For the entire month of September I set a goal to cook as much from scratch as possible. I set another goal to cut out four hundred dollars from our grocery budget. That was a very lofty goal. When I set my mind to do something I go all in. It’s a struggle, I have an all or nothing mindset.
I’ll try not to bore you with a lot of back story, but I wanted to share with you my reason for jumping right into cooking from scratch for a month.
Over the past few years, especially, it’s felt like the quality of what I buy in the store has gotten really bad. Then on top of that add inflation and shrinkflation and things seem to just be spiraling out of control.
There was a time, in my younger days, that I thought eating healthy unprocessed foods and cooking from scratch was too pricey and too difficult. Right after I got married way back in 2005, I remember standing in an aisle at Aldi thinking “what am I supposed to do with this food?”
At that time Aldi didn’t have near the easy already made package foods like they do now. I didn’t shop there for awhile because in my head it seemed like I had to be able to cook from scratch to buy their food. I wasn’t taught how to cook from scratch and learning just seemed too overwhelming. I didn’t know where to start. I shopped at Walmart every week buying easy boxed meals, processed snacks, tons of chips and the list goes on.
Over the past year, I have been dipping my toes in cooking from scratch. I have found confidence in making bread, I love working with dough now. I started making our cookies (these are THE BEST chocolate chip cookies) and haven’t bought packaged ones in a long time. My point is that I have been slowly building my confidence and really noticing how bad things are getting with food, so I just decided to do a whole month of cooking from scratch to see if I really could.
And here are a few things I have learned along the way, as well as some mistakes.
Mistake number one: Having an all or nothing mindset.
That’s usually my first mistake with any goal I tackle. I can’t help it, it’s just who I am. Knowing that though, I try to give myself plenty of grace on the back side of any project. Here’s a tip for you, always start small and simple. I know that now.
Mistake number two: Not focusing on one goal.
I squeezed in two goals when I should have just focused on one. Switching to cooking from scratch was a big undertaking. I should have stopped there and focused on that. Instead, I decided to add in another goal to save us hundreds of dollars in our grocery budget. Not just one or two hundred, nope, for some reason I landed on four hundred dollars. I have no reason for this other than it looked good on paper.
Obviously, that was a mistake in itself. I was in a constant state of struggle trying to stock up our pantry to make meals that would keep us full and watching every penny trying not to buy too much protein. Protein in expensive.
Mistake number three: Underestimating how much we eat.
I was shocked by the amount of certain ingredients that I used. For example, flour. I have been making my own bread for a while now. You can find my two favorite bread recipes here and here. I was making sandwich bread only on a “when I felt like it” bases. If we didn’t have bread, we just did without.
I knew that I would have to step up my bread making game if I was going to get us through the month. Again, my focus is on filling us up while spending as little as possible, so I knew carbs would be my best friend.
I made sandwich bread, hamburger buns, subway sandwich bread, plus cookies and pop tarts. I started the month with ten pounds of flour thinking that would be enough, nope, I used twenty-five pounds of flour. I could not believe it.
Mistake number four: Not planning enough.
This should have come naturally to me. I love planning and organizing. I did plan. I grabbed my planner and wrote down all the meals and listed what I needed for the month and felt pretty good about it. The issue was that I didn’t plan enough for the entire month. Since I didn’t plan enough, I also didn’t buy enough which left me struggling the last week or so o the month. I ended up overspending because I lacked a good plan.
Here’s the difference between September and October. I feel really good about the month of October.
The other side of this lack of planning coin is that I didn’t do a great job at batch cooking or making ahead and freezing. My plan for October is to make as much bread as I think we need (example two loaves of sandwich bread a week) and freeze that so I can pull it out as needed.
I also plan to do more cooking ahead for the month of October. The easiest way to do this is to double up the recipe of a meal you are cooking for dinner and freeze the leftovers, or you can cook another meal while making dinner and freeze that bonus meal. This will save you time in the kitchen. A must have for a full time working mom.
I did cook ahead some during the month of September but not enough.
Key takeaways:
Give yourself lots of grace and keep trying.
Keep meals simple. I mean very simple. Here’s a picture of a few of our dinners. At first I felt bad that this is all I made but these wholesome meal were very filling and satisfying. That’s what I noticed the most. We were actually getting full on less.
Make extra as often as you can. If you are cooking dinner, either double what you are cooking to freeze the extra or making something entirely different to also freeze for later. I did this a lot and it really helped.
Be sure to celebrate the small victories.
Do your research. I watched a lot of You tube videos and got tons of inspiration.
I did not buy one, not a single package processed snack item the entire month. That’s huge.
In fact, on a shopping trip the last week of the month Andrew and I walked past the Little Debbie Nutty Bars.
At this point in the month, I was tired and running on empty and little ingredients left to whip up a good protein on the go breakfast. In my desperation state, I asked Andrew if he wanted to buy a pack of those Nutty Bars to get him by for a breakfast snack.
He and I don’t do breakfast well and Nutty Bars were a typical staple before I decided to make this life changing dietary move. Hey, they do have peanut butter in them after all. Anyway, he went for them and then stopped and said “no, I don’t think so”. This might sound silly, but to me it was his way of saying that he supported this new change I was making. Honestly, that gave me the push I needed to finish the month out.
At the end of the month, I asked Andrew what he liked the most about the foods I made for the month, and what he liked the least.
His favorite things were fresh bread (nothing beats fresh bread and butter, it disappears quickly) and the snacks I had. Our snacks were very simple. Cookies; like oatmeal, no bake and chocolate chip. We also had pretzels and crackers and fresh fruit.
He only had one con, which was we needed more protein. With that being said, I have stocked up on protein for the month of October!
I hope this post inspires you to give cooking from scratch a try. Whether it’s a whole month challenge or just here and there where you can fit it in.