Learning to Enjoy Grocery Shopping

I found my new favorite place to grocery shop: Walmart Neighborhood Market. The ambiance is like a high-end grocery store such as the local Tom Thumb, but with the exact same prices as Walmart SuperCenter. LOVE. No seriously, if you can be in love with a Walmart, I am. This seemingly very minor discovery totally changes my world when it comes to grocery shopping because I hate grocery shopping.
I actually love shopping in general, and I don't particularly mind cooking. I do hate spending money, especially when there is the issue of fluctuating grocery prices and determining what a good price is on a gazillion products in a grocery store. This is a potentially stressful process for a frugal woman like myself. A frugal woman who has a teeny-tiny grocery budget to stick to. When I say teeny, I mean less than $50 a week (and our eating-out budget is even smaller, FYI).

Enter EMEALZ. Since cooking isn't my favorite thing to do, meal planning feels like homework. I dread it. I put it off. I don't mind scouring the internet (ie. Pinterest) and cookbooks for fun things to make or even for food to make for special events, but for weekly meals? Yuck. Not on this budget. It's no fun for me. Emealz takes care of this for me. I've been using Emealz for almost a year now, and we've absolutely loved like 90% of the meals we've made with it. The 10% we didn't love were mostly because we aren't big fish eaters, but you can swap the fish out for chicken in just about every instance. It is so worth the $1.25 a week if you are like me and hate meal planning. TOTALLY.

BUT, I still dreaded grocery shopping. We're on the Walmart plan (because overall it's cheaper than the others) with Emealz, but I've never been able to enjoy the shopping. It's the overall experience that I hate. It is generally better if I have a drink with me, but the overcrowded aisles, the ridiculously long check-out lines, the hike to and from the parking lot, and even the ultra-bright white fluorescent lighting in the store make it a miserable experience. This Walmart Neighborhood Market is a grocery store only. It's much smaller than even a basic Walmart. The parking lot is smaller. It's the middle of a mostly residential area, which means the store is less congested. The lighting in it is more subdued and indirect. This week, I spent less money on a week's worth of groceries than I normally would and was in and out of the store in record time. I have been shopping there for several weeks, and now I look forward to grocery shopping. What a difference shopping in a decent store makes!

This post probably doesn't interest anyone too much, but it was too exciting for me not to share!

Our Tax Time Party

Probably like many others, Nate and I have been putting off doing our taxes. It's just such a dull, dismal chore, that oftentimes just means having to pay an extra bill. Since we've been planning all week to sit down and do them tonight, I wanted to do something extra special to make the job a little less daunting.

I've been inspired by some other blogs, especially this one, with ideas for decorating, crafting, and adding joy to everyday life. The blogger I mentioned, Melissa, has so many examples of her creativity on her blog, and she has even found a way to make even leftovers exciting for her family, with very little added effort.

Inspired, I decided to incorporate our supper into the project, so we could eat while we worked. Our big meal of the day had been lunch, as we ate Mexican with Nate's Aunt Sharon and Kirk. So, our supper could be lighter than usual. I wanted mostly finger foods, easy for munching and grazing while keeping within the constraints of our new diet. I loaded up the silver tray, introduced in my previous post, with various goodies I happened to have on hand. I actually took pictures of the setup, but I accidentally saved them on my camera (rather than memory card) and can't get them off! I'll just have to describe them now. Hopefully someday I will be able to get them off my camera and can add them to this post.

I started with some pepper jack string cheese and low fat mozzarella string cheese and sliced them into squares. I arranged them on a small plate with toothpicks. I rolled some ham deli meat and placed them on the plate with the cheese. We also had some 1/3 fat strawberry cream cheese to use up. I wouldn't normally serve two (make that three) types of cheeses at the same meal, but I knew we hadn't come close to our dairy quota for the day and could handle it. I sliced an apple and arranged the slices around the small custard cup size bowl of cream cheese. I added a strawberry as garnish for the cream cheese. I wanted to have crackers with the cream cheese as well, but we only had graham crackers. As I feel like graham crackers are more of a dessert cracker than what I was going for, I reached for the container of multi-grain tortilla chips I bought yesterday. I tried one in the cream cheese and was pleasantly surprised. The combination was a hit with Nate, too.

I had decluttered the living room a bit earlier, so Nate and I got our tax folders and settled down around the ottoman in the living room, with the silver tray of goodies between us. With teacup in (my) hand, we got to work. The job flew by. Before we knew it, we had all of the paperwork and forms filled out and the food was completely gone! We're waiting to actually submit the files, but the task itself is finished. Munching on those goodies really made it a stress-free, almost relaxing job. Next year, I might even meal plan specifically for our next tax time party. I imagine shrimp and cocktail sauce, veggies and low-cal dressing, olives, chunks of ham, etc. would have made it even more party-like. All of those foods are diet approved, too, so we wouldn't sacrifice healthy for convenient.

My husband agreed that this little extra something made doing our taxes so much better. It was almost like a date. Almost. (I should hope we haven't already reached the stage in our marriage where those type of dates are the only type we have time for!) I hope the next time we have a dreaded task ahead of us, we can think up a creative way to make it an enjoyable memory!

Healthy Eating

I'm really not very picky, when it comes to food. It seems my mama raised me that way.

"What? You're full? You need to eat 8 more bites of your [insert green, cooked vegetable here] before you can get up from the table."

*groan* "Ok, mom."

We had to eat as many bites as the years we were old. Of course, when I say we, I mean my older, not-picky brother and me. My younger brother only had to eat 2 bites of whatever it was, even when he was 10. I guess it's a rule or something - the baby always get spoiled somehow. I'm actually not bitter about that at all. Nope. Hehe, I love you, Jonathan. ;o)

Anyway, I think it was a good rule. My brother and I grew up to have varied tastes in food. Even now, I will at least try any food. However, there are certain foods I just can't bring myself to like. The more I try to like them, the less I do. The food on this includes but is not limited to: bacon, bell peppers, oranges, Swiss cheese, licorice, and root beer. Ok, I know root beer isn't a food, but it seems there is at least one thing in each food group that I don't like.

Nate, on the other hand, isn't a huge fan of trying new foods. But now that we're eating healthy food, he's been awesome. I cook salmon, perch, shrimp, chicken, brown rice, couscous, artichoke; make salads and wraps; and he's great about eating all of it. He actually loves like 90% of what we eat. The food he has to "force down" includes berries and shrimp. He has an extremely weak sense of smell, which, as we were taught in elementary school, affects your sense of taste. Anything tart or sour tastes like just that - tart and sour. He doesn't get to taste the yummy sweetness of strawberries. He even refuses to eat sour gummy worms! I guess I can't say I blame him.

Probably the weirdest combination on this diet that we've come across was ricotta cheese with strawberries. I was like, "ooh, it'll be like a fruit and yogurt parfait!" I pulled it out of my lunch box and got all ready to eat it but, after one bite, ugh, it was gross! I made myself finish it because I knew it was good for me, but never again. Ricotta cheese in lasagna is great, but it is not a substitute for yogurt. It's not sweet. It's more like cottage cheese in flavor, but the texture is more solid. If you've never had it, picture firm yogurt that you could eat with a fork. I was not a fan at all! Nate actually really liked it though!