Grocery Shopping Used to drive me insane.
I never wanted to go grocery shopping as an adult. Not only am I not the cook of the home (my husband is), I also was not privy to the stressful swarms of people that accompany each Sunday at the food store.
Don’t ask me why, but being in crowded places in small spaces can set me off. Not to a “rocking back and forth in a corner” level of crazy but I do feel very irritable and can become quite rude to strangers. Grocery-shopping forms part of every middle-class American lifestyle. Without grocery shopping, there would be no homemade dinners.
However, in 2019 world with working young adults who are often overworked, there’s no time for making dinner “from scratch.” This is why meal planning is KEY to successful #adulting in 2019. Not only does it make meal time sooo much easier, but also it keeps you on a certain budget ensuring bill-paying and saving are constant and drama-free.
Cooking is part of the meal planning process and a VERY important life skill when it comes to saving money with meals at home.
*Side-note: if you can’t cook, just live with someone who can! LOL.
Step 1 in Meal Planning is: Finding a grocery store you enjoy! Don’t make meal planning such a chore. Even though it is.
We grocery-shop every week so- why not make it not just bearable, but fun?!
After testing out different grocery stores, we finally found a place that we both enjoyed. Thanks to its free samples, aesthetically pleasing ambiance, and in-store breakfast with cappuccinos- I finally enjoyed buying groceries every Sunday.
I could walk around sipping the foam off my coffee while stopping to try say, ranch cucumber bites, and feel absolutely fabulous.
My husband does all the legwork in the kitchen. He plans our meals a couple of days ahead and purchases groceries based on his list.
He knows exactly which vegetables are what and what protein amount we are supposed to have for our “macros” per day- whatever that means.
I honestly can’t tell a cucumber from a zucchini (have you seen how SIMILAR they are?!)- when I tried to make cucumber-infused water I almost made zucchini infused water (yuck) and got myself into quite a PICKLE- ha. Ha. Get it?
It’s weird that I don’t remember my parents EVER planning a list of food for the week and I think that’s where my parents, especially my mom, wasted a LOT of precious time every day.
A lot of times my mother came home from a tough day doing real estate and hitting the gym with no idea what to cook for dinner in under fifteen minutes- we ended up eating grilled chicken and rice a lot.
The lack of planning took its toll during stressful times where my mother simply gave up and ordered Chinese for the night.
Not only is ordering food not the healthiest of options, it is also another cost you have to include in your adult budget. $15 of takeout every night can really start to add up. At the end of the month you’re looking at about $420!! This is why cooking (or living with someone who cooks *ahem*) is the ONLY way to go in adulthood.
Hey, it doesn’t have to be difficult. My husband cooks six meals in one day. Yes, he is amazing, but there’s also a method to the madness.
He mostly pairs proteins with rice or quinoa, which are both so easy to make with a rice cooker. Just follow the instructions on the box (typically two cups of water per one cup of rice or quinoa) and push a button. Heck, even I have done it!
So there you go, that’s most of your meals for the week.
Now, for the hard part. Ideally your meal would have both proteins and veggies plus a starch (rice) in the proportions that are best for your body’s health. But definitely make sure you’re getting adequate protein. Proteins are essential in keeping you full and providing useful nutrients for your body.
The protein doesn’t have to be meat, by the way. I’m not promoting a specific diet here because I’m an omnivore, but if you’re vegan/vegetarian you have plenty of protein options nowadays anyway.
However, we are omnivores like I said.
My husband typically purchases meats on sale, or meats at a lower price which means we do not eat steak very often. He purchases a combination of: chicken breasts, lean pork, and lean ground beef. Ground beef is an extremely quick and easy protein to prepare! And if you purchase lean ground beef it has about 5% fat so it’s really not unhealthy like eating a plate “Hamburger Helper” or something.
He also cooks “extra firm” tofu with a lot of our meals because we like to have a vegetarian option once or twice a week, and tofu is super cheap too.
Typically, he’ll marinate the chicken in a Ziploc bag for a few hours while he’s prepping for other meals or doing other house chores, which is super handy and I think he is a genius for it! He literally adds a sauce that he makes into a Ziploc bag and then throws in the chicken for later. The chicken grabs so much flavor, it’s actually pretty tasty, and I typically hate grilled chicken. It’s amazing that with just a little planning ahead, our meals taste soooooooo much better than most things I ate growing up (sorry Mom! No offense!).
Either way, step 2 is definitely: MEAL PLANNING. Think about the meals that you want to plan ahead (such as lunch and dinner) and brainstorm what meals are part of your “macros” or simply help you feel full and satisfied.
We typically don’t plan breakfast because that’s usually just a piece of toast (yes, #guilty of using avocado on it and calling it “avocado toast” like every other millennial).
However, we do plan our snacks.
Snacks are important!
Without snacks we would only eat three times a day people! I would DIE of pure, uninhibited STARVATION in between meals.
After years of trying many, many “healthy” snacks: from spaghetti squash, to broccoli, protein shakes, etc… I finally found the snacks that keep me full and satisfy my cravings. I tend to crave very salty, “potato chip”- like snacks. You have to find the snacks that work for you. I didn’t like spaghetti squash eventually because of the texture. Protein shakes made me sick. One day I might go back to broccoli but for now these are the main, golden three snacks:
Asparagus, baby carrots with hummus, and trail mix!
Yup!
That’s my top three.
Even though I’m no cook, my husband has taught me how to prepare my healthy snacks in ways that even I CAN’T mess up. One of them involves an oven-yes. If you’re not familiar with an oven you might want to find out from someone else in the household how to use the oven. We’ll be needing that preheat button and possibly the timer too. But it’s very simple when you actually learn it.
So, without further ado, the only snack I actually have to “cook” are the asparagus whose recipe I will now bestow upon you, you’re welcome:
Now, you need a sheet pan for this method so the asparagus can cook evenly. You’ll also need aluminum foil if you don’t want to make a mess. Also a sink, knife and cutting board. And the ingredients are:
Olive Oil
Black pepper
Garlic Powder
Red Pepper Flakes
Salt
First, you preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. If you’re an adult who’s never done this before, you might want to get an adult who is an “adultier” adult, per se.
Now, rinse the asparagus thoroughly making sure each one has been washed.
Then, you want to grab all the asparagus as if in a pile and use a sharp knife to cut the ends of the asparagus. The ends look like the end of sticks, with no leaves.
If you’re not sure where to cut, grab a single asparagus by its ends, and slowly bend it in half until it snaps. The length of the small bottom part is how much you should cut off.
Once the ends are all cut, you want to place the aluminum foil on the sheet pan and lay the asparagus spears one by one on the pan so they have plenty of room in a single layer. They can touch if you don’t have enough space, but they should not be one on top of another.
Use the olive oil first so that the asparagus can hold on to the spices better. Coat the asparagus in olive oil on the top side and then roll them over and over until they each have some oil. Lay them out again in an orderly manner without being on top of each other.
Throw in two pinches of salt on the asparagus, a lot of garlic powder, and black pepper. The red pepper flakes you want to be careful with and spread at your own preferred “spicyness” levels. Now that the top part is all covered in spices, repeat the step where you roll them all over and over until both asparagus sides are covered in spices.
Finally, grab the pan and throw it in the oven once it’s at 400 degrees.
That’s it!
They will take about 25 minutes to be ready, depending on how crispy you like them (Hint: the crispier, the more they taste like potato chips – at least to me).
Be sure to check the oven every ten minutes to see how they’re cooking. Every oven is different so you don’t want to set them & forget them because you might not like the results.
That asparagus is one of my secret healthy snacks! Not only do they satisfy my salt cravings, but they are also dark green vegetables which we are all supposed to be eating 5-9 servings per day!
If you would like to see a visual representation of what I just described to clarify any steps you might not yet fully grasp, check out my video about it below! PS: I typically use the thing asparagus because they grab more of the flavor, but in the video I used the thick ones.
Meal planning makes eating healthy easy- and saving money stress-free! If we can do it, you can do it too. Trust me.