal. So, rather than spending a bunch of money on food that is just carrier for the sauce, try ordering just the sauce and go home and make the food.