Housekeeping

Or is it Blogkeeping?

First, the results of the poll from the great car color debate are in. There were 7 votes for silver. 2 votes from people not wanting to get involved (one of those votes was Jeremy--the pansy) and 3 votes for tan. I also got word that someone else wanted to vote tan but the poll was closed already. So 7-4 in my favor. (I didn't vote.)

Granted--this poll proves nothing. But based on the results of the poll I will continue to call my car "a silvery color" without shame or guilt. And in a few months, I can take pictures of our new van with pots and pans on the hood and we can all decide what color it is as well.

Second, I've been posting our dinner main dishes up in my left sidebar. I post them sometime the week after we eat them. This is because I am not a strict menu planner, and sometimes even when I grocery shop for a certain meal it will end up getting pushed off to a later date.

Basically recording what we're eating is something Jeremy and I are interested in doing for the sake of curiosity. We often tell people that we don't eat a ton of meat, which leaves the question of what do we eat? Part of this little experiment is to see what we do eat. The interesting thing is that I've been doing better at planning our meals so far this year, and for some reason when I plan out our menus strictly we end up eating more meat--I think we're all hardwired to think a meal must revolve around a meat choice.

I'm also interested in monitoring the homemade to prepared ratio of the foods we eat, for the sake of health and getting rid of artificial ingredients and preservatives in our family's food. So here's the results of January, with 31 days:

10 vegetarian meals
19 meals (including the vegetarian) that included less than 1/2 serving of meat per person.

21 homemade meals (+ leftovers 2 nights)
4 prepackaged food-based meals eaten in the home (i.e. take and bake pizza, frozen burritos, packaged tortellini)
We went out to eat 2 meals and brought home takeout food 2 meals

I feel pretty good about last month. We ate out/took out more that we normally do I think because we were sick last month--and that takes out the desire to put effort into food. Obviously we ate leftovers more than twice last month but this list was only dinner meals. Jeremy is actually really good about taking leftovers for his lunches, and every once in a while I decide I'm not in the mood for peanut butter and I'll have leftovers too.

I don't know how long we'll keep up this cataloging of our dinner meals, but for right now the project is still holding my interest.

Third, my "using eggs" posts (see the link up top) will start soon. My blog and I were just working through some relationship issues the last two weeks, and had to get that sorted out first.

Fourth, my comments are functioning again, if you ever feel so inclined to leave one.