Week 1

Hello! Welcome to my new blog. I've started a couple blogs before but they never seem to pan out. This time, I have a direction and goal in mind. My husband and I have decided to start planning our meals out a week in advance. I thought this might be a good opportunity to start from scratch (pun intended) with a new blog.
My cooking adventures have been limited in truth. There wasn't much cooking in my house when I was younger so I'm still a beginner. I do enjoy cooking but sometimes it can feel more like a chore. Spicing up the menu seems like a good way to make cooking more fun. I have many recipe books and most recently got a book called "7-Day Menu Planning For Dummies". My husband and I want to start saving money and eating less junk (ie, fast food). I think by planning out our meals weekly, we can save money and time at the grocery store. Plus, I can look up coupons for items on my list. I know this isn't a novelty, plenty of people plan their meals. We tried it for 1 week last year and it worked really well, we just forgot to keep going. :) This time, we're sticking to it. So... here it goes.

Week 1, Day 1 (yesterday): We had Chicken Pot Pie which worked out pretty well. I ended up getting a rotisserie chicken from the store which I then pulled apart to put in the mixture. That way, it was precooked and didn't take much time. We used frozen veggies we had in our fridge too which didn't end up working out all that well because we had a lot of green stuff and nothing else. Definitely next time, I want some carrots or something. The meal was relatively quick, about 30 minutes which was great because we had already been to the grocery store after work and were tired. The recipe came from the For Dummies book I was talking about earlier. If there is any interest, I will put the recipe up on here. Just let me know. I'm unsure of how much to put up here. I think my plan will be to put really awesome recipes in the blog when I come across them.

Week 1, Day 2: Our dinner this evening was a crockpot dinner. It came from the book that came with our crockpot (lol). It was gumbo and I have to say I was a little disappointed. The recipe wasn't very well written out and I was unsure of the instructions. Like most crockpot meals, I just assumed that everything could be thrown in because the recipe really didn't give enough information. I thought wrong. There was rice on the list and the gumbo mixture ended up really, REALLY mushy. We basically had slop for dinner. Next time, if we try this again, I think I will wait to cook the rice when the rest is done. Although, now that I'm thinking about it, I'm wondering if I can adapt this recipe to work outside of the crockpot. Stay tuned for that, we'll see.

That's it for now. Nothing too exciting so far but I'm hopeful for tomorrow's dinner.