Comfort Food on a Rare Cold Weekend

Thanks all for your comments – I’m so impressed you read my posts on Christmas, given how much came at you so quickly. I love my small but committed band of readers – ya’ll are great, and it always buoys me to see comments here. (I still read a lot of blogs and never comment, so I’m bad at commenting myself and am not trying to shame any lurkers into commenting – just appreciating those of you who do drop me a line once in a while!)

It is, lo and behold, freezing down here in the swamplands for once. I left work early to log in from home and get here safe, before the supposed Deathly Wall of Sleet comes marching towards us. Southerners are pretty bad at driving in any type of winter weather. All the partners were out anyway, so I took my prerogative to get home, get out of my suit and into my comfies and slippers, and get some chicken fajita soup started in my crockpot (I already cooked it, now I’m just -reheating).

This month’s Southern Living has some really great comfort food recipes – every single one sounds do-able, tasty, and a little different from the norm. As we were driving home from our trip last week, I made up a list of foods I wanted to prepare and make for the week – a homemade macaroni and cheese, a meatloaf, a chicken soup, pork chops and veg, etc. When we got home, our January Southern Living was waiting for us, and every single one of my meal plan choices was there, in that edition. I am clearly its target audience, and it clearly has my number. I suppose you could run American + white middle class + Southern + January + dinners into a machine and the algorithm would spit out a limited number of options, so it wasn’t so odd that the SL editors and I thoroughly agree on what should go on a January dinner table. Still, I laughed. And then edited my grocery list slightly to add the few newer, different ingredients that helped mix it up.

One final note before I post our meal plan and then get back to billing. Our Costco membership has been a great investment. We pay $110 a year to shop there, and we receive 2% back on all purchases.  We get at least $55 back at the end of the year – in other words, if our 2% cashback is less than $55, then Costco makes up the difference. If it’s more than $55, then hooray for us – bonus money. Given our food budget alone, it’s not outside the realm of the possible that we get more than $55 back. But even besides the membership fee, the savings on bulk items is great. I am careful to only buy things that are a savings – for example, unless they’re on sale, diapers are NOT cheaper in bulk there. I’ve been told to watch out for great sales but in the absence of a sale, I get my diapers elsewhere.  Similarly, alcohol, bread, and some produce doesn’t seem any cheaper, at least compared to our local grocery. But milk and dairy products are half, or less than half, the cost at the grocery. I get great, creamy Irish butter and cheese, milk, cream, eggs – all for way less. I also get bulk meat, which is considerably cheaper and it’s convenient to have a constant store of chicken breasts and thighs, ground turkey, sausages, ground beef, and pork chops on hand. I get flats of canned goods – Rotel, black beans, tomato sauce, cream of mushroom soup, pieces and stems of mushrooms. Juice boxes are half the price, and bulk juice, pasta sauce, syrup, paper towels, are consistently less as well.  T.p. is hit or miss, but I keep an eye on the price and keep our grocery store circular on hand so I know which place has it for less. I also bought a few Christmas gifts there, and you can get a $100 restaurant gift card for $75, for example, which is a big savings (only if you were going to go there anyway – I haven’t yet done the gift card thing but I’m keeping it in mind for the future).  They have other good deals on non-food items as well, including kids’ vitamins, turbo tax software, soap and toiletries, and even tires, travel, glasses, etc. Finally, apparently they are a great employer, and pay their employees well and have good benefits, and their CEO’s pay is only 123 times that of the base employee’s – not the 350x of many other wholesale retailers. I like knowing that the people who are serving me are paid a living wage, and I’m not benefiting off their labor without properly compensating them for it.  All around A plus for Costco.

We also recently had a Trader Joe’s open up nearby, where we can get cheap wine and some pre-made sauces that I’m eager to try. We walked through there quickly once, so I didn’t get a full lay of the land, but I’m totally down with going to TJ’s once a month, Costco once a month, and then the grocery for little stuff in between times. So far – this is not an exaggeration – we’ve saved $600 per month. I keep track of our food and other spending (loosely, and occasionally – I only have so much time) in a spreadsheet, and I was shocked at this. I double and triple checked. Astounding. I think this is probably because there is less impulse purchasing at Costco. We have little storage in this urban home, so I can’t grab bulk items without seriously thinking about whether the cost savings truly outweighs the burden of finding a place for the item. And you don’t just willy nilly grab 14 gallons of pancake syrup or whatever. I go so much less often to the normal grocery store with normal sized things, so I have less opportunities to grab impulse buys. Also, since we always have the ingredients to make something, be it black bean burritos or soup or chicken breasts with frozen veg, we definitely order out less.

A last note – my sister clued me in on a tip that I don’t think I’ve shared here, but which is important. Psychology can play tricks on you when you buy bulk stuff – e.g., bulk snacks. If it’s all there and visible in front of you, then you just eat it all up faster. While this isn’t a problem with the cans of Ro-tel or the bulk paper towels, it does happen with the packs of snack crackers and the Nutri Grain bars. So I pull out a small amount for our pantry, and hide the rest where it can’t be seen. That helps us save as well.

OK, enough Costco evangelizing. Below is what we’re having this chilly Southern weekend and coming week. We’ve been watching Stranger Things (at long last, months later), and we only have a couple of episodes left so we’re going to binge watch the rest tonight. It’s epiphany, so we bought a king cake and my militant, calendar enforcing husband flipped off the Christmas lights that I flipped on because apparently it’s bad luck to keep them on after Twelfth night. I say we just leave them up and call them Mardi Gras lights, myself. We shall negotiate this later. But the Christmas decorations will come off the tree, and our Mardi Gras decorations will go on the tree – we do keep that up through Ash Wednesday, and I love it. I have purple, green, and gold twinkle lights to string up around the house, and some fabulous masks and other ornaments that go up on the tree, as well my prized Muses shoe. I want a Nyx purse next. Thank heavens for Mardi Gras – it sustains us through the melancholy of the end of the Christmas season.

Meals last week and this, dressed up SL style:

Double Crust chicken pot pies – I used a rotisserie chicken though

Skillet mac and cheese with crispy breadcrumbs  – I am somewhat concerned it won’t all fit in my skillet, but we’ll see how we go

Roasted pork chops with beets and kale

Mini meatloaves with potatoes, leeks, and brussels sprouts

Spaghetti bolognese with crispy bread and salad

Chicken fajita soup with Fritos and salsa

One pan pasta with chicken sausage, mushrooms, and collards (I’ll probably use kale since we’ll have some leftover)