Waste Not.....Want Not..

Sounds simple and straight forward, a good principle to live by. I have always thought I was pretty good at living by this principle as well. But today, I am beginning to realize that maybe I am wrong.
One of the things we attempting to do in the month of October is live out of our freezor/pantry with as little shopping as possible. Matt and I have been doing really well getting together a menu on Sunday so that we don't need to rush out and eat somewhere. In reality it is actually working. We have begun to empty out the meat from the freezers in the house and even need to bring up some items from the big freezer in the next week. We are also beginning to see a difference in our pantry as well. Let me be clear, in no way, shape or fashion are we running out of food. Instead we are beginning to run out of our favorite snacks and foods. For example, currently we have one Poptart and only have 7 boxes of cereal. The strange thing is that I noticed this afternoon that my first instinct was to start a grocery list and plan a trip. Then I remembered wait this is a good thing. Next Matt mentioned that we will soon need more cereal. Finally, Haley is looking for something to snack on and say Mom you need to buy more Poptarts. So now I am thinking, maybe it is not always simple to waste not want not.

It is simple to buy food on sale or purchase in bulk, plant a garden and freeze thinking "I don't want to waste this so I will save it for later." We, as a family, are discovering that it is not as simple to use what we have on hand, things we have saved for another day instead of rushing out to get our favorite foods.

Since I want to end this on a positive note because I really thing this is a good thing for us and it will help us save at least 1/2 if not 3/4 of our grocery budget this month for other things. I am going to mention 3 meals this week that have used items that are on hand. First, I made a chicken casserole on Sunday from the cooked chicken we put away last week, rice that had been cooked for other meals and some cheese. Second on Wednesday, we had hot dogs and used left-over manwich meat with a dash of chili pepper to top. Finally, today we had Taco Rice and left-over chicken casserole for dinner.