Spending less while not changing your lifestyle

 Just drifted over to Mr. Money Mustache via a link from Weka's blog.  The discussion from Weka was about how to reduce food spending.  Interesting stuff although I am neither vegetarian nor vegan.  Did vegetarian for about five years in the 90s but didn't care for it for a variety of reasons.  I, however, spend a lot of money on food and figured that maybe it was time to start figuring out ways to reduce that in general WITHOUT significantly reducing my standard of living.  I left a comment on the thread over there but then, as occasionally happens, decided that my comment needed to be over here as well.

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After reading this, however, I'm going to start keeping MUCH better track of my grocery spending and start figuring out ways to cut back.  I am single and a good cook, I generally eat well.  I spend a fair amount of money on good wine (more than food?  We shall see.)  I haven't kept track of my spending at all however.  I can go into Quicken and look, but "the grocery store" doesn't necessarily mean "groceries" these days.  Started with yesterday's trip to the store to pick up some staples for last night's dinner (steak enchiladas).  Will be keeping track using a free app I grabbed at random off Google Play and then we'll see where it goes from there.  My tips would be:

1) Costco: relatively inexpensive lamb, pork loin that you can slice into chops, bulk meat for freezing as well as large blocks of cheese at significantly less than the grocery store.  I don't drink a lot of milk and when I do (rarely) eat bread I usually make it myself.

2) Instapot: slow cooked food that you can make after work instead of at 5 am as you are getting ready to go

3) plan your meals a week at a time, something I did for a while and then stopped due to inertia

If you want good, kitchen tested recipes check out my recipe blog (kept for my own reference mainly) at http://heresolong.blogspot.com.  The blog is called An Egg Without Salt and I post up any new recipes I try so that I can find them when I'm not in my own kitchen (or when I can't remember where I found a particular recipe in my books).

Plan: 1) keep track of spending; 2) go back to planning a week's worth of menus at a time;  3) collect underpants;  4) ???; 5) profit 

New Year's Resolutions

Yeah, I don't do those.

But there are some things I've been meaning to do so I find that January is a good time to start them.

• I'm going to cook more.  I'm going to focus on recipes that I can make multiple helpings of each Sunday, either to reheat during the week or to bake in smaller portions as the week progresses.  Over the past few months I have found myself unmotivated to cook as some of the things I am doing at school to improve the learning process are keeping me there until 4:00 many days.  By the time I do a quick errand or two I am getting home around 5:30 and there isn't much time to cook anything time consuming.  Pre-made dishes should resolve this issue.  I will post up the recipes I am trying on my cooking blog An Egg Without Salt in case you are interested.

• I'm going to up the home improvement level.  If you have been following this blog you have seen my efforts on upstairs rooms with one room finished, one room two thirds finished, and the hallway coming along nicely.  I also have an ongoing project in the downstairs hall.  I started stripping the painted over woodwork about twelve years ago.  That effort lasted a few months and the frustration level resulted in my abandoning the project partially finished.  My front hall currently has about half the original woodwork stripped (mostly), with none of it looking particularly aesthetic and none of it looking close to being ready to refinish.  After watching some Rehab Addict over the break I am going to give it another go.  Over the past two days I've mostly finished one newel post and gotten a little further in cleaning up the trim on a window (you can see pictures below of the two pieces I'm working on).  I have decided that I will stain them once they are stripped rather than waiting for the whole hall to be finished so that I can see some progress and what it will look like as I go.  Here's a couple pictures of the current progress in the hallway.

• I'm going to hire someone to come in and sand and prep the master bedroom floor for refinishing.  I'll probably still do the finish myself (depends on who I hire and what they are willing to do) but I can't have my bedroom down for a year while I putter at it like the other two rooms.  This way it will get done and I can move on to the other projects I have waiting in the wings for the floor refinishing to be done.

I think that's not a bad list and doable.  They are things I have been thinking about doing anyway.  We'll see how long the motivation lasts but I think small achievements will keep me going.  I don't do well with large projects with few milestones so maybe achieving small successes regularly will keep me going on these.

Oh, if you are looking for a New Year's Resolution, how about resolving to buy your stuff from Amazon.com using the link at the top right corner of my blog.  If you go to Amazon using that link you pay the same for all your stuff but I get a little commission from Amazon for referring you.  Win win situation.

Epic Cooking Fail

Picked up a few new cookbooks at the Friends of the Library book sale so last night thought I'd make a nice dinner.  Wishing I had a wife, girlfriend, or roommate with whom to share this work of culinary art.  Butternut Squash Soup with Pumpkin Seed Pesto and Tuscan Pork Loin Roast.

Blah! Butternut Soup is not nearly as sweet as most squash soups I've had plus I think maybe I put too much cumin in when I scaled down the recipe.  Really not very good.

Oh well, there's still the pork loin for the main course.  Rats. Overcooked.  I was aiming for an internal temperature of 155º but missed as I overestimated the time it would take before I checked the temp. Contrary to popular opinion, if you cook pork until all the red is gone, it is drier than dust.

Thankfully, there was no one to share it with.

Infinite Possibilities

So once you discover that you can stuff a chicken breast with cheese, the possibilities are endless. Last night it was cheddar cheese and chipotle peppers with adobo sauce, topped with pepper bacon. Incredible. No point in even posting them on the recipe blog with pictures cause they all look the same and they are all just as good as the last.

Been there so infrequently it's starting to seem less like home

Hmmm. I either need to cook more or (more likely) remember to take pictures of my brilliant culinary creations so that I can post them up on the blog.