A new leaf.

Enough...

We've gotten in a terrible habit of eating out at almost every meal, and it has to stop. It's unhealthy and uneconomical.

We've always been inclined to dine out, but this particularly horrible seven-to-eight-month streak really began back in September after we moved to Austin due to the hurricane in Galveston. I lost a lot of my kitchen tools in Ike's nastiness, and then after I started working full-time again in Austin, it was awfully hard to want to navigate a kitchen.

It doesn't help that I've been awful about grocery shopping. Often I will have good intentions and want to cook in the evenings, but it's the planned grocery-store stop on the way home that always gets us. I'll call Matt on my way home from work, and both of us are just too famished to wait through a shopping trip and cooking time.


Lunch is even worse. Because my job can be so crazy, I end up grabbing either a fatty, fried Thai tofu curry with white starchy rice from the place across the street - or a huge, overfilled Chipotle burrito bowl. Or, even worse, a burrito. Worse than these: fried cheesy sandwiches on white bread from the bakery down the block. With a side of white pasta salad...and all of these at $8-10 a pop. Good Lord!

So. I'm stopping!

I spent some time at BookPeople on Saturday and picked up a cookbook that my amazing vegetarian-mama friend Erin recommended on her blog. I leafed through and found some great recipes that looked so surprisingly simple.

Then it was time to face by biggest opponent: the grocery store. I did it, though. I purchased the ingredients for all of our meals this week (except tomorrow night, which is laundry night, when we eat while our clothes are tumbling, simply for efficiency's sake).

I also cooked up a big batch of whole-grain farfalle pasta and refrigerated it last night, for my lunches this week. I bought a bunch of different ingredients to use in pasta salads and whipped up a lunch which my belly is digesting as we speak: pasta salad with pesto, chickpeas, spinach, red pepper flakes, and kalamatas. Very good.

So that's my struggle for now. Stay tuned.