Two Week Challenge

My husband and I are notorious for waiting until the last minute to plan dinner, and as our solution to not being prepared we decide it would just be easier to eat out instead of taking the time to make something.

Don't get me wrong, I love a good night out on the town. I mean, no dishes, no clean up who could ask for a better evening. Since we have made it our goal to plan a trip to Europe we have decided we need to cut back on our extra spending. And that extra spending is in the form of cutting back on dining out. So we challenged ourselves to two weeks of only eating our dinners at home! Now, I am challenging myself to eating all my meals at home - since I work most days from home. Chris on the other hand likes to eat lunch with his co-workers which I support.

The Challenge: Do not eat any non-homemade meals for two weeks!

The Plan: This is where we will make it or break it!

1) Grocery shop for food that we like and can make last minute if need be. I started "couponing" as a way to save extra money, but we have found that my shopping trips do not always end in me bringing home full meals. So I have to do a bit more planning prior to my shopping trips.

2) Plan our menu. In the past, I have decided in the morning what our dinner menu will be. I pull out the specific protein from our freezer so it can thaw all day in the fridge (a thawing technique I learned in a food safety class when I worked in a hotel. If you learned what I learned in that five hours - you would never thaw meat out on the counter again)! When I would go back to the protein in the fridge of course it was still frozen and not ready to be cooked. What was our solution? Eat out of course.

This is why menu planning will be crucial to our challenge! So is grocery shopping, which if you took a peak in our fridge you would see that it as empty as the first day it arrived at our house.

3) Getting in the kitchen and cooking. You cant eat a dinner without getting in the kitchen! Bringing it back to a goal I had set for myself in 2011 of testing out two new recipes a week.

In this series of posts I will be sharing recipes that can be prepared in advance and then frozen down for later consumption. With only two of us to feed all week, I am hoping this will add variety to our life and keep us on the non eating out program! Here is to two weeks of homeade goodness! Wish us luck!