Grocery money and recipes...

A post on a military wives' group online got me thinking. Apparently DH and I do a great job of spending money wisely on food. I thought we did okay, but that we could be doing a lot better. After multiple posts the past few weeks on grocery budgets, I feel better about our food costs. We went to the commissary Saturday and spent $112.42 on food. A couple of items will not be completely used up this menu, or I bought it for next menu cause I had coupons that were about to expire. If I only bought exactly what we had to have, it would have been $10 cheaper. 

Anyways, some recipes...

Stove Top Chicken - found this in my last Southern Living magazine. Made for some very yummy chicken and some very flavorful broth! I changed the recipe they gave slightly - cause a couple of parts didn't make any sense at all. Basically I washed the chicken (4.5 lbs) and dug out the icky parts. I rubbed the chicken with a mixture of salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Heated up a dutch oven. Put the chicken in breast side down with 1/4 cup blush wine (white is used, but I didn't have any of that already open) and 1/4 cup water. Brought to a boil, then covered. Cooked for one full hour (till 180*). YUMMY. I saved the broth to use for later. While I do occasionally buy carton and canned broth, I'll use my own if I have it. Now what they said to do was drop butter in the dutch oven while heating, brown the breast side of the chicken for 5 minutes. Then flip and add the wine and water mixture. Well, that's just stupid cause as soon as you put the lid on, condensation happens and the browned part just creates a brown mush skin. After all, I don't care about the skin - I care about the yummy meat! The meat was very good, and once I took all the meat off we had enough chicken to make two meals. :D

Meatloaf

Tonight we had MIL spaghetti. Remember awhile back when DH decided that he was going to cook his mother's spaghetti sauce? Well, we ate half of it for a dinner that night. I froze the other half and we had it tonight. There's still some leftover too - that'll become DHs lunch later in the week. 

I can't find one of the items that I need to make the cheesy chicken and potatoes, so I think I'm just going to invent something for that instead. lol. Yep, invent something with what I do have for that meal. Who knows what we'll end up with, but I'm sure it'll be edible!

I've never attempted a Jambalaya before. I've never had true NO style Jambalaya before either. But the 14th edition of BH&G's Cookbook has a recipe, and I'm going to try it! It has sausage and shrimp and rice....and well,  I love sausage, shrimp, and rice. I'll post it after I try it and type it up.