My meal planning

When I do my menu planning I almost always go back and forth between beef and chicken, and then throw in a "misc." meal - meaning eggs, pork, tuna, or meatless.
Since my husband works in the evenings, our main meal is lunch. We typically have oatmeal or cold cereal for breakfast during the week, or our main meal is a big "brunch". Dinner is usually a sandwich, or any leftovers.

so my week could look something like this:
M: beef
T: ckn
W: beef
Th: eggs
F: ckn
S: beef
Su: pork
m: tuna

how I divide my hamburger

I don't know exactly how much hamburger I use in my recipes, but I do know approximately.

I buy it in bulk when it goes on sale and then divide it up into smaller meal size portions.

This week I bought my meat for $1.69 a lb. - I got 2 big packages of it -

each for about $8.00 and $8.50 - I divided it into 16 smaller packages so that each one was equivilant to about $1.

From this picture below you can see it was 5 lbs (or 80 oz.) for $8.50 - so each smaller portion from this one is around 10 oz. which is fine with me - when a recipe calls for a lb. of meat, 10 oz. will be enough.

another blog for me

I have wanted to start this blog for a long time, but I kept putting it off, because I knew it would be time consuming - and as of right now, I don't have a lot of time on my hands. But I had to remind myself that it's just a little at a time, do a bit here, do a bit there, and I can get it to become what I have wanted - eventually.

I have tried several different methods of trying to keep track of recipes I like, from ordinary recpie cards, to homemade recipe books, to spreadsheets - so this will be attempt number 4 at getting all the information I want into one handy place.

I love taking pictures of my food. At first I thought I was pretty weird, but I have discovered there is a plethora of food bloggers out there just like me, taking pictures of their food all the time. So, I had to start a blog to fit in. LOL

I like knowing how much a recipie is going to cost - thus the long pondered name of the blog - calculating in the kitchen -
We are working on keeping costs down, learning to live the Frugal/thrifty lifestyle, because we will soon be homeowners. We closed on our "house" just this last week. Technically we now own the land - and we will be building our house on it over the next many many many months. Paying a mortgage will be a major difference from the way we have been living and budgeting.
So now - on to all the fun stuff!