Eat at Home Challenge: Crockpot Cantonese Sweet & Sour Pork Chops (Day 1) and more...

Welcome to Day 1 of the Eat at Home Challenge — a one-week challenge designed to encourage and inspire you to make more meals at home in order to save money and eat more healthfully! I'm be following the Eat […]

Here's what's new: Eat at Home Challenge: Crockpot Cantonese Sweet & Sour Pork Chops (Day 1) Gretchen’s $35 Grocery Shopping Trip and Menu Plan A Peek Into My Week Last Week (+ BIG plans for this coming week!) Eat at Home Challenge: Crockpot Cantonese Sweet & Sour Pork Chops (Day 1) Welcome to Day 1 of the Eat at Home Challenge — a one-week challenge designed to encourage and inspire you to make more meals at home in order to save money and eat more healthfully! I'm be following the Eat at Home Slow Cooker Menu Plan and I have been SO impressed with this plan. The recipes look so yummy, there’s lots of variety, and they only look like they’ll take me a few minutes to put together every morning! Details on The Eat at Home Challenge The Eat at Home Challenge is this week and runs through April 21, 2017. Every morning around 9 a.m. CT, I'll be on Facebook Live prepping our dinner to throw in the slow cooker for the day so that when 6 p.m. rolls around dinner is READY! Every day, in addition to doing a Facebook Live video on my Facebook Page, I'll be posting here on the blog what I made that day, along with a link to my video (in case you missed it). I’m using the Eat at Home menu-planning service for my recipes for this challenge. You can sign up and get the recipes if you’d like to follow along with me! Scroll down to the bottom of this post for all the details on this menu-planning service + a 25% off coupon code good for this week only. My hope is that this will inspire you with some new recipe ideas, encourage you to not wait until the last minute to think about what you're having for dinner, and motivate you to eat at home more (even on busy nights!) so you can save money. I'd love for you to join me in this challenge! To participate, go join the Facebook Page here so you can share what you are making every night and see what readers all over the country (and world!) are making for dinner each night, too! What I Made Today This morning, I made Crockpot Cantonese Sweet & Sour Pork Chops. We don’t eat pork chops very often, so I’m excited to try this recipe out and see what my family thinks! The recipe was incredibly easy to make and it smells SO good! My family is excited to try it tonight! We’re going to be serving it over rice (remember the rice I made and froze last week?) plus roasted broccoli. Delicious!! Click to watch the video above for all of the details on the recipe and to see me make it LIVE! What is the Eat at Home Menu-Planning Service? I’m using the Eat at Home menu-planning service for my recipes for this challenge. I usually make my own menu, but I thought it would be fun to try out a menu-planning service and see what we thought of it. So far, I’ve been very impressed! Eat at Home is a menu-planning service designed to make getting dinner on the table much easier every night. It was a service created by Tiffany, a mom of 4 who loves to cook and loves to gather her family around the table, but has found that if she doesn’t have a quick and easy plan, it’s hard to make that happen. Tiffany with her family Here’s what Tiffany says: When I started Eat at Home in 2008 my kids ranged in age from 16 to 6 years old. Now my kids are growing into adulthood, but we all still gather around the table together at least once a week. There’s something special about eating together that pulls families close to each other. But it can be a real struggle to get a meal on the table in the midst of busy schedules. My goal is to give easy solutions to dinner, so families can get to the good part – time together! Here’s a video from Tiffany that she made just for you all to introduce herself:   How Does the Eat at Home Menu-Planning Service Work? The Eat at Home menu-planning service is an incredible way to help you save time and save money. You don’t have to worry about planning menus OR grocery list, because Tiffany does all of that for you as part of the menu-planning service. She has designed it specifically with busy families in mind and the menu plans offer: Quick to fix meals (even as fast as 15 minutes to the table!) Lots of slow cooker recipes Done-for-you Weekly Meal Plans & Grocery Lists The recipes can all be fixed quickly, with only a few minutes of hands-on prep. Because the recipes use common pantry ingredients, it's likely that you have everything you need to make many of the recipes.   It’s so convenient because all the work is done for you! You just choose which menu plan you’ll use, print the grocery list, go shopping, and then spend a few minutes prepping food each day and dinner is D-O-N-E! When you sign up for the plan (it’s just a few dollars per week — or less!), each month, you’ll get: An entire month of Traditional Menu Plans, including weekly grocery lists and printable recipe instructions An entire month of Slow Cooker Menu Plans, including weekly grocery lists and printable recipe instructions An entire month of Whole Food Menu Plans, including weekly grocery lists and printable recipe instructions Each menu plan comes with recipes created for small family (3-4 servings) and large family (6-8 servings) Color-coded grocery lists make it easy to swap out ingredients or whole meals Printable Menus to hang on the fridge or near your calendar, so you can easily see what's for dinner that week and your family can too Access to the entire month at once! 1 Hour Freezer Stash Plans – a new plan each month to stock your freezer with 6 meals in 1 hour! You can choose to stick with just the traditional menu plan or just the slow cooker menu plan or just the whole foods menu plan. Or, you can rotate different menu plans on different weeks, depending upon what you feel like cooking or how much time you have!     Get the Eat at Home Menu-Planning Service for as Low as $1.21 per Week! If you struggle to make menu plans and would love for someone to make them for you + make a grocery list for you, it's well worth spending a few dollars every week to let Eat at Home do the work for you. This week only, when you sign up for their plan (either the monthly plan, the quarterly plan, or the yearly plan, you can get 25% off by using coupon code MSM at checkout! That makes the done-for-you menu plans and grocery lists just $1.21 per week. And you get access to all three plans and the freezer cooking plans for the whole month at the rate! Go sign up for this incredible menu-planning service here.  (Oh and they have a fantastic money-back guarantee if you think you want to try it out but aren't sure whether it will work for you or not!) Note: The links in this post are affiliate links, and we will be compensated when you make a purchase by clicking through our links. Read our disclosure policy here.        Gretchen’s $35 Grocery Shopping Trip and Menu Plan Aldi 2 dozen Large Eggs – $0.72 each 2 cans Cream of Chicken/Mushroom Soup – $0.49 each 1 can Green Beans – $0.49 1 bag Frozen Chicken Breasts – $5.99 1 loaf Bread – $0.85 1 bag Frozen Blueberries – $2.29 1 bag Frozen Broccoli – $0.99 1 bag Spinach – $1.49 1 bag Tortillas – $0.99 1 White Vinegar – $0.79 1 Pineapple – $1.29 1 pkg Cheddar Cheese – $1.79 1 pkg Chopped Pecans – $4.99 1 bag Baby Carrots – $0.49 1 Cantaloupe – $1.79 2 Cucumbers – $0.49 each Total: $27.63 Dillons 1 Moms Best Cereal – $1.67 1 Sour Patch Kids Candy – $1.39, used Free e-coupon (no longer available) – Free after coupon 1 Kroger Hashbrowns – $1.79 1 Smithfield Ham Steak – $2 1 bag Kroger Flour – $1.59 1.28 lbs Banans – $0.76 Total after coupon: $7.81 Total for both stores: $35.44 Menu Plan for This Week We still have fruits and vegetables leftover from last week so I will be using those up this week, too. Breakfasts Cereal x 2 Toast, Eggs, Spinach x 4 Blueberry Coffee Cake, Fruit Lunches Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwiches, Carrots Sticks x 2 Tuna Salad Sandwiches, Sliced Cucumbers Mac & Cheese, Fruit Salad Cheese, Crackers, Fruit, Veggies x 2 Lunch at my parents Dinners Chicken Noodle Casserole, Steamed Broccoli Sour Cream Enchiladas, Tossed Salad Hamburger Vegetable Soup, Crackers & Cheese, Carrot Sticks Ham Hashbrown Casserole, Eggs, Cantaloupe Italian Chicken, Mashed Potatoes, Biscuits, Green Beans Out to eat Leftovers        A Peek Into My Week Last Week (+ BIG plans for this coming week!) After 13 days in Israel, Jesse made it home at 2 a.m. last Monday morning. And I made sure one of the first things I did was to express just how grateful I am for him and all he does for us. I knew that I am so blessed with a wonderful husband, but having him gone for two weeks reminded me just how often I take so much of what he does for granted. And then we savored a Slow Monday… sleeping in, snuggling, talking, laughing, reconnecting, catching up on some projects, and accomplishing a few Laundry Day tasks. I’ve been a LOT more motivated to bake and cook recently since I got to add quite a few new things back into my diet again — including more baked goods and even an occasional dessert. I still can’t have white potatoes, but I made these amazing-looking homemade rosemary fries for the rest of my family. They said they were incredible and gobbled them up in about 10 minutes! 🙂 I may have squealed when I opened up this package this week! Y’all know how much I love She Reads Truth and how much their studies have encouraged, blessed, challenged, and changed me the past three years I’ve been doing them. The one thing I have asked for for Christmas the past few years has been a monthly subscription to their studies. It’s been such an amazing investment in my spiritual growth and deepening my relationship with Jesus. When I heard that the team at She Reads Truth was releasing a Bible, I was thrilled and I had high expectations for it. But folks, this Bible is far beyond my highest expectations. It’s not only beautiful and high-quality, but it’s packed with reference notes, timelines, maps, charts, devotionals, introductions to each book, and — my favorite part — reading plans for each book of the Bible. When I opened it up, I felt like the little girl who had just gotten her very first Bible… and I wanted to drop everything then and there and start reading and studying it. I’ve been so eager to get up each morning so I could start my day with time in God’s Word using this stunning Bible! At 12 years old, she’s growing up so much and I’m so proud of the young woman she’s becoming. She’s her own person, she doesn’t worry what other people think, she has really strong convictions and beliefs, but she has a heart of incredible compassion for all people. She loves playing flag football with the boys. She loves hanging out with her girl friends. She loves long talks with adults. She adores taking care of little kids. And she cares so, so deeply about people. I’m especially proud of her because she and her team finished first in their division at the Destination Imagination State Championship and qualified to go to Globals in May. They are currently fundraising for this big event and have raised over half the amount needed in just less than a week! We are helping to do a garage sale this weekend with some of the team members and all the funds will go toward the costs of this big event. I’m excited because I’ll get to go with her and there will be teams from 15 different countries and over 17,000 teams at this event! It should be quite the experience! Jesse and I helped chaperone a Field Trip with the 4th, 5th, and 6th grade classes at school this past week. We went to a number of different historical sites in Franklin, TN and did a historic scavenger hunt. It was so fun and we learned so much about the history of this area! Baseball is a big part of our life right now as Silas is on the travel team and has multiple games most weeks. We’re so proud of his team and how hard they have been working, how much they’ve improved over the last few months, how much they’ve shown great sportsmanship, and the fact that they are starting to win a few games. 🙂 We took the kids to a FREE Community Easter Party on Saturday where they had free Easter Egg Hunts, free face-painting, free balloon artists, a free petting zoo, free cotton candy, free nachos, free popcorn and more. The kids had a BLAST — even Kathrynne! But apparently I missed the memo that kids are supposed to dress up in their Easter clothes for this type of event. Um, as you can see from this picture, we clearly did not come dressed in our Sunday best. I just had to laugh because that’s pretty much the #StoryofMyLife as a parent. At least I’m doing my part to make all moms everywhere feel better about their parenting and organization skills! 😉 Getting Back on the Bandwagon — The Periscope Morning Show Returns! With Jesse being gone for two weeks, I feel like I kind of fell off the bandwagon as far as consistency goes… mostly because I was just trying to survive and make it through. But I need a kick in the pants to jumpstart me back in a good direction. So, after some thought, I decided the best way to jumpstart things would be for me to commit to going to bed by 8:30 p.m. and getting up at 4:30 a.m. Monday through Friday this week. I need the public accountability for this, so that’s why I’m putting it out there. Starting tomorrow morning, I’ll be posting on Insta Stories soon after I get up to let you know when I got up. I’ll also be aiming to be bringing back the highly popular Periscope Morning Show and plan to be on live at 6:30 a.m. CT Monday through Friday. This is something many, many, many of you have begged for and I’m thrilled to be committing to it again — at least for this next week. If it goes well, I may commit to trying this again longterm. 🙂 If you want to join me, you can download the Periscope app to your phone, follow me (I’m MoneySavingMom), and make sure you have notifications on so you’ll know when I go live each morning. I’ll also be on Facebook Live at 9 a.m. every morning this next week making our dinner in the crockpot live as part of the Eat at Home challenge. I’d love for you to join me for that, too! And I’m hoping that these public commitments will help me to get back in the saddle and start being more focused, productive, and efficient instead of feeling like I’m sort of running around in circles and taking way too long to accomplish basic tasks! 🙂 Here’s to a great week for ALL of us! And hopefully I’ll see some of you live this week on Periscope and Facebook Live!        Latest finds on Pinterest You can make a difference -- even when you're on a tight budget! Check out these helpful and creative suggestions! Do you feel like you'll never get out of debt? Read this post for encouragement and practical advice on baby steps you can take! 10 Habits to Add to Your Evening Routine. Make Over Your Evenings with these 10 tips for the perfect evening routine. Latest finds on Pinterest You can make a difference -- even when you're on a tight budget! Check out these helpful and creative suggestions! Do you feel like you'll never get out of debt? Read this post for encouragement and practical advice on baby steps you can take! 10 Habits to Add to Your Evening Routine. Make Over Your Evenings with these 10 tips for the perfect evening routine.     Click here to safely unsubscribe from "LITE Feed, Money Saving Mom®." 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