Food Makeover

So our house is having a food makeover.  Dax has always ate great... we've made sure of that. But over the past several months Daniel and I have become major slackers (and I think that's putting it nicely!) I credit it to us getting use to my new work routine and Daniel's constantly changing schedule (thank you third year of medschool). With all excuses aside, we def. needed to start making some better choices.... and not only with our food, but with our money too. This fall is going to bring some major changes for us, one of which will be residency interviewing. If you're new to the medschool process, Daniel will probably apply to like 30 residency programs across the US (like literally across... one being Boston) and will hopefully do interviews at like ten of those. Needless to say that between applications, flights, hotels, rental cars, etc, this process gets really pricey, really quick.  Therefore, we really need to start getting a little smarter with our money... and that includes making a set budget for food and sticking to it. Before we've never really had a set food budget. We just went shopping and bought what we wanted.  Well my super awesome BFF post this wonderful blog post about their budget so we decided to try it out as well! 

Her idea (that we're also doing) is to budget $100 a week for groceries for us. Each weekend we go to the farmers and buy whatever veggies catch our eye. Where we live there aren't any huge farmers markets around... but there are a few different small ones that we have checked out (so we may drive around to each of them and get whatever we're wanting at each one). This is what we came away with on our very first trip to the farmers market..

Doesn't it look delish!? All of it was absolutely wonderful. Porter Peaches are by far some of the best peaches you'll ever have and the local honey was to die for. All of it tasted (and looked, for sure) ten times better than buying it at your regular grocery store where it has travel hundreds of miles before you can purchase it. I'll give you some of the recipes we tried out in another post...

Anyways, back to the plan! After going to the farmers market, we went home and made our dinner plans for the week. We decided what we would make each night for dinner using the veggies we got at the farmers market, and from there made a list of additional things we needed to get at the store. It was super exciting when our "store" list was so small. It felt good knowing that we would be eating mostly local, fresh veggies instead of processed things.

Now money wise we decided to get $100 cash out for our first trip to the farmers market. We used cash to make our purchases there, and at Target (where we do the rest of our grocery shopping) we use our Target Red Card (which if you're an avid Target shopper I highly suggest! It's pretty much a debit card that gets you 5% off your total purchase each time you use it... no strings attached!) Any cash that we had left over we put into a cookie jar that we have in our house and saved it for the next weeks trip to the farmers market or for an "eating out" fund. I'm not going to lie... there was one day last week where we were both exhausted, it was late, and making dinner just didn't sound appealing.... so we busted out our extra money in our food budget (I believe we had like $15 left last week) and got a pizza from pizza hut. Only using that cash for eating out keeps us from going over our $100 a week food budget.  We are also keeping a really detailed list of all the money we spend on food in the month of June so that we have a better idea of where our money is going to (this includes everything, from groceries to a drink at starbucks... which I had to add this morning). Now the first week we over bought at the farmers market because we forgot to take into account that there are some nights when Daniel won't be home for dinner because of his schedule. But this week before heading out to do our shopping we figured out how many meals we would be needing so we could keep that in mind when shopping.

Our new food budget has worked out awesome so far. We haven't gone over budget yet (granted we've only been doing it for two weeks), we're eating way better than before, and we're being held accountable for what we're eating/spending on food.  If you have any other ideas (on food or just budgeting in general) let us know!! We would love to hear them!