New Direction for a New Life

In the five years since I set out traveling, I've gotten some ideas on what I want to work on, added some amazing people to my family, and am happy to be back in the city I left to start my travels.  

With a new small person to feed, and a tight budget while I attempt to finish a thesis while running herd on a one year old (complete failure so far, but I have grand hopes for tomorrow . . . ), the most useful thing for me is to keep track of how we spend our food money.  Why?

• Unlike most Americans, we have a food budget problem.  Almost 25% of our disposable income goes to eating.  And paper towels.  But since we buy paper towels about once a month, I think most of it goes to the trifecta of Safeway-Whole Foods-Farmers Market.  Utterly ridiculous, and an expense we might have to think about cutting back on.  In an effort to at least justify the expense with good food and not letting anything rot, I need to start planning out the meals for the week based on our haul from the farmers market/what's looking good at the grocery store that week.
• This article http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/dining/planning-your-menu-with-some-help.html?src=dayp implies that there's some un-met demand for menu planning.  While I love a good recipe blog, I think the day to day minutae of how to keep everyone fed for a week is the flip side of recipes, that often gets very short shrift.  Home economics training, anyone?
• My partner has expressed some concerns about how much time we spend cooking.  We need an index of the recipes we find fast and tasty.  Hopefully, this blog can become that searchable database.

I plan to post the weeks (rough) menu on Sunday, along with what we've spent at the markets/stores.  Then, I'll update as the week goes on to reflect reality, making notes about what ingredients were good/bad, which recipes are worth doing again, any additional things we needed to buy, and what we actually ate!

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