7 Ways My Food Habits Changed in 2013

Cooking is such a big part of my life that I think it’s fun to look back at the past year and see what’s changed.  (Here’s my post with the same theme, looking back at 2012) I didn’t think there were too many changes in 2013, but as I started to mull it over, I realized that there have been several that have been pretty monumental to me:

I started shopping at Sam’s Club and using Click n’ Pull.

Last year on January 9th, I purchased a Sam’s Club membership and haven’t looked back – it has been nothing but a good decision! At this point, our family of seven eats enough that I would need to buy Sam’s Club-sized quantities of a lot of things at the grocery store anyway, and Sam’s makes it easier for me to buy every day things like canned tomatoes at good prices without having to wait for a sale at a regular grocery store.

(Here’s what I buy at Sam’s Club.)

And I can’t tell you how awesome Click n’ Pull is, although this post about the Sam’s Club service attempts to tell you how amazing it is. I love it.

I went from a gas stove to an electric glass-top stove.

For various reasons, we put a glass-top stove in our new kitchen – at some point we’ll have gas, but this was the best option for right now. I loved my gas stove in our old house, and it’s definitely been an adjustment to go to a glass-top stove. I actually have to remove the pan to keep things from boiling over and I can’t just turn off the burner and leave the pan on the stove when I want it to stop cooking.

I do like that the glass-top stove gets a lot hotter than my gas stove did, and I have nothing but good things to say about the oven part – I’m just not a fan of the range.

We started having Friday Pizza and Saturday Cereal.

Frankly, I’ve been pretty overwhelmed lately by how much work it is to cook for seven people – even a “simple” meal is a lot of work.  I love cooking, but sometimes I just want out of the kitchen!  So, Jeremy suggested doing pizza on Friday nights and cereal on Saturday mornings and we’ve done that for a month or two now and I love it.  It’s usually just frozen pizza, though occasionally we’ll get take out, and there’s not usually a vegetable or anything.  Just pizza.  If I tried to do a vegetable, it would defeat the purpose of having Friday Pizza.  I know that might not sit well with some of you, but I’m being honest. :)

And cereal for breakfast on Saturdays is my kids’ favorite meal of the week, I think!  Those two in conjunction give me almost 24 hours of not cooking a meal and it’s been really refreshing to me.

I started weighing ingredients for baking.

A “cup” of flour can range from 100-200 grams, depending on how you measure it. Yes, we are told to scoop it into a measuring cup and level it off for an accurate measurement, but even that produces a wild range of weights – which, especially at high altitude, can really affect the end product.

I started weighing items like flour and sugar for baking and was pleased to discover that my baked goods were more consistent and that it creates fewer dishes! (I think it started when I was developing recipes for From Garbage to Gourmet, because I wanted to make sure that my measurements were accurate.)

The weighing came to a screeching halt when one of my kids decided to help me clean my digital scale with a soaking wet rag, and the inner workings of the scale didn’t take particularly well to water. I went awhile without one but a friend blessed me with one over the holidays and I am anxious to get back into weighing instead of using measuring cups.

I finally found a worthwhile recipe for homemade sandwich bread.

I’m still working on getting back into the habit of baking bread for sandwiches after about a six-month hiatus while we were moving and renovating. I’d stuck with the habit for a couple of months, though, so I’m hopeful that I will be able to do so again. This is one of those things that isn’t too difficult for me to keep up with once it’s into my daily routine, but it takes awhile for me to get in the groove.

Here’s the recipe I use for homemade sandwich bread.

I didn’t freeze any summer produce.

Typically, I try to freeze several gallon-sized bags of blackberries, raspberries, and strawberries during the summer when they are at their best flavor and lowest prices, but because that was smack dab in the middle of our home renovation, I didn’t get that done. I also didn’t get any Hatch chiles roasted and frozen, which makes me sad.

I tried freezer cooking.

My first-ever attempt at cooking at month’s worth of meals and freezing them went well, but the fact that I haven’t done it again and don’t really plan to probably says something about how effective I thought it was.  I’ll definitely keep cooking extra for the freezer, but I’m not sure that spending an entire day in the kitchen is something that’s going to fit into my life on a regular basis.

You can read about how I cook non-casserole meals for the freezer here.

Those are some of the changes that happened in my kitchen in 2013. What about you? Did you have any changes in your cooking, eating, and grocery shopping last year?