Bored In The Kitchen?

I mentioned in the post below that I plan out dinner meals two weeks at a time. This was a long time coming, let me tell you! Before I started doing that, I had about 7 meals that I cooked and rotated constantly! Nothing fancy - tacos, hot dogs, burgers, meat loaf, pork chops... you get the picture. Sounds good, right? But, over and over again? Wrong!

My brave and handsome husband suggested that I make NEW meals instead of having the same thing over and over again. Um, slightly insulted, slightly embarrassed. I decided to go on line and also really look at the cookbooks I had. Thank god for meals.com! Very impressed with the recipes. I know how to cook, but when you put together one part lazy, one part tired, one part stubborn and one part, well I don't know what else, but anyway it didn't turn out good.

I looked for meals and saved them on the meals.com website. I printed them out, punched holes in them and kept them in a three ring binder. The binder, 3 years later? It's not pretty, but it's mine! :)

I have dinners, desserts and snacks in the binder. I love the web! I also go to pillsbury.com (they have great ideas for Superbowl) and bettycrocker.com (they have printable coupons) for inspiration. If you guys are bored with your meals, try those websites, they're awesome! Not to mention the foodnetwork.com (gotta love Paula Deen!). They have easy recipes and reviews. Don't forget to sign up (it's free) so you can save any recipes you have in a "recipe box" on the sites.

Let me know what you think?

Next post I'll talk about how I conquered my grocery list fear!

Short Cut (ish) for Cooking?

I love to cook and bake. I made my older son's 19th birthday cake out of a Betty Crocker box mix. I can bake from scratch, but I really like taking short cuts. I guess I don't really consider it a short cut since I'm still taking the time to mix everything together and bake in the oven. A real shortcut would be to drive to Costco and get one of their cakes already made and decorated (I've done that too!).

Anyway, I've also used the cookie mixes from a bag, cake frosting, cake decorating tubes,and muffin mixes. I'm busy and the time savings are awesome! I really like the holiday cookies that come already cut out in shapes, so all you need to do is bake them. Every time I've made sugar cookies from scratch (real scratch), I can never roll them out good enough to cut them in shapes.

I want to know what are your favorite short cuts for cooking? I haven't made a biscuit from scratch in a year!