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January 2022 Roundup

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I’ve come to find out my favorite food to cook is frozen appetizers 😂

I wasn’t expecting to have an easy January, especially doing a challenge that’s really not in my wheelhouse.

Oh sure, I can eat. And you may even be surprised that I took a few semesters of home ec in high school and can follow a recipe. Unlike Moira and David Rose, I actually know what “fold in the cheese” means!

But I really, really don’t like to cook. It’s not my favorite way to spend time. This has been such a weird phenomenon for me because I really do enjoy delicious food with lots of variety. But unless I can find it in the freezer section or it doesn’t involve a whole lot of prep and juggling multiple preparations at once, I’m not interested.

So taking on this Cooking-at-Home Challenge where my husband and I got away from our drive-thru/delivery habit has been, well, a challenge!

Quick challenge summary: I challenged us to cook 7 meals a week from home, and for my husband and I, that means either lunch or dinner — the two meals we eat together. (Want to learn more about the challenge? Check out the January Focus post and the Mid-Month Check-In 🙂)

As for keeping track, I found my usual method of printing out a calendar and finding a way to mark the days to be the most effective, even if it usually ends up looking like a key piece of evidence in a psychological thriller.

I used either an L (for Lunch) or a D (for Dinner) for the meals we cooked and an X for the meals we didn’t. I also posted the progress for most days to Instagram in my Stories and you can find the full highlights here!

One of my favorite questions I asked folks following me on Instagram was about cooking shows they enjoy! I ended up getting really into a few, like Project Bakeover (Hulu, Apple TV), Nadiya’s Time to Eat (Netflix), and School of Chocolate (Netflix). Obviously, I enjoy baking a lot more than cooking, but I found that any show that takes place in a kitchen gets my gears turning for new things to try.

One thing a lot of folks were curious about this month was my husband’s sous vide set up. I mentioned in my Mid-Month Check-In that my husband, Mark, was the MVP of this challenge. He really got into his sous vide immersion cooker more over the past month, and even answered an AMA on my Instagram Stories! (Check out our Sous Vide setup here)

I wish I could say we saved money with this challenge. We definitely saved money by not going to the drive-through or getting delivery as often. I would even say we may have cut our meal spending down by at least 20% this month. It’s a rough guess, but when I was doing the math in the beginning of the month, our take-out orders were in the $25-$30 range, compared to our prepped at home meals that were in the $7-$15 range.

But, as I said, we may not have actually saved money … you see, there was the tacos incident, where Mark bought 60(!) ranch-flavored taco shells thinking they would be like Taco Bell’s discontinued Cool Ranch Doritos Loco Tacos. They were not and now we have a bunch of these things because he could only order them in bulk 😂

He also decided to up his sous vide game and get a real vacuum sealer instead of relying on freezer bags which sometimes leaked and ruined the meat. That said, the first time he used the vacuum sealer, our pulled pork had never been better! Even better than some of the local BBQ places, I would say!

This challenge was a lot more fun to do because it was so wonderful getting so many suggestions from readers and friends on Instagram and in the Hate to Weight Discussion group over on Facebook! Even though the podcast isn’t currently airing new episodes, it’s still really cool to continue to catch up with listeners of the show who continue to inspire me to keep going when it comes to personal goals.

I’m hoping we can continue the trend of cooking at home more and I could see myself repeating this challenge in the future, especially when we inevitably slide back into the delivery/drive-thru rut we seem to do every so often.

As for my next focus, I have a feeling it will need more than just one month to complete. I’ve decided to tackle decluttering! After 2 years of pandemic living, we desperately are overcrowded with stuff and need to downsize.

I’m already gathering inspiration on Instagram and getting a plan in place so stay tuned!

THIS MONTH’S BLOG POSTS

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