I saw Meredith's post today about being in a frugal rut, and I know exactly what she means! I've been in quite a rut the past few months, especially with frugal grocery shopping and cooking. I mentioned my cooking rut before, which I still haven't gotten over. Getting up the motivation for coupon-clipping, price-comparing and self-denying is taking its toll. Grocery shopping isn't fun anymore, and I haven't even been to CVS in weeks!

I used to spend a lot of time coming up with cheap meals, using coupons, and buying the cheapest meats, but that usually left us with meals we didn't want to eat, or worse, hungry. Then we'd run to the nearest Chick-fil-A and splurge. I was satisfied with my grocery expenditure, but the money was still leaking out from other places.

This is where we are at right now. I'm burned out from frugal grocery shopping, and we eat out much more than I care to admit. I really, really want to keep spending less money, but I also want to spend more time making wonderful meals with fewer processed ingredients and more local and organic items. It's a hard line to balance. Right now free-range beef and chicken are way out of my price range. I would love to buy half a cow, but I don't have the space for a deep freezer. I would love to grow my own produce, but having 4 square feet of soil on a balcony will not feed a family of 2, no matter how much I try. Produce seems to be hard to find in my farmer's market (I believe since I get there so late.)

I'm hoping this weekend I can sit down and organize my thoughts to come up with a strategy. I'm planning on making a master list of all the recipes Stuart likes, along with several quick and easy ones I'm eager to try. From this, I'll look over sales flyers for meat that's on sale at the grocery store, then pick out the recipes that seem to fit with the meat selections. I'll by the veggies I need from the farmer's market, and pick up whatever else I need at the grocery store as well. I'm hoping this way will balance my desire to cook well and cook cheaply.

Since this is a holiday weekend for me (no work on Monday!) I have no excuse for my slack-offishness of late.