new found love ???

I have a new love (or maybe just a rediscovered one).Homemade cooking.

Growing up, I loved having homemade meals and sharing them around the table with family.More often than not they were very simple meals.Nothing fancy. But I didn't care.We were together.Then we moved to the city and that all changed drastically.Slow, leisurely,Sunday dinners at Grandma's were a thing of the past.Everybody was going every which way and there just seemed to be no time to sit together.And meals became rushed.As with everything in the city, life moves fast and it wasn't long before we fell into the trap of eating out all the time.Something that was a rare treat when I was younger.Soon food just became unappealing all together.I got tired of trying to figure out what to eat all the time.At the same time I got sick of eating out too.

I have struggled for years with food and quite often have made more than my fair share of unhealthy choices just because food became boring.I got tired of cooking and I think I only had a list of a few items that I made regularly and we have had the same things over and over every week for the last several years. Its not that I can't cook.I just became really lazy about it.But something has rekindled a flame.I don't know if its because eating out is outrageously expensive or the price of groceries continues to sky rocket but I want to learn and to teach myself to make new things.Jams,jellies,breads,soup.I want to use my vegetable garden more efficiently!Learn to 'can' things.Share it with my kids so they can survive on their own with out eating macaroni and cheese every day of their grown up life.I guess I just long for the simplicity of life when good times were had making and eating meals together.

A couple of months ago I dragged myself (kicking and screaming all the way) into trying to meal plan.I hated the idea.There was no way I could come up with that many ideas for meals.Guess what? I did it! I started by writing down the meals that I normally made.Then I added in a few that I hadn't made in a really long time.Finally I added some new recipes that I wanted to try.Wouldn't you know it I have a list of approximately 35 different meals.So I could go an entire month never having the same thing twice.I have slowly been trying to figure out lunch meals now too.I hate lunch even more than supper.My kids don't eat much in the way of sandwiches (No pb and j in this house) and all of us have gotten tired of eating mac and cheese, even if it is homemade.Lunch has been a VERY slow process.I've gotten 2 weeks worth of meals.That is a start.The two biggest advantages I have found are that I don't have to think about what to make. When I am tired I just look at my little sheet and it tells me what to make.Second , it makes grocery shopping a whole lot easier.I write the menu out,write down the ingredients I need and wha-la! instant grocery list.There by making it less painful to go into the store and it saves me money because I'm not wasting food as much.And a side benefit is that we have hardly eaten out in the last three months!

I don't plan on totally going crazy.I'm still very much a meat and potatoe girl.So becoming vegetarian is not high on my list of priorities.I'm also not going totally off the wall into organic stuff either.Thats not to say I won't use it.Sure I will do it when I can.I just have no plans to go to the outer extremes of organic,green,whatever stuff.My only goal right now is to eat less prepackaged stuff ,eat out less and start to enjoy food again.