Tonight we had beanie weenies and spinach salad as a dinner.
To make beanie weenies you cut up:
2-3 hotdogs (and stir together in a pot with)
1 family sized can of Bush's baked beans
Salad was pre-washed spinach (from Costco), a cut up tomato and thousand island dressing
Ironically the first day I decide to write it the blog is a day I felt particularly unmotivated to cook. But I thought why not blog about this? When I first started trying to feed our family Gluten Free feeling unmotivated to cook was something I had to just get over. It was not much of an option. I had already fed my kids cereal that was $6/box for breakfast, nuggets that were $8/box for lunch, and for dinner I needed to cook because I did not have many other options. But we have been gluten and dairy free for almost a year. I am finally at a place where I can take nights off of "real" cooking.
Yesterday I went to a gluten free expo in Dallas and it was expensive (like everything gluten free) but fun. It turned out to be well worth the money in "free" goodies. I have half a year of lunch bag goodies to send my son to school with! Also he had a great time getting to sample all the treats and I loved not having to stress about hidden gluten.
The expo reminded me of when we first went allergen free. There were a lot of items there that I tried and turns out we did not like. Many of them very expensive and hard to consume.There were also many new and tasty items as well as some that have become tasty staples in our pantry. I will say the best part was just getting to try a lot of things without buying them. When we first changed our diet the hardest part was trying very expensive food just to find our kids did not like it. We spent over 4 times our normal grocery budget the first month. We have managed to get it down quite a bit since (by cooking mostly from scratch), but we still struggle to keep it at twice what it was before we made the switch. Also cooking most meals from scratch was incredibly hard when we first started since a lot of the recipes turned out to taste terrible. Now a year later we have our favorite recipes that the parents and kids love. It is much easier and honestly not too big of a deal now that we have been doing it a year. The nights when no one feels like cooking we have a small list of options which are not the most delicious but work for a meal on a long day. Also on nights we do cook we have found many recipes we all like that are not too time consuming. We try to do some major cooking about one day a week such as baking, making waffles or frying and we try to do enough for putting extra in the freezer. All in all our time in the kitchen has decreased dramatically since first changing our families diet, and our spending has also gone down by over $1000/month (Which is really great since I have quit "working"-for income, and we have had a baby in that time).
Please take a moment to answer in the comments (and add any comments on the post of course!)
What do you do for dinner when you do not want to cook?
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