Do You Have a Fallback Meal?

The other night, I was browning some hamburger for dinner. I had planned to make a skillet casserole that called for pasta, tomato soup, and frozen corn. The meat was sizzling away, and I had started the water to boil for the pasta when I went out to the garage freezer only to find that I was out of frozen corn. I didn't have any leftovers in the fridge, either. I didn't want to just waste the meat, so I went to one of my fallback meals. A fallback meal is something my family likes, that has a minimum of ingredients needed, that I can pull together at a moment's notice. For hamburger, my fallback meals are usually Hamburger Helper or Dirty Rice (made with Zatarain's Dirty Rice mix).

I have long been a planner of meals. I have a menu stuck to my fridge of the meals I have planned for the week. It's taken me a long time, though, to learn flexibility when it comes to dinner menus. It is important to have a fallback meal or two that you can pull together quickly. In a less-frugal stage of life, being out of corn on the night I was planning to serve Curly Noodle would merit a trip to a drive-through, which can easily cost in the neighborhood of $40. Instead, I pulled out two boxes of Hamburger Helper (which I had bought on sale with a coupon and probably paid about a dollar each), and cooked up some peas & carrots to go with it. Not necessarily great, nutritionwise, but more nutritious than that drive-through meal would have been.

I am convinced that eating out is bad for both your budget AND your waistline. Plan for a couple of things that you don't normally schedule for a meal. Be prepared with a well-stocked pantry.

Eating Out At Home

My sister and fellow frugalite writes,

We love eating at Famous Dave's Barbeque. My hubby always get the Devil's Spit Burger. He loves the sauce and the spicy pickles on it. When I was at the grocery store the other day, I noticed they had the Famous Dave's Devil's Spit Barbeque sauce so I grabbed it up. We were having burgers for the fourth of July so I figured we could try to recreate them at home. Hubby went by the restaurant and asked to buy a side of pickles. They had them in jars which also leads me to believe that they probably sell them at the store too and I just didn't see them. OK, long story short...our made-at-home Devil's Spit Burgers were great! Maybe not exactly the same but close. We spent $2.99 on the sauce and $3.49 for the pickles, both more than I'd usually spend on BBQ sauce and pickles, but when you consider that we still have a ton of sauce and pickles left and that the burger at the restaurant costs $9.00, I think we saved quite a bit of money!

Looking for at-home versions of your favorite restaurant fare is a great money-saving idea. And yummy, too! More and more restaurant chains are packaging at-home versions of some of their items. Do you have a favorite restaurant meal that you can now make at home?

Summer Heat-busting Recipes

One thing I am really consistent about is planning weekly menus and shopping lists. But, I'm not as adept at anticipating what the weather will be during the week. This past week, the Pacific Northwest had its version of a heat wave (temperatures pushing 90 for several days in a row). For those of us without air conditioning and used to much cooler temperatures (the average high for this time of year is 68 degrees), it can get pretty miserable. Our house tends to get especially warm in the afternoons thanks to our western exposure.

Anyway, last week during the heat wave, we ended up opting to grab fast food at a nice, air-conditioned fast food establishment rather than cook and add heat to the already sweltering house. Prior to this summer, we didn't think twice about doing this. Now, that's a different story. We can easily spend upwards of $30 at Wendy's or McDonald's, and that is just not going to fly in our single-income household.

So, this morning I spent some time going through my recipe books looking for some good summer recipes for salads (both main dish and side) and grilling recipes that I can add to my menus for these summer months. If I find any that pass the test of my uber-picky family, I'll post them here. I figure even if I use some convenience foods (pre-cooked chicken strips, etc.) in these meals it will be cheaper than eating out.

If anyone would like to share a good summer salad (pasta or otherwise) recipe, or suggest other things that we can either eat cold, grill outdoors, etc., let me know! I'll try to make this a recurring theme for posts throughout the summer.

Trader Ming's Mandarin Orange Chicken!

Our family has recently discovered the wonder that is Trader Ming's Mandarin Orange Chicken. Yummmmm! I truly believe the secret to this wonderful dish is that you cook the chicken and the sauce separately and then assemble just before eating. The chicken stays crispy and the sauce is just right!

Available at Trader Joe's for $4.99/package, it is a great thing to have on hand for a quick and easy lunch or dinner. My family of 4 (including 2 teenage boys) usually inhales 2 packages, along with cooked rice, most often for lunch. It takes about 20 minutes to cook in the oven. We often would grab lunch out on a Saturday, especially if we were busy, but with this in the freezer, we have been opting for eating in instead, which saves a ton of money, considering that our family can rarely grab fast food (even Subway $5 footlongs) for less than $25.

Convenience food from the grocery store (or in this case, Trader Joe's) can really be a budget-saver if it keeps you from heading out for fast food.

Jamba Juice Oatmeal

Jamba Juice is promoting their new organic steel-cut oatmeal with a great promotion. Through March 31, get a steaming cup of oatmeal with your choice of several yummy toppings (I chose bananas and brown sugar crumbles) for a dollar.

I stopped by Jamba Juice today while I was out running errands and redeemed my coupon. One word: YUM. Very delish. I think I may start having steel-cut oats at home, because they are way better than instant.

Regular price for the Jamba Juice oatmeal is $2.95. I definitely won't be getting it very often at regular price, but for a buck, you can't go wrong, so go print your coupon!

Menu Planning

I. Hate. Menu. Planning! Hate it, hate it, hate it!

Menu planning, to me, is a necessary evil. If I don't have a week's worth of menus posted on my fridge, we are so much more likely to go out for dinner than not. If I don't know what to thaw the night before...well, you get the picture. That said, I am burnt out on it. Entirely. Even with keeping a monthly calendar of what we ended up eating each night, I still get in a rut.

The only thing I hate worse than menu planning is cooking.

Tracking Meals with a Dinner Calendar

I make dinner menus and shop once a week. I post the menu on the fridge each week, and used to just toss out each menu at the end of the week. Just recently, though, I started keeping track of what we actually ended up eating each week, as even with a weekly menu, things tend to change. I write it on a monthly calendar, and keep the calendars in my menu planning binder. I have found this helps us eat out less (not that you would know it from the sample calendar), because I am planning dinners better, and it also is a very useful tool when one of my kids (or my hubby) says, "not that again!" I can whip out my back calendars and say "for your information, we haven't had that in five weeks!"