It startes

For those of you that don't know us that well, let me give you some background on this blog. In our family we cook 95% of our meals and snacks. It started because
1) it's cheaper
2) we both need to lose weight, so this is a way to better know what's in our food and
3) it gives us time to spend together

Because we cook majority of our meals, we are always on the lookout for good recipes. And we have a lot. But it's one thing to collect recipes, it's another to try them. With creating this blog, my hope is that it will help us to try new things.

Every Wednesday our menu for the next week (with the menu it goes Friday to Thursday) is created. Thursday is grocery shopping day. We do the shopping on Thursday because our local farmer's market (Sappington Farmer's Market) does $10 off $50 dollars and the local grocery store (Shop N save) does the same thing once a month. So we save a little bit.

We usually do 3 smaller meals a day plus 2 light snacks. It has worked out pretty good. My husband has lost about 30lbs just changing food. Maybe more, we haven't weighed ourselves in 2 months. So it's working.

We also have fairly busy lives. Right now we live with hubby's parents (I lost my job a few months ago and so we couldn't afford our apartment anymore). And my in laws eat the same food we do. Which means 4 adult schedules to manage. The 3 of them work. My father in law works the early morning shift, so he is not home for breakfast during the week, so whatever we choose for breakfast has to be something he can take with him or that he can easily make. My mother in law works during dinner one night a week, so dinners have to be mobile or easy reheated. My husband works 2 or 3 days a week, different shifts and will have school 2 days a week starting in a week, so he needs stuff he can take with him. Since they are usually at work during snack time, snacks have to be easy. I also have school 2 nights a week, so some meals have to be made ahead of time. Since we are all on different schedules, we usually double the dinner recipes and the extras become lunch the next day. Snacks are usually finger foods so they can eat them at their desks. And some of our meals have to be made a day ahead of time. And since we are so busy, meals can't take a long time to cook.

Each week I am going to post our menu and then when we cook a new recipe, I will post the recipe and our opinion of it. Hopefully it will provide you with some new, fairly fast simple meals to try with your own family.

Feel free to post some of your favorite recipes for us to try, please include links to the recipe or post all the instructions and ingredients. And if you try one of our recipes, please let us know your opinion as well.

Recipes you probably won't find us cooking:

Anything with oranges or alot of citrus... I am allergic.
Mushrooms: Mother in law gets sick
Pepperoni: Husband gets bad heartburn.

Other than that, we are up to trying almost anything once.