Day One: Yellow for Dinner
During months where I actually manage to track my money, I’ve noticed that I tend to spend at least twice my entire grocery budget eating out. This kills my budget, of course, and more importantly, it really annoys me. Why does it annoy me? Because for all the money I’m spending, I’m not eating particularly well.
Now, if it were just me alone, I’d definitely be eating well. What has so far shown itself to be the best Indian restaurant in my city is just a few blocks from my house, and a few blocks from that is the restaurant at which I was first introduced to Thai food so many years ago, and if I’m not interested in picking something up, I can always have fancy, expensive pizza (that is, not coincidentally, the best pizza I’ve ever had in my life) delivered to my doorstep.
But alas, it’s not just me, and my boys don’t like spicy and my boys don’t like vegetables mixed with things and my boys don’t like sauces and my boys don’t like pizza that involves ingredients more complicated than cheese and pineapple (and the little one won’t even go for the pineapple). So instead of spending my money on good, yummy food, I eat a lot of mediocre crap just so that I can also purchase something for my children. Pizza Hut is a prime example. I do not like Pizza Hut pizza yet I can generally find something on the menu that is endurable because they offer a $4 personal-sized pineapple pizza that is perfect for my boys. Even the smallest cheese pizza at my preferred pizza establishment is something like $13, and there’s a good chance that something about it will be just foreign enough that my children will reject it entirely.
The end result is that I spend a lot of money to eat a lot of crap, I’m pretty unhappy about it, and I’ve decided to do something about it. I’ve decided to challenge myself to go one entire month without eating out, getting take-out, having food delivered, picking up fast food, etc.
It’s not hard to cook at home, especially when my standards are as low as they are. Or rather, since that doesn’t sound very complimentary, let me rephrase. It’s not hard to cook at home, especially since I don’t allow any sort of traditional notions about meals restrict our dining options. Speed is probably the biggest priority. At the earliest, we don’t get home until six. If I’m going to spend any time with my boys and yet still start their bedtime routine at 7:30, dinner needs to be as quick (and easy) as possible.
Nutrition closely follows speed. At my house, the minimal dinner requirements are generally a couple servings of fruits or veggies and a little bit of protein. Since snacks at our house tend to be things like crackers, toast, granola bars, cereal, fruit and yogurt, I feel like my minimal dinner requirements round things out nicely enough. Monday and Tuesday’s dinners consisted of fish sticks (cod, not that minced crap — although we are not above the minced crap), sliced bananas and steamed frozen corn, and strawberries, peas and cheese quesadillas. Last night, our weekly gymnastics night, needed to be extra quick, so we went with Hot Pockets, apple slices and raw baby carrots. A menu like that means that dinner is on the table in five minutes. For the others, fifteen minutes at most.
Given that I’ve established a long list of very quick and very easy and reasonably nutritious meals that my boys will actually eat, I don’t think it will be hard to cook every night. The key is just getting myself back into the habit. My hope is that thirty days of doing so will not only provide enough repetition to establish the habit, but might even reveal better grocery shopping and meal planning strategies. And I think that for further accountability, I’m even going to post what I eat for lunch and what my family eats for dinner for the entirety of this experiment.
That part feels a little scary to me. It’s like letting people come over without cleaning my house first. Now you will see that we are not a family that eats all whole grains and organic produce with a healthy sprinkling of wheat germ for flavor. But that’s okay. It’s all in the same of science, right? Or…maybe “science” isn’t the right word. It’s all in the name of weird blog experiments that no one really cares about, right? Right.
So anyway, day one. Today for lunch, instead of going out to the Thai place next door for food so spicy that it was actually painful to eat it (as I did yesterday), I ate leftover spaghetti and a lot of candy from my boss’ candy jar. For dinner my boys and I had macaroni and cheese (yep, the boxed kind), canned peach slices (supposedly in light syrup, but if that syrup was light, I’d hate to see what they consider heavy syrup), and applesauce (naturally sweetened, if you care). It was a very yellow meal, made even more so by the presentation on yellow plates. Tomorrow will bring the real challenge as a) as of tonight all the dishes in my house are officially dirty, and b) Friday night is the one night I generally allow us to eat out guilt free as a way to celebrate the end of the week and the impending weekend. We shall see if I can remain strong in the face of adversity.