Tired

Today has been a very nice, but long day.

I didn't get to sleep until about 4:30 last night, but managed to get up around 10 and make it out to the farmer's market around 11.

Today's find were:
hydroponic tomatoes - $5
a huge English cucumber - $4
some goat cheese with chimchurri mixed in - $4
a dozen eggs - $3.50
So, that was what? $16.50, not too bad, considering I paid $4 for one cucumber, but it was delicious, and the fluff-rat agrees. Really, the eggs are the main thing I really want to be able to purchase every week there. There is a lot of produce there, but it's mainly onions (holy cow there are a lot of people selling onions), still a lot of "winter" type greens, and now our strawberry season is over :( It hasn't even started for most of the country, and ours is over and gone for another year.

Then we went to Costco. Wow. I love that place. I'm working towards more local food, etc, but I would have a hard time giving up my Costco membership.
This is what we got today:
12 lbs of baking soda (for making cleaning supplies)
2 gallons of white vinegar (for making cleaning supplies)
2 lbs of shelled pecan halves
1qt 1/2 & 1/2
1qt heavy cream
3 half gallons organic soymilk
1lb baby portabellas
1lb organic baby spinach
1lb organic spring greens
6lb organic tofu
6lb pears
10 lbs onions
2.2lbs Ruta Maya Organic coffee beans
2 loaves sourdough (they were still warm and wonderful with the goat cheese)
2lb strawberries
4.5lbs organic raisin bran cereal
1 pair jeans for Chris
30oz Kalamata Olive dip
12 pack 100% recycled papertowels
2lb cashew granola-ish type of stuff (best snack food ever)

And you know what the total was? With tax it was $131.24.
You just can't beat that.

Love me some Costco, really I do.
I read a lot of blogs from serious couponers and CVSers and comparatively this may seem like a lot, but overall this works much better for us because this is what we eat. I rarely ever see anything with a coupon and on sale that I would use.

I have made it through my first week of meal planning and I think it went very well. I need to work on this coming week's meal plan. I have tomorrow night worked out, since we ended up putting off making dinner after we both filled up on green smoothies I made.
Then we went out for tea with friends, and later when we got hungry split a wonderful masala dosai from a veggie Indian place. When we came home I just cut up the humongous cucumber and several tomatoes for us and we each had large plates of that for "dinner".

So, tomorrow night, I will be making chicken with mushroom cream sauce, using the baby portabellas. I found the recipe at Simply Recipes and I am always pleased with her recipes. They always come out great when I try them. I plan to serve the chicken and sauce on a bed of wilted spinach with sourdough on the side instead of noodles or rice. I'm also using boneless skinless chicken breast, too. I am not sure how that will work. I will be able to cut the cooking time down to about 20 minutes, but it won't have the same ability to brown. Meh, I am sure it will still be very good.

If I am making anything involves meat, 9 times out of 10 it will be using boneless skinless chicken breast. My husband has a serious aversion to meat with bones in it :) He's not picky about much of anything, and that's one of his few weird issues with food. His mother and step father would take him to dinner and my husband would sit alone at his own table in the Thai restaurants as a child with his plain rice and soy sauce, covering his eyes so as not to see them picking the meat off of their whole fried fish and such. Heh. Of course, my husband being born in Singapore and living in the Phillipines as a very young child loved curry and other regional foods from the area. Really, he's not a picky eater.

I do cook whole chicken or cut up chicken on occasion, I just debone it for him. I don't mind at all, I find it endearing.

I have had a long day, and am looking forward into crawling into bed soon. I think I will end up eating a small bowl of cereal before bed, though. The baby sure does like cereal before bed!