Reflecting on One Year

On July 20, David and I celebrated our first year of marriage!  This year has flown by and without a doubt this has been my favorite year!

To celebrate we went out to dinner at Maggiano's.  This is where we had our rehearsal dinner, so we thought it would be a fun place to reminisce, plus it is so yummy!

During our delicious dinner and that enormous piece of cheesecake, we talked about our first year of marriage.  I wanted to come up with a list of questions that we answer each year on our anniversary to see how we grow and change.

After doing this, I realized one of the most challenging aspects of this year for me and also where I have grown the most is in cooking, grocery shopping, and meal planning.  I cannot even begin to tell you how many tears were shed over those three things!  Seriously, looking at ads, cutting coupons, meal planning, grocery shopping, hulling those groceries up to our third floor apartment, cooking the food, and then burning it never ends well :)

Since this blog started as a way to share what I was learning in marriage (and pregnancy... and parenting), I want to try and help other wives out that are trying to figure out all this as well.  My most frustrating moments have come from not knowing what recipes to make or choosing the wrong ones and ending up making a frozen pizza.

I am excited to begin posting more recipes on the blog and tricks I have learned over the year to save money grocery shopping.  One crazy idea I have is to even calculate the cost of every recipe I make to figure out which meals are the most cost effective and which meals will be considered splurges.

We still go over our grocery budget most months sometimes by $5 and sometimes by $30, but we are in a much better place than a year ago!  In other budget categories we don't have as much control over, but the grocery bill we definitely determine and can change!

Keep a look out for fun recipes that I promise taste good, save money, and reduce your stress level :)

If you feel like you are failing in the whole cooking area, I will leave you with this fun story.

In the first couple months of being married, I got really excited about freezer cooking.  David's dad had given us a lot of potatoes from his garden so I wanted to make a lot of mashed potatoes then freeze them for future meals.  I also had recently gotten a Kitchen Aid mixer.  My thought was I would boil the potatoes and then mash them using the mixer.

So, I boil them, put them in the mixer, and turn it on.... and mashed potatoes hit the ceiling.  I cried and some how probably blamed it on David.  Proud moments!

Now, I am much more careful when I turn on the mixer and use a potato masher to make my mashed potatoes!  There is definitely a learning curve!