My first post on this blog tells you more why I'm rationing the calories. As for time and money they both come down to the same thing: we have two kids!
My OH and I decided when we got pregnant with my daughter (now 6) that we'd do what we could to avoid having to pay for childcare and that one of us would give up full time work to look after the kids. So now I'm at work full time during the day, and when I get home from work, OH leaves for his part-time evening job. This means we don't eat our tea together during the week, and the only time we get to spend all together as a family of four is at the weekend, and it's really precious to us.
So we're short on time together, and until OH goes back into full time work when our son (3) starts primary school Sept 2014, we're also conscious of the pennies.
This impacts on how we like to shop, cook and eat.
We don't like to spend hours in the kitchen chopping and prepping - we're happy to take shortcuts when we can, so we keep the freezer stocked with bags of frozen ingredients like sliced peppers, casserole veg and diced onion. Morrisons do a fab range of frozen chopped herbs and spices like garlic, ginger, chilli and parsley. These items work out way cheaper per lb than their fresh counterparts and there is much less wastage, as we've had an awful tendency in the past to let our fresh veg go past it's best before we use it and end up chucking it away; a terrible waste of food and money.
We keep a well stocked spices cupboard, and always have tins of chopped tomatoes and various legumes in, as well as the usual store cupboard basics like rice, pasta, couscous, and more recently quinoa.
So we've always got enough in to cobble together some kind of filling stew, casserole or slow cooker dish. Which brings me on to how we like to cook....
We cook an awful lot of bung-it-all-in-a-pan-and-leave-it-for-a-while-see-what-happens kind of dishes. OH often bungs a load of stuff in the slow cooker in the morning then goes out for the day with the youngest to his various playgroups and whatnot (howcome my 3 year old has a better social life than me?!), so I often get home from work to a house that smells of yum and a slow cooker full of something delicious.
More often than not, it'll make up 4-6 portions. Our children are extremely finicky and rarely eat what we eat (a whooole other story which I might blog about at some point!) so when we cook up a pot of something, it'll usually do us for 2 or 3 days.
We've got a healthy collection of tupperware and takeaway type containers to freeze leftovers in. It's brilliant for me when I get home from work to be able to get a portion of sommat out of the freezer that is yummy, healthy and home cooked.
So one of the reasons I'm writing this blog is to get a collection of these dishes together that are all around the 250-300 calorie mark - perfect tea for a fast day!
Feel free to share your thoughts with me. Have you got any shortcuts that save you time and money in the kitchen?
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