Cooking makes it better

COPE

How do I cope when things get a little rockier than I expect? I get busier than usual. Today, I am cooking. Today, I am making the prescheduled menu items. At the time, I didn’t know I would need it. The Lord always knows what we need when we need it. 
I picked these items for today because we haven’t had them in awhile, they make great freezer meals, the kids love them, and the kids had the Monday off school with no evening activities so I had some extra time to make and prep certain meals. 

That was the plan for the week. 

I spent way too much on groceries for the week on Saturday. Granted I did get 8 days of menus plus left overs as well as meals to put in the freezer, however, my weekly budget is only $200 and I was nearly double that – again for the third time in as many months. I really do need to focus on getting the grocery budget back under control again. 

Of course, the plan fell apart on Sunday morning when I spent the entire day with my sister, Jennifer. It needed to be done. You can’t will away death. You can’t will away cancer. You can’t will away grief. Sometimes it is just best to not be alone. 

Fortunately, it was only the Chicken Fried Rice that was screwed up and missed from the menu plan for the week. Nothing major. We can do it later in the week in place of something else if necessary. Today, however, we had time…the kids had no school and I did not have to worry about the evening responsibilities. 

 

Dinner tonight for the Sansom house is homemade lasagna. The kids love lasagna. Ben loves my lasagna. I love…

 

I love that it makes a lot of lasagna when I make it. I clearly cannot eat my own lasagna when I make it because it is laced with tomatoes and that is a big no-no for me. That does not even begin to cover the amount of pork and pork by-products that are found in this lasagna. Unfortunately, I make a very good lasagna that I just cannot eat. 

This afternoon, I made one for dinner and 4 additional ones for the freezer. That makes me feel marginally better about the amount that I spent on Saturday. Marginally. I mean, I am putting 4 dinners into the freezer so that money will be “not” spent at some point in the future. In addition to these, I put the Italian Sausage links for Spaghetti Dinner night in the freezer. I bought a large package of Italian Sausage on Saturday because that was all they had but I was not going to cry over having extra sausage links. The boys love Spaghetti night. This way we already have the links ready to go when they want to do it. 

What I haven’t made is the Alfredo Lasagna that was on the menu for tonight. Making the Alfredo sauce is a bit more work and right now I am waiting on utensils to go through the dish washer. I think I will make that in the morning and I will just eat something simple tonight myself. 

I am flexible.