August Menu

As I'm sure my Pinterest peeps have noticed, I've completed our menu for August. A few changes that I have made from last month are:

-Trying to add more veggies, either in the entree, or as a side dish.

-Made a shopping list for each week at the same time I created the monthly menu (FYI, this was NOT a good decision, making a shopping list as we go is much better).

-Cut back on # of eat out nights. I figure we will still keep it to once a week, but this way it can be as circumstance dictates and not how the schedule dictates.

-Cooking smaller quantities and schedule less leftovers, we weren't eating them anyway.

-Organizing ALL of my upcoming recipes on Pinterest, that way Dalan can look it up on his iPad and start dinner before I get home.

Here is our August Menu:

I'm pretty proud of us sticking to it for this long, lets see how month 3 goes down.

Weekend Project

I first saw this project on Pinterest. I showed my usually skeptical husband, and surprisingly he was all for it. Not only did he jump on board, he knocked me down as he scrambled to take the helm :)

We went to the hardware store and bought 1 sheet of 4'x8' plywood and four-eight foot 2"x4"s. Dalan then got to buy a new toy because his table saw 'wouldn't work' to cut the plywood. I think he is just making stuff up to get more tools. So, Dalan bought a new circular saw, and we got started.

Step one: safety first!



Step 2: using our new circular saw and some sawhorses, Dalan cut the plywood into 4" strips.



Step 3: mark out 'center ' on each strip and attach the 2x4 with screws, so it is now a T.


And apparently i missed some pictures, I guess i was too busy making dinner.



Step 4: attach the T plywood side up to joists in the garage ceiling. Dalan first attached it loosely so he could verify that it was straight.




Now more missing pictures, I got distracted by our other project.




We then attached another 2x4 to the bottom, now making an I shape. We had pre-measured each sized tote that we used and our tracks needed to be 17.75" and 16.25" apart.



A big goal for this storage was to get our Christmas tree out of it's ratty box, but we could find a tote big enough for under $80, we found one that was 'pretty close' so Dalan improvised.




And here it is all finished.



I think we ended up spending about $50 in materials. TaDa!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Clipper thingy

Bobbi gave me one of these today, and I think they are crazy awesome!









It's like a paperclip/staple love child, AND the clips can be reloaded when you're done with them!
I realize that everyone else is probably not as excited about this as I am. I am probably too easily amused.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Menu-ing

I decided to give it a little while before I wrote this post. And as luck would have it, we have now surpassed 2 weeks on our menu system, so I now feel it is safe to spread the word. Given our upcoming trip to Disneyland, Dalan and I looked over our budget to make sure everything was going to work for the trip. We were SHOCKED to discover how much we have been spending on eating out and decided that we needed a big change pronto! I've been organizing our entire month of meals, and we are going grocery shopping every Monday or Tuesday to buy the ingredients. I've included days that we will eat out and days to have leftovers. So far, it has worked great. There are a few nights that we haven't felt like eating the scheduled item, so we swap it with something from the same week, which we have the ingredients for so it works great! Here is our July Menu:

So far, the extra delicious items to note are:

Bruschetta Chicken Bake

Pizza Factory Breadsticks

I have some plans for how we are going to tweak our system in the future. I want to rig a huge magnetic calendar on our fridge that I can stick the recipe cards to and then it will be easier to swap out the items. Then we can keep the same cards and use our favorites again next month. I'm getting ready to start preparing August, have any great recipes you want to share?