Here’s another tip on making your food budget work for your dinner eating needs. I hate leftovers. HATE leftovers. Think they taste oogey no matter how they are warmed up. But - there are some ways to reuse food in new recipes so that you can pretend you’re not eating leftovers (trust me - this works for me. Just go with it).

For example: when you make pasta sauce, even if you’re doctoring sauce from a jar with additional garlic and caramelized onions, make extra. Save that in a container, and you can use it to make miniature lasagna rollups (put sauce and cheese in a lasagna noodle, roll it up, top with sauce/cheese, bake. Done!) or use it as part of a sauce for baked chicken. Red sauce is your friend. You can put it on bagels (I kid).

My goal when I look in my fridge is to have at least two options of what to make for dinner that are easy and yummy so that I don’t turn around and pick up the phone to order takeout. That’s really it - don’t challenge my imagination when I’m hungry and don’t order in. We’re trying to order in only twice a month, and I like to save it for Friday night family dinners. Boston Market is my friend (especially with coupons). So right now our dinner options are:

1. leftover pot roast from Friday night last week (about at the end of it’s use-by date) which I can thin-slice or shred, mix with sauce and serve over noodles.
2. leftover red sauce with meat which I can put on a bagel (I kid).
3. chicken sausage (garlic basil flavor) on which I can put that bagel - sorry, the red sauce
4. leftover grilled turkey breast from Sunday night (yum) with biscuits (homemade 20 min. recipe), plus some green vegetables for a side

There. Easy.

Also, a word about Boston Market: it is my friend. It can be your friend too. I find one three-person family meal plus one extra side will feed us for dinner, then two lunches over the weekend for $22, less if I have a coupon. If we get the whole chicken meal but request all white meat, we get breasts and wings, plus I get mac & cheese, potatoes and gravy, corn, and a salad. I buy the corn as an “extra” side and right now it’s $2 additional. So there’s Friday night (shabbat) dinner: chicken with awesomeness. Then Saturday lunch for the boys: any and all of the above left over, and the same for Hubby and me. One meal goes a long way - especially that side of corn. It lasts for damn ever. It’s like a bottomless pit of corn. The salad isn’t bad either, but I tend to doctor it by chopping up other stuff that we like and tossing it in the container it comes in. Again -bottomless pit of green stuff that lasts forever.

Over the weekend I did a bit of research into cost comparison and cheaper options for basic items like food, gas, and more food. Here’s what I learned, free from any and all Christian rhetoric, overuse of Bible quotes, and assumptions of superior moral status due to religious alignment. Except this one: DO NOT FUCK WITH JEWISH WOMEN when it comes to SAVING MONEY. SRSLY. We have cornered the market on cheap. Trust me on this. Consider this a new series here at The Less Internet, Lesser Know Blog of Me: Your Friendly Jewish Mother’s Guide to Cheaper Living

1. The easiest way to save money on your groceries is to find out where old people shop. Forget coupons and store cards and stealing the circulars out of other people’s trash on rainy nights. Just find the old people and follow them when they go grocery shopping. Show me a grocery store full of elderly people and I’ll show you the best prices in town. Count on it.

There. Wasn’t that easy?

We grilled a turkey breast. It was the juiciest turkey I’ve ever eaten. It was stupendous.

That is all.

You know what pisses me off? Many things.

You know what’s pissing me off right now? The number of frugal living blogs that I stumble across that are very Christian-centered, as if being frugal and conscious of money somehow equates to a Christian value and the moral superiority comes flowing off the page and slaps me in my cranky, JEWISH, frugal face.

I’m usually utterly blithe about Christian references and they bug Hubby much more than they bug me, but lately, this equation really pisses me the fuck off. Do I need to email all these people? “Frugal values are not exclusively Christian. But thanks for ascribing morality to what for you is a choice. Please excuse me for making different choices, from my religion to the coupons I use and the priorities I have for frugality.”

Also: NOT EVERYONE IS CHRISTIAN! Please, if anyone co-opted frugality, it’s US JEWS!

I really, really hate it when overtly even hissy-fitting people assign a Christian superiority to their personal values, as if aligning them with a faith gives their choices more weight.

In my eyes, it makes them look like sanctimonious douchebags and I don’t want to listen to what they say. 

It takes an hour to an hour and ten minutes to go 14 miles from my house to New York for work. My commute this week has just sucked donkey kong. Tuesday: my bus hit a Porsche, and we sat on the side of the road waiting for the police to finish up for about an hour.

Yesterday: traffic.

Today? On my way to work: I left the house a little before 7am, which is running late for me. Traffic on the main highway the bus follows into the Lincoln Tunnel was so backed up from an accident, I didn’t get to work until 8:40. That’s an hour and forty minutes… to go 14 miles.

I will be so happy to wake up tomorrow and stay. home. 

Because the Dow is up and down like a Jack Russell terrior on methamphetamine, my daily schedule is consistently up by 400 percentage points of nonstop holy fuckshit busy. So hi. Busy, I am it.

1. Both Baba and Freebird are obsessed with playing with the Wiggles guitar, which plays songs at the press of a button. So - time for eBay to deliver unto us another Wiggles guitar.

2. Because Freebird was a first boy, we have crap piles of personalized items with his name on them. Baba, not so much. So I’m slowly making progress in figuring out what all to acquire so that the personalization scales are more balanced.

3. Hubby and I had our first monthly Family Budget Committee meeting. The macro: not bad. The micro: annoying. But The State of Money is forcing me to reconsider how and what I cook, and now that our 6’ freezer is defrosted, I plan to buy any and all meat products that are on sale, and make dinner in the crock pot at least twice a month.**

**aside: due to the nature of my other site, my fingers automatically typed “cock pot” just now. Snerk!

This week: pot roast. I plan to serve it over egg noodles, which will make Freebird happy because he’ll eat anything so long as it’s a pasta. Baba, however, will literally eat anything. If it’s a solid matter item, it’s in his mouth. Bonus if it’s nom-able.

4. This weekend, the family descends to eat dinner on Saturday night in what Freebird calls the So-ca. Not Sook-Ah, like Hubby says, but Sew-Ka. It’s adorable. Just like when he used to call the sofa the “fo-sa.” I hope we can find time to go hiking again because that was awesome.

5. I’m tired. We didn’t go to bed until after 11:30, because of the debates and our powerful powers of mad inertia. If I hadn’t already voted, that would have influenced my vote. Not. The debates made me so angry I screeched at the tv. Poor hubby. He was probably entertaining some complicated analysis and I blew it away by shrieking that both men should stay the fuck out of my uterus.

6. I want a constitutional amendment that forbids men from even talking about women’s health issues. No man should ever, EVER have the power over abortion or any other process affecting women.

7. And while I’m ranting, in all this bullshit rammering about abortion, how come no one talks about the right of a child to come into the world greeted by PARENTS WHO WANT THAT CHILD?! Honestly, I try very hard to maintain an attitude of compassion and empathy, especially with people who feel differently than I do, but when it comes to that topic, I cannot extend any compassion to anyone who says that my desire to have the right to choose any and all available options for my own body, from abortion to the right to a painless death with dignity, offends them and their god. My response is like Dan Savage’s, and is immediate: fuck you, and fuck your God.

8. I’m going back to my happy place now. Pass the vicodin. 

I blogged about my hellish commute on Friday afternoon. Turns out it was because someone glued two liquid filled bottles on to the median strip and despite a few hundred thousand commuters in and out of the tunnel and cameras up the yin yang, NO ONE SAW A GODDAM THING.

Great.

Jimminy Flapjack.

Also: mother fucker.