This week's menu plan and recap of last week

This week dinner main dishes will be:

• beef stew
• spinach/bacon/feta quiche
• smoky black bean and lentil soup
• baked rotisserie-flavored turkey tenderloin with mashed potatoes
• ham and beans
• turkey/dried cranberry salad on crackers
• leftovers

Last week a friend of mine gave me some ham and a large ham bone with lots of meat still on it. I used some of the ham last week in the potato au gratin casserole instead of the smoked sausage so I still have the sausage for another time. I will make a big batch of stock out of the ham bone and use it in the smoky lentil soup and also in the ham and bean dinner. She also gave me two frozen pie crusts that she had leftover from Christmas and I will use those to make two quiches this week - one for us and one for her.

Last week I spent $20.48 at the store! This morning I bought:

• a gallon of milk
• 5 lbs. potatoes
• 1 head of celery
• 2 dozen eggs
• a small container of feta cheese

and spent a total of $8.34. I am going to see if I can get through this week with that being my "big" grocery shop for the week! I anticipate that I will have to buy milk twice more before next Monday but other than that I'm going to try to get through the week just on what we have in the house. I have had a few moments in the last week where I felt an impulse to run out and buy fast food and a few other things that I wanted but managed to wait for those urges to pass, and they did. I hope to end the month with my shopping and eating habits better under control. Not that I have a problem with overspending, it's just that I am somewhat of an impulse shopper when I'm already at the store for something else, and I'd almost always rather eat out than in, and it's always possible to do a better job of managing your resources.