A new feature

So, when my parents were here, my mother told me AwwwClutter had become boring. Indeed. That didn’t stop her from from taking 4 pairs of shoes home, though, and she tried to cover herself by saying I had stopped posting regularly, but then my dad made some remarks about the bad pictures and overly long stories. When your own parents are bored, well, what can you do? I am going to continue though with renewed vigor, because I really do want to ditch a few more pairs.

My friend K. suggested I post pics of my entire outfit, but I’m not quite ready to upgrade my photography and more importantly, my pajama wearing, so no full outfit shots for now, though that might change.

But, I’ve also found myself with a little more open time this coming month, so the decluttering is going to pick back up.

And, more importantly, I am adding a cooking angle. I had a coupon for $1 off Real Simple magazine, and HT was offering double dollar coupons (love that!), so I bought a copy of October’s issue. Flicking through it, I noticed a feature story on a “month’s worth of dinner!”

So, why the heck not. I’m going to cook with Real Simple this month. One of my friends, TSM, has a grid she follows for, well, everything, including nightly dinners. The thought of a grid makes me itchy – I’m more of a free form, spontaneous person. And I do ok in the nightly dinner routine, with a fair amount of variety and diversity. But my parents also make fun of our cooking style (hi mom and dad! So happy to have you visit for a week!) – we tend to like to cook big batches of things, and have leftovers more than half the week. Love nights when I am just able to heat up something in the microwave. So this will be a change, cooking every night. We’ll see if we like it.

I’ll comment on the recipes probably the next day. Today, here are just my thoughts on starting the challenge. First, in the magazine and website, they talk about a full month, but really it is 4 weeks. But really, it’s Monday-Friday for 4 weeks – no recipes for Saturday or Sunday. Which is fine, but it really and truly annoys me that in the text they never address there are no recipes for Saturday or Sunday! They offer a shopping list and several times say this is all you need for a months worth of dinners, But THAT IS NOT TRUE. Annoying. Very, very annoying, actually. But it’s also fine as it gives us some leeway, I guess, for our own choices or for going out once a week.

Second, I tend to like recipes that are linked. Buy a whole onion, but use half in this recipe and half in recipe #2. Cook extra chicken breasts and use them in the next nights’ choice. Or whatever. That just seems more efficient to me. But no, this is 28 different meals.

None of the recipes seems to take more than 45 minutes, so that’s good for weeknights, but I’ve found in the past Real Simple timing can be quite off. So I’m watching for that.

I also like to cook seasonally – and by that I mean following the sales in the store flyers. So chicken when it is on sale, and beef when that is on sale, etc. So this could be a shock to our grocery budget. And finally, in looking over the recipes, while they say it’s a complete meal I think some of the nights are lacking in vegetables. So I may have to supplement.

The ingredients for this week cost $155, including the staples of milk, OJ, eggs, bread, etc. We typically spend about $100 a week, so already we’re over. We’ll see how it goes the rest of the month.

Wish me luck, let’s keep our fingers crossed the kids like the food, and we’ll see how it goes.