Dinner Archives - Making Sense Of Cents

10 Slow Cooker Recipes That Will Make Dinner Time Easy

Last Updated: September 2, 2021 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 2 Comments

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Are you looking for some new and delicious slow cooker recipes so you can have tasty and stress-free dinners this week?

I love making meals in a slow cooker. Dinners are so much easier when you start everything in advance! I’m less stressed, can focus on things I’d rather do, all while knowing that I have a delicious meal cooking.

So, if you’re looking for some of the best slow cooker recipes, I have 10 new recipes for you to try – that’s almost two full weeks of meal ideas!

I think you’re going to like all of these slow cooker recipes, but here are my favorites:

Easy Slow Cooker Cauliflower Soup – Cauliflower, cashews, and a smoky chickpea topping. This soup is packed full of protein, and it’s vegan. This soup is creamy, rich, and the chickpea topping is roasted, which gives it a nice crunch.
Slow Cooker Salsa Verde Chicken Soup – Chicken, black beans, fire roasted corn, lime juice, and more. You can top this hearty soup with cheese, avocado, sour cream (I like to use plain Greek yogurt), and more.
Mozzarella Stuffed Crockpot Meatloaf – Garlic, onions, mozzarella cheese, Italian seasoning, and more. This meatloaf even has a delicious sweet and spicy glaze on top. I honestly had no idea that you could even make meatloaf in the slow cooker until I found this recipe.

Many of these slow cooker recipes take 15 minutes or less of prep time, which means you can easily make them before you go to work in the morning. They also make great leftovers for lunch the next day. [Read more…]

Our Plan To Finally Cut Our Food Spending

Last Updated: December 31, 2014 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 89 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

As most of you know, our main financial problem is that we spend too much money on food. When I first started blogging back in 2011, we were spending over $1,000 on food each month JUST for the two of us.

It’s a number I still don’t even understand and I feel ashamed whenever I mention it. We have been doing better over the years, but nothing to be proud of.

Some of our problems related to food include:

We go to restaurants too many times each week.
Too much of our food is wasted and has to be thrown away.
We get lazy and tend to make the same meals over and over again.

That’s why one of our main goals for 2015 is to make more delicious meals at home.

We would like our average food budget for 2 each month to be somewhere around $500 per month. We want this monthly average food budget to include going out to eat and grocery spending, and I believe this is a number we should easily be able to achieve.

Since this is just a food budget for 2, $500 a month should be a reasonable number! I know there are many people out there who spend just a few hundred dollars each month for their growing families, and that is just amazing. [Read more…]

$940 in Extra Income, Life Updates and 2013 Goals

Last Updated: April 8, 2021 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 35 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

Happy Monday everyone! Another Weekly Update post. I hope you all enjoyed my St. Thomas and St. John pictures in my weekly update post from last week. Also, don’t forget to check out my sister’s blog, FITnancials, that I am helping run (she is the writer).

I also have a $399 cash or tablet giveaway that will be up on my blog later today. Please come back and check that out!

Didn’t do a whole ton this past weekend. Time flew by and we wasted a lot of time relaxing. Should have been more productive! Spent Saturday relaxing and at night watched Gangster Squad. It was good! Ryan Gosling definitely was just an added bonus in the movie 🙂

Then on Sunday spent about 5 hours looking for homy gym equipment, and then about 3 hours setting it all up.

2013 GOALS

I realized the other day that I didn’t make 2013 goals yet. Yes, I made my 2012 and 5 Year Review – So many GOOD things post but I didn’t actually list any goals for this year. So here we go:

1. Pay off ALL of my student loans.

My goal is to completely wipe out the $38,000 of student loans that I graduated with in August. I’ve been calculating it (yes, I do this all the time) and they are still on track to be completely gone by March or April of this year. April will be the latest and lets just hope that nothing changes and takes me off from this schedule.

2. Get super fit.

Now that we plan on having everything that we need to work out in our basement, we definitely should have no problem with working out and getting more toned. Me and W plan on making a workout schedule for ourselves and are super excited to see our results.

3. Save for a decent sized down payment.

We are about 75% positive that we want to buy a new house in 2014. I plan on making a new post on this soon. A lot of you have wondered why we want a new house and why we want to sell our current house. It’s probably all lifestyle inflation and in my head but I still want one.

4. Plan an awesome wedding!

We are most likely thinking Spring of 2014 and last month I posted some wedding ideas. Of course there’s a long list of things that need to be done, and I’ve done pretty much nothing 🙂

Spending:

We did spend some money in the past week, but some of it was from bonus money that W earned. He gets a bonus card from the car brand he sells, and it’s all deposited on a debit card. Now, this is different from his monthly “salesman of the month” bonus that he’s been earning (that is all direct deposited into our bank account). It’s all extra money so we decided to spend some money on ourselves and have some fun.

And we did spend a lot of other money, which you can see below in my “being healthy” section below.

Extra Income (does not include salary from our jobs):

I did good last week, but I am expecting the next couple of weeks to be better. I’m waiting on a couple of payments and I have some things scheduled for the next couple of weeks. Lets just hope nothing falls through! I made $940 in extra income last week.

Food:

No meal plan again for this week. We didn’t do the greatest with eating in last week, mainly because of laziness. We do have a well stocked fridge, I just need to cook some dinners before everything goes bad!

Being healthy:

I haven’t been doing the greatest with this. We did buy a home gym yesterday (pictured above), which was SUPER expensive. I did not realize how much everything would be just so that W could lift some weights. The olympic bar alone was $320 (tax included) and that doesn’t include any of the weights which were super expensive too ($150 for the two 45 pound weights).

We are still looking for a treadmill. We saw a couple yesterday but I wanted to do a little research on them. It needs to be reliable and good for 3 people to use every day. What brand/type of treadmill do you have? Let me know!

How’s your spending, working out and extra income going?

Sunday Meal Plan

Last Updated: April 12, 2021 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 20 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

Hey everyone! I feel like I haven’t made a Sunday Meal Plan post in what seems like forever. And not having a legitimate meal planning post has definitely hurt my wallet. I don’t think about the food I’m going to make as much as I would if I had a meal plan.

I pretty much just throw anything into the shopping cart, and call it good. Except, I never get anything that is good enough for a full meal!

I think the dining room plan that I have hopes for (click to view it from my old Sunday meal plan which has the picture) is finally going to be completed either this month or next.

My friend and I are driving to Ikea (WHY DON’T THEY HAVE ONE AROUND HERE?!) and plan on doing this soon. Hopefully this is sooner rather than later.

We are planning on eating in as much as we can for both December and January. Anyone want to join me on my challenge to eat at home as much as you can?

Also, since we will be on vacation from the 16th to the 19th, I am looking for a couple of guest posts. I would prefer the posts to revolve around money of course, but maybe about how you save on vacations, what side jobs you have, and/or what your long-term goals are. Is anyone interested?

So how is your food budget going? How much money do you think you’ll spend on food in December?

Here’s what I plan on making as our main course for each dinner:

Monday – Creamy Spring Pasta (pictured above)
Tuesday – Korean Style Tacos
Wednesday – Out to eat
Thursday – Sausage Chili Recipe
Friday – Spaghetti
Saturday – Out to Eat
Sunday – Steak

What’s on your menu? Share any recipes 🙂

Sunday Meal Plan

Last Updated: November 9, 2012 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 23 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

Hope you are all having a great weekend! I have a picture of a dining room above because this is pretty much what I want to do with our dining room. This is actually exactly what I wanted, so when I just stumbled across this picture I was floored because what is the chance of me finding the EXACT items that I want all in one picture?!

I have everything picked out and now I just need to go to Ikea badly. We plan on going sometime this month. The table is more of a brown color and not white like it looks in the picture. What do you think?

We are still doing GREAT with our eating at home goal. To refresh you, our goal is to eat in Monday through Friday. We went out to eat on Wednesday, but we decided that we would trade off and eat in on Sunday instead.

Let me know how your food budget is going as well. What is your monthly food budget? How much do you spend on restaurants? How about alcohol?

Here’s what I plan on making as our main course for each dinner:

Monday –White Cheddar Chicken Pasta
Tuesday – Roasted Red Pepper Pesto Pasta w/Goat Cheese
Wednesday – Tortellini and Garden Vegetable Bake
Thursday – Steak
Friday – Huevos Rancheros
Saturday – Out to Eat
Sunday – Out to Eat

What’s on your menu? Share any recipes 🙂

Sunday Meal Plan

Last Updated: May 23, 2013 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 17 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

Hey everyone! I haven’t posted a meal plan in what seems like forever. We have been doing FANTASTIC with our food spending this past week. We ate in 5 days. Yes, I said that FIVE. This might sound stupid to you all, but we are really bad when it comes to eating at home.

I’ve been making a lot of new recipes (which are all super tasty) and I’m loving it. I noticed that a lot of you are on a “No Eating Out November” as I’ve seen on some of your blog posts.

Do any of you have a goal to not eat out this month at all, or maybe even limit your eating out? I know we do! Our goal is to eat in Monday through Friday right now.

Here’s what I plan on making as our main course for each dinner:

Monday – Chicken with Tomato Herb Pan Sauce via Chic Darling
Tuesday – Chicken Teriyaki (I’ve gotten many rave reviews about my recipe)
Wednesday – Steak
Thursday – Three Cheese Chicken Penne (but I will use Steak instead)
Friday – Smothered Chili Burritos
Saturday – Out to Eat
Sunday – Out to Eat

What’s on your menu? Share any recipes 🙂

Spending, Life, Income, Food Updates…

Last Updated: April 8, 2021 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 47 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

Happy Monday! My weekend was good and relaxing, and i didn’t get much done even though I had a lot planned that NEEDED to be done. Oh well. Halloween has definitely taken over my life this past weekend, and I’m loving it!

A lot of you were wondering about my skin problems that I talked about last week. Turns out that nothing was wrong and I was given pills to make the white spots go away. The dermatologist said that it’s not a big deal but it’s extremely hard to get rid of the spots completely, so they will most likely keep coming back. So he gave me extra prescriptions to save me money on visiting him more than once, thankfully!

The Halloween costume that I talked about on Saturday did not work out at all. I obviously have no crafty skills at all.

The boy has a vacation in December. His work told him that he technically doesn’t have to take it (since he won’t get paid from his work), but it’s also one of the slower weeks for him so he most likely won’t sell much during that week. We’re thinking of maybe going snowboarding and skiing in Colorado. I’ve never really done either so we thought it would be a nice trip.

Does anyone know of any good resorts or hotels there? We would like to go to Vail, as long as it’s not too extremely expensive. If we do go, then it would be the week right before Christmas. Not sure if we will drive or take a plane either, as it would cost almost the same.

Let me know if there’s anything we should know about a potential Vail trip! Also, if you’ve ever gone and have a blog post with pictures or tips, then leave the link below please 🙂

My updates:

Spending: We did OKAY on spending this week, but not the greatest. Didn’t spend too much on food and $0 on drinking, but went to the movies (during matinee though so it was only $7.50 per person) and we did surprisingly rent a TON of movies, which still adds up.

Extra Monthly Income (this is on top of my salary from my job): I didn’t really make a lot last week, as compared to recent weeks. I made around $250 last week. And this is exactly why I don’t rely on my extra income, it is not stable! I do of course enjoy it still though.

Also, I’m trying to ramp up my Swagbucks. I haven’t searched using Swagbucks in forever but plan on doing so just for some extra Christmas present money. I have a shameless plug in now and it is for you to join Swagbucks using my affiliate code. I really love Swagbucks and have made over $200 in gift cards just from searching (just like searching on Google) and it’s SUPER easy.

Food: We’ve been doing better definitely. Our goal is to eat in Monday through Friday of this week. I’ll be thinking of a meal plan today and am going to the store after work. If you have any good recipes, please share them in the comments!

Being healthy: No comment… 🙂 I’ll do better TODAY.