January’s No Grocery Shopping Experiment Week Two

It is Week Two of the No Grocery Shopping Experiment and so far it has been going well. It has been rather cold this week (between -25C/-13F to -42C/-43F) so staying inside and cooking is welcomed, and a warm hearty meal is especially yummy after shoveling all the snow! I have been enjoying my daughters planning the meals and helping to cook. In that way, cooking as a family has been quite fun. I love a variety of meals and this week has been delicious!

We did run out of milk, so we purchased one 2L carton of dairy-free milk for $4.85 but other than that, we are hanging in there! We are running low on potatoes so I have been chopping them much smaller and using only one or two in meals like soup. We have 2 heads of cabbage, so I have been adding cabbage to a lot of meals or eating it as a creamy coleslaw. Super yummy!!

Generally we try to eat up leftovers within three days, otherwise I freeze the meal for another day, depending upon what it is.

The week for our meal plans are running from Monday to Sunday. Here is what we cooked this week.

Week Two – This week is January 8 to 14
January 8
Lunch — Cheesy Quinoa with BBQ seasoned Veggies
Supper — Korean-style Pork and Rice Bowls. For this, I cook chopped onion until tender then added ground pork and scrambled fried the pork with some garlic, ground ginger, salt and pepper. Once cooked, I added shredded cabbage and chopped carrot. Once the veggies were cooked, I added soy sauce, water and a bit of a cornstarch slurry to create a bit of a sauce. I served it with rice. It was delicious!!

January 9
Lunch — Leftovers
Supper — Lentil Shepherds Pie with Biscuits and homemade mustard beans

January 10
Lunch — Leftover Borscht and Biscuits
Supper — Leftover Lentil Shepherds Pie, Salad, Fresh Homemade Breadsticks (and I usually use my favorite pizza dough recipe which you can find here Heart Shaped Pizza with the Best Crust) along with Lentil Burgers made from leftover lentils that were cooked yesterday for the shepherds pie. I combined the lentils, egg and seasonings then formed into burgers and cooked in the skillet. I put a bit of bbq sauce on the burger along with some cheese. Some of the burgers fell apart so we ate it like a sloppy joe. Next time I would add another egg along with bread crumbs and perhaps shredded carrot, potato or zucchini to add moisture so the burgers stay together better. I would mash half the lentils as well so the burgers would not be so crumbly.

January 11
Today’s meals cost about $18.50 Cdn which is about $2.31 per person
Lunch — Malt Waffles with Homemade Vanilla Syrup
Supper — Fresh Whole Wheat Buns, Coleslaw, French Onion Rice and Slow Cooker Ranch Chicken with bacon, green onion and cheese (recipe coming soon).

January 12
Lunch — Oatmeal
Supper — Leftovers

January 13
Lunch — Fried Dough
Supper — Fresh Buns, Coleslaw, Fried Wieners with Onions, Homemade Perogies and homemade pickles. For the fried wieners with onion, I first sautéed onion in butter and a bit of oil. Once that was tender, I added the chopped hot dog and cook until lightly browned.

January 14
Lunch — Creamy Garlic Pasta which I added some carrot to and tastes like a homemade Alfredo. We also had Coleslaw (since we have a lot of cabbage) and Garlic Bread using the leftover homemade buns.
Supper — Mămăligă, which is Romanian for cornmeal mush cooked on the stove. I have eaten Mămăligă all my life (my gramma always cooked it), and we serve it with shredded cheese and butter. We also had store bought Hashbrowns that I had to use up from the freezer, Loaded Scrambled Eggs and Toasted Buns.

And that is week two! It was a variety of meals and though some meals seemed sparse, our bellies were full and that’s what matters. This week really made me think about the struggles of the past, and even today. Food doesn’t have to be fancy. It just needs to be good.

We’ll be moving into week three. Meals are planned and my daughters have their days that they will be cooking. I like knowing ahead of time what meals will be prepared which helps me to know what items I need to remove from the freezer to thaw. It also helps me to see what ingredients need to be used up and ensures we eat leftovers so there’s no food waste which is important.

Do you meal plan? What do you like about meal planning?

enjoy from Our City Homestead to yours