Welcome to Share Your Fare...

Have you ever gotten together with a group of friends and shared recipes?  In the past I have done this via email where everyone emails a few recipes to one person and then that person compiles them all and emails them out, and I have also done it in person at a cookie exchange where you come home with a basket of sweets and a wealth of new recipes.

My hope for this blog is that friends of mine, and then friends of theirs, and then friends of theirs will come together on this blog and share recipes.  They do not need to be fancy, most people would prefer that they are simple in all honesty, they just need to be crowd pleasers that we can all serve at our own tables.

I cook almost every day.  I love to eat, so here and there the hubs and I of course eat out, but it is becoming more common than ever before that dinner is served at my dinning room table.  Since I cook nightly I needed to come up with a plan of attack.  My solution is to create a weekly menu on Sunday and go grocery shopping for the whole week.  I have a weekly menu pad like this one:

Find it here!

It has a "Weekly Menu" on one side and a perforated "Grocery List" area on the other side.

So it goes like this:  I ask the hubs if there is anything he would like for dinner.  He usually has a suggestion or two.  Once I have those few items listed on the menu I look at my ingredients and see what I can buy more of to make something else.  Like if he wants enchiladas (and believe me he always does) I think okay, I need chicken so how about I buy a whole chicken and boil it for soup or I buy chicken in a larger quantity and make Chicken Cordon Blue or something along those lines.  Make sense?  I do not just do this for meats, but also for perishables that I am not going to use all of.  I hate throwing food away so I think of what I can do with the remaining ingredient.  Sour cream is a constant example.  Before I did this I would buy a tub of sour cream for enchiladas and then end up throwing 3/4 of it away because it went unused and molded.

Also, when I ask, "What would you like for dinner?"  He can head over to the menu and select from the list.  I know that I have the ingredients to fit his hankering that night and this cuts back on the impulse to eat out.

So with all of these tricks I can cut down on my grocery bill (I have cut it in half for my family), give my husband (who likes infinite choices) a menu to choose from, and I simplify my nights.  Everyone is happy!

I hope that explained my process well enough for you!  Congratulations (and thanks) for sticking with me.

So back to the blog.  I will post my menu as is for the week and I will tell you how much you should expect to spend to duplicate the same thing.  (We eat leftovers at the Kruger house, so I make enough for the hubs to take to work for lunch the next day.  This means that in theory I could either feed a family once or two adults twice with the portions that I make.)

If you would like to become an author leave a comment in the comment area of any blog entry with your contact info or email me.  My only requirement is that you have good taste and you are willing to post two recipes a month.  As I said before, the more contributors we have the more successful this will be!  So start sharing!!!