Food Challenge and Weekend Stuffs

This is probably going to sound a bit silly, but the husband and I have been thinking of taking on a "food challenge" of sorts. It has to do with depriving ourselves of one of our most favorite activities: dining out. One of the best things about living in Los Angeles is the abundance of food options, and we def take advantage of this. If there's one thing that we enjoy treating ourselves to it would be dining out and exploring different foods. The bad thing is that it takes its toll on the wallet. We're not really big shoppers or spend extravagantly on personal goods, so this is our way of treating ourselves to something nice. But with our anniversary coming up along with the possibility of making a pricey purchase soon we thought that taking a month off of dining out would be a good way to save a little. Hence our "food challenge."

We started last Sunday, and I'm happy to report that we had a successful first week! We usually eat at home during the week, but the weekends are when the challenge gets tough. So far, so good though! Here are our rules:

• Meal plan and eat homemade meals for 7 days a week from October 1-31 (although we started a bit early). We already plan weekday meals for the most part, but we usually don't plan for weekend meals. I guess that's the challenging part.
  
• We can be lazy and prepare frozen/quick meals for days when we just don't have time to cook. These are our cheat meals.
• We can buy lunch during the week because sometimes we don't have enough leftovers to take to work the next day (we usually do though).
  
• We can still buy our morning coffee. They are necessary to make it through some mornings.
• I'll post pictures of our meals at the end of each week to keep ourselves on track, and also to hold ourselves accountable if we Eff up. I feel a little weird doing this, but hey it helps. Don't judge me.
  
• Exceptions include: events that we have been invited to that include food (for example, a wedding we went to this weekend, or our parents inviting us over for dinner); and pre-planned trips (for example, this weekend we are going out of town and hotels don't have kitchens...sorry)
  

On to Week 1 results:

Sunday
Salmon with Hoisin, Orange, and Bok Choy: an easy salmon recipe from Bon Appetit magazine.

Monday

The husband has a late night class, and I usually hit up an evening kickboxing class so Monday nights will most likely be cheat nights. We heated up some frozen Indian food and had a quick meal.

Tuesday

Indonesian rice pilaf. Red cabbage, carrots, raisins, cilantro, cashews, and whole grain rice makes this one of my favorite meals to prepare.

Wednesday
Bacalao a la Catalana. I got this recipe from our Spanish cookbook. Cod, spinach, pine nuts, and raisins. So good.

Thursday
Stir-fry tofu and veggies. A quick, easy, and healthy go-to meal.

Friday

We were supposed to go to my parent's house for dinner on Friday night, but it got postponed at the last minute. Since we hadn't planned or prepared for making dinner that night, we had another cheat meal: frozen pizza that we had picked up from Whole Foods and some greens.

Saturday
A good friend of ours got married, so we spent the day at a beautiful wedding at the Los Coyotes Country Club.

Needless to say, we didn't have to do any cooking on Saturday.

There ya have it. We're having fun with our food challenge. Let's see if we can keep it up!