30 Days of Home Cooking (Week 1)

Hello friends.

 Every month Jeffery and I sit together at the computer and put together our budget for the upcoming month and look at the spending from the previous. While we were renovating the kitchen, we racked up an absurd amount of money in restaurant spending. Jeffery suggested we challenge ourselves to not do any eating out for the month, no convenient fast food, only home cooked meals.

We are allowing ourselves a few exceptions:

• The night before the counter tops are installed so we can uninstall the dishwasher and not have dirty dishes laying around.
• My father is coming to visit and we're going to leave the boys with him to go have a late anniversary dinner somewhere we would never take our children. 
• Jeffery would also be traveling to pick my Dad up during dinner time, so he would be having fast food that night.

I'm going to post weekly updates on what we made for food and if we were tempted to eat out somewhere. I'll let you know if we fail, and I'll let you know if we end up saving any money at the end of this month.

I'm only going to be sharing dinners with you because, aside from weekends, it's the only meal we share. Lunches are sometimes leftovers, and Calvin asks for pancakes or french toast every morning so there would be a lot of repeats. I'm hoping that sharing this with you will not only encourage you to cook at home more often, but also give you dinner ideas for those days you don't know what to make. Recipes I use and can stand behind I'll share here on the blog, but for those I don't, you'll have to find your own if you want to make it.

For the first night in our 30 day challenge I made a Thai Curry for the first time ever. It looks beautiful, and it smells beautiful, but something was definitely lacking in the spice department. I also don't think it was quite sweet enough. I do think the recipe was a good foundation to build upon, so I'm going to work on it and when I'm finally happy with it, I'll share it here. For now, enjoy the photos and imagine the whole house smelt like curry paste.

On day number two I made a pizza upon Calvin's request. I like to make artisan pizzas at home; with thin crust that is crispy on the bottom. This pizza was delicious. 

Here's Calvin helping by stealing handfuls of mozzarella off the top.

The pizza is topped with a mozzarella/parmesan cheese blend, chopped tomato tossed with olive oil, and feta cheese crumbles. The recipe for this pizza can be found here.

To accompany the pizza I made a small salad, with radishes out of our garden, and chopped up tomato and feta to go with the pizza toppings.

The third night was supposed to be our first exemption, but instead we decided to make some simple taco salads. We only used a single pan and then used paper plates for the rest. I didn't take any nice shots of this meal, it's just your typical taco salad. Jeffery cooked the meat up while I chopped the veggies, as we usually do when we make tacos.

On the 4th day I decided to make a pasta dish I've only ever heard about and never actually eaten, Spaghetti Carbonara. The recipe I used called for pecorino romano, a cheese I'd never tasted before. It's slightly more sharp in flavor to parmesan in my opinion, and I expected quite a bit more of the cheese flavor to shine through in this dish. Perhaps it was the recipe, or perhaps this is how the dish should taste. The thick cut bacon I bought was incredible though; from the moment it hit my hot skillet I knew it was going to be delicious. It was good enough to eat for lunch the next day, but I'd like to experiment with it a bit more before I share a recipe for this.

Day 5. Jeffery grilled burgers and hotdogs for us. I made a butter feta cheese sauce and sauteed some onions and mushrooms for the top of our burgers. Growing up I wasn't a huge fan of burgers, Jeffery is the one who taught me to love burgers. 

It's all about the toppings my friends.

 I'll probably never like a hamburger on top of a bun with a little bit of ketchup on it. I'll also probably never like meatloaf or meatballs that much either. We did thicker patties than usual because we used up some left over ground sirloin for this burger and Jeffery didn't want it to dry out. He's seriously a fantastic burger maker.

Night 6 was Jeffery's travelling night and so there won't be any pictures here of that. He grabbed some Chick-fil-a and the boys and I had some Tyson Panko Chicken Nuggets.

The last night of our first week I made us a shepherd's pie. There's no real recipe for this that I can share with you. My aunt Beth is the one who shared with me the best tips for shepherd's pie. To keep your ground beef layer moist, I stir in some cream of mushroom soup. For added flavor I do half ground beef, and half Italian sausage. This night I was too lazy to pull my mixer out of its spot, but typically I would whip my mashed potatoes after they were done cooking, because I like a nice fluffy potato layer. No one took a photo of this dinner so I'll insert one of my previous shepherd's pies. I haven't made one of these in a long time.

Jeffery and I were sitting down for lunch the other day and I told him that something I need to work on is trying out new flavor combinations and not being afraid to say, "Well this doesn't work."
It's just food. No one will die if I make something that doesn't taste very good. So I hope this encourages you to try something new too.

Until next week.
-Em