Dinner: no grocery spending!
Came across a fun challenge on beingfrugal.net:
This coincides nicely with my dinner from yesterday! We’re going away for a week for the Thanksgiving holiday and I was thinking how we didn’t really have anything ready for food to make (no fresh meat in the fridge), and I got home late from work, and didn’t want to have to go drive to the store and start dinner 1 1/2 hours later. So I put together what I call “Everything but the Kitchen Sink Soup” – all the veggies in the fridge, plus a handful of split peas, a lot more of lentils, leftover pasta bits (angel hair broken up makes nice vermicelli), some opened canned tomatoes (they go in everything). Voila, soup that’s good for 5-6 meals.
The challenge from beingfrugal is a great concept: go through your cupboards and get rid of all the wierd packages of food items you don’t use regularly. The trick is to not go buy *more* specialty items to complete the meal. For example, we have a bunch of asian noodles. I didn’t buy them, but unless we go buy coconut milk and curries and other items, I can’t think what to do with them!
So don’t give in and get take-out or go eat out when there’s “nothing in the fridge.” Be imaginative and whip up something you already have!
