Domestic Disasters and Trying to Re-Board the Wagon

Last week I decided that I would take an exciting new idea I found in the land of home blogs to try to cut down on my grocery bill: shop for the month. Plan a monthly menu and shop for that in one trip. You'll need to run in again for milk and produce of course, but get everything else. It sounded like a good idea, and I plan on trying it again, or at least maybe trying to cut it down to twice a month, but this month did not go well.

First off, if I plan dinners, I plan nice dinners. Normally in a month, despite the best ideas, I might pull out one new recipe. The rest of the time it's cheese tortellini with olive oil, parm and spices or frozen pizza. I say I'm going to plan a weekly menu, but just wind up going to the store to pick up foods for lunch and some generic spaghetti dinners. When I pull out all my cookbooks and try a new Giada recipe once a week, it's a bit more expensive. I need to find some cheaper recipes.

Secondly, that one grocery trip wass hell. I was frustrated when they were out of something (Purina One Adult Dog Lamb and Rice) because this was my "one trip." After an hour and a half, our cart was full, we were exhausted and depressed by how much was still on the list. We gave up and checked out. This lead to an additional problem of me wrongly assuming that I had everything for the lasagna I had planned to cook that evening. Who knew lasagna needed eggs? I didn't until I had already started making some special Giada sauce. We ate frozen pizza instead.

I regrouped and adjusted our menu for the rest of the month with what I had managed to buy. I'll try again for next month, but maybe just shopping for two weeks at a time.

So on a slightly different topic but I'm actually going to tie it all together today (Gasp!), I've fallen off the exercise wagon. I fell off several weeks ago. I'm hoping that the longer days and warmer weather will help, and I'm trying to devise a new workout plan. I'm also trying to remind myself that it's better to do something than nothing, because I often wimp out because I know I don't have a full 30 minutes or I think this is the only day I'll have time this week so why bother. I need to start bothering. Maybe I need to try to find a 5K or something so I have a goal. I'll look into that. But yesterday, as I was eating Doritos (I try to eat healthy more often than not but I can never give up my bad food! I rely on exercise because dieting kills my soul.) I had an idea. What if I bought junk food for the month and that's it! This would be a way to curb excessive junk food eating, perhaps, by buying so much and then having to spread it out over the month. So I can have a monthly bag of Doritos, but if I eat it all in the first week, then it's gone and I can't get anymore. I don't really eat that much junk food, Girl Scout cookies excluded which is really more of a special season that one must savor while it lasts, but this might be a good way to keep from overdoing it.