Blogging Away Debt Our Journeys to a Debt-Free Life

by Ashley

I wrote at the end of August about starting a MONEY and FOOD diet for the month of September. Has anyone been joining me? I wanted to check in with a progress update now that we’re nearing the end of the month!

Meal Planning & Eating At Home

I give us a solid A for eating at home. I’ve only relied on take out a couple of times and it’s been “healthier” fast food type foods so it’s been relatively inexpensive. For example, I’ve gotten a grilled chicken salad from Chick-Fil-A one week and from Salad-and-Go another week.

I’ve meal planned a variety of healthy foods to have at home. And I took a different approach than normal. Instead of meal planning for a single week at a time, I meal planned for the entire month of September. This allowed me to think strategically about foods I might have leftover one week, and how I could repurpose it later in the week or early the following week, etc.

To give an idea, I made 3 separate meals out of a large pork loin. The first meal was crockpot pork loin with mini potatoes and carrots. For the second meal, I took about half the leftover pork and pulled it, tossed with BBQ sauce, and served with baked beans and broccoli as sides. For the third meal, I took the other half of the pork, pulled it, and pan fried it up with some taco seasoning to make it like carnitas. I served it on flour tortillas for the family (and just on lettuce for me since I’m doing low carb), with a fresh pico-de-gallo chalked full of flavorful veggies.

I love how crockpot meals simplify things at dinner time, and I’m also a big fan of the “cook once, eat twice” motto of basically repurposing food after its been cooked to use in a second meal. It speeds along the prep part of dinner and saves time and money.

Money Diet

My goal was to have total food spending this month be $750 or below and, although we still have a week to go, I just placed my final grocery pick-up order and we’re barely going to squeak by at our goal!

I think having a grocery plan for the month helped dramatically, as well as doing online pickup orders so I wasn’t tempted with point-of-sale purchases. I will say that I did not do a Costco shopping trip this month and, if I had, I definitely would have gone over. Even though we use Costco mostly for paper products (e.g., paper towels, toilet paper, paper plates), I still put this in our “grocery” budget. I’m happy with the “win” of meeting our goal……but also fully acknowledge that I certainly would NOT have, had I done our typically monthly Costco trip. It’s progress, but still more room to improve, too.

Recipes

I want to share a couple of fun recipes I used this month, just in case anyone else is looking for new meal ideas.

• Blueberry Sweet Potato Breakfast Meatballs

  These are a new favorite! I got the recipe from a friend and had initially given it major side-eye. It’s a lot of flavors together and sounds odd. But I’m here to tell you – it comes together beautifully and is delicious! I’ve already made the recipe twice! I make a big batch, then freeze so I can pull out just a couple balls at a time to re-heat for breakfast.

• Hawaiian Shrimp Taco Bowls

  These are amazing! It’s nice to have something different (we otherwise eat a lot of chicken and pork), and the homemade cilantro lime crema is the star of the show! I eat mine with cauliflower rice, while the rest of the family eats jasmine rice. I won’t lie the cauliflower rice is not as good. But it’s a nice low-carb substitution.

• Ginger Steak Salad

  This is technically not Whole 30 due to the sugar in the marinade and salad dressing. But this is where I say I’m doing Whole 30-ish because this is still much healthier than what I might otherwise eat (like fried chicken or pizza! Ha!), so I call it a win! In fact, we’ve had a LOT of salads this month. Feels good to get in the fresh veggies. And a homemade dressing is always better than store-bought, in my opinion.

Has anyone else followed along this month with a food and money diet? How did you do? Have any favorite Whole 30 (or Whole 30-ish) recipes you want to share? Drop them in the comments!

Ashley

Hi, I’m Ashley! Arizonan on paper, Texan at heart. Lover of running, blogging, and all things cheeeeese. Freshly 40, married mother of two, working in academia. Trying to finally (finally!) pay off that ridiculous 6-digit student loan debt!