#212: What We Ate This Week, How I Prepped, & What I Spent, Part IX

In Part 9 of What We Ate This Week, I’m sharing a very full February week — what we ate, how I prepped, and what we spent as a family of six after returning from travel.

This week includes:

• A full fridge reset after vacation
• Two Trader Joe’s runs + one Costco trip
• Scratch cooking (as always)
• Frozen cookie dough confessions 🍪
• Homemade tortillas 🌮
• Shabbat rhythms ✨
• And how I manage leftovers so I don’t cook on Saturdays

Total grocery spend: $309
Dining out (besides airport): $0

What I Prepped This Week 🥣

• Hard-boiled eggs
• Sourdough pancakes
• Homemade sandwich bread
• One loaf sourdough
• Blueberry scones
• Frozen cookie dough balls
• Sourdough tortillas
• Roasted chickpeas
• Challah for Shabbat
• Pre-packed school lunches
• Washed + chopped snack vegetables & fruit

Meals Mentioned 🍽️

• Chicken noodle soup
• Lentil soup (freezer stash win)
• Meatloaf + mashed potatoes + Brussels sprouts
• Slow cooker chicken taco bowls
• Sheet pan salmon + frozen vegetable mix
• Steak + salad + challah (Shabbat dinner)

Systems That Are Working ✔️

• Bulk mashed potatoes for future meals
• Frozen cookie dough for emergency dessert
• Large after-school snack platter
• Homemade bread rotation
• Leftover-only Saturdays

Budget Notes 💸

Goal: Keep groceries under $1,200/month
Reality this week: Higher than average due to post-trip restock
Win: Zero restaurant spending (minus unavoidable airport food)

www.daraboxer.com

Transcript

Welcome And Series Context

Dara Boxer 0:00

Hello everyone and welcome to the Raw on the Cooked, a weekly podcast that provides simple routines around the home plus raw and honest book reviews. My name is Dara. I'm a Midwestern stay-at-home mom to four young kids, and I thrive on simplicity. Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode. Today we are going to do another segment of what we ate this week, how I prepped, and what I spent part nine. Yes, part nine. And I think after I do part 10, which maybe I'll do over the summer, I'm gonna retire the series. I feel like it was a good run. But in the meantime, I wanted to share what a very, very full week in February looked like. The week that I recorded what we ate for lunch and what I prepped and all the things and how much I spent. And so the my one of my favorite things to do before a trip is to make sure that there's just nothing in the fridge, like no food waste, like you know, there's just it's bare bones. So I feel like when I come back from a trip, we are essentially starting over at the grocery store, like bare bones in the fridge. So it was a really expensive grocery week for us. Um, normally it's not this high, but let's just get right into it. Okay, so after I went grocery shopping, and by the way, the Monday we got back from our trip was President's Day. So I had all four kids at home with me. My hub my husband happened to work at home, so he watched the older kids. I took the baby to the grocery store with me, and we ended up spending$171 at Trader Joe's for our weekly shop. And when we got home, we just I just dove right in. I made a batch of hard-boiled eggs, I made a batch of sourdough pancakes for breakfast in the morning. Those are just our go-to breakfasts on a school day. I usually scramble up four eggs and I make an entire batch of pancakes all in one go, which yields me about 24 pancakes. So it lasts usually the week, depending on how hungry people are for breakfast. And I'll just sort of like pop them in the toaster oven in the morning to warm them up and then make eggs fresh in the morning. So I did a batch of sourdough pancakes as requested. Um, I make a homemade sandwich bread, which if we're not doing the pancakes, my kids like toast in the morning, and I don't know, there's something kind of disturbing about what they put in our store-bought bread. So I just make it myself with five, six ingredients. Like it's just easy. I also use them for peanut butter sandwiches, just whenever I feel much better about that. Um, I packed lunch boxes for the kids' school lunches for the rest of the week, um, prepped and cut up and chopped and organized and washed and sorted berries and vegetables for easy grab and go snack plates for an after-school snack for my kids. I usually have um this like long melanite platter that I put um chopped bell peppers, uh, baby carrots, chopped cucumbers, uh maybe a couple tomatoes. I do grapes, strawberries, blueberries, cut-up pears, cut-up apples, a handful of cashews, a handful of almonds, um, maybe a cracker, maybe a handful of popcorn, um, just a big snack plate for the kids. And it usually works as a fabulous after-school snack. They I don't know what it is, but kids just come home from school so hungry and just so ready to go. So I feel like a good day is when I can get a snack plate put together before I go out and pick them up from school, just depending on who's napping or what's going on here. Um, and then that way if they don't eat like a ton at dinner, it's fine because I know that whatever I put on the snack plate is pretty healthy and it's like mom-approved, and so you know that's that. Um, as always, I baked a loaf of sourdough sometime that week. Um, I'm gonna count keeping the sourdough starter alive as a meal prep task. Um, I did a batch of scones for school snacks. I do one-packed lunch for the kids at school. Um, we do those bento go boxes with the five compartments. So I make four of those per kid per week. We do pizza lunches on Friday, and then I have to send each kid with a morning and an after school snack. So I usually either send them in with like a piece of fruit for one and then a baked good for the other. So I rotate, I either make a batch of homemade scones or homemade muffins. Lately, we've been defaulting to banana chocolate chip muffins, and I wish I could put almonds or not almonds, sorry. I wish I could put like crushed pecans or some sort of nut in there as well for like a little boost of protein. But of course, it's 2026 and like every school is nut-free, which is so annoying. But anyway, I was getting kind of sick of making those, so I decided to make a blueberry scone. I had some frozen blueberries in the freezer that I just felt like I needed to use up, so that was uh a good way to utilize that for the scones. Um, my kids let me know that the scones were good, but they like the muffins better. So for the following week, I switched back to muffins for the record. Um, okay, so other things that I prepped that week, I did two dozen cookie dough balls. And so let me explain. I have one of my favorite cookie dough recipes ever. I've been using it for over a decade at this point, and a lot of times I will double the recipe, which yields two dozen cookies, no, four three dozen, it's a lot of cookies. It's a lot of cookies. I actually don't know how many it yields, but I double the recipe. And what I do is after I scoop them and shape them into like I use like a little ice cream scooper, so I get like perfect little cookie dough portions. I pop them in a Ziploc bag, and then that way, if I need dessert in a pinch, if we have company or whatever, I can just like grab them out of the freezer and bake them while we're eating dinner. It has saved me a couple of times when we hosted a dinner party, but more often than not, my husband and I will just grab a frozen cookie dough ball and just like have that as a dessert like in the middle of the week. And my kids have now started doing that too. So instead of just like baking cookies like a normal person, my kids just eat frozen cookie raw cookie dough balls like straight from the freezer, um, which is great, but there are three of them at the at this moment in time that do that, and plus my husband and plus myself. So that's five frozen cookie dough balls per person per day. So you can imagine how quickly even two badges of cookies go. So that is now like a new regular thing that I'm doing, which is just like prepping cookies but not baking them, just putting them directly in the freezer. Try it. I mean, I know a lot of people will be like, wait, what about salmonella? And like my response to that is do you know a single human being that has ever in the history of existence had salmonella from like a frozen cookie dough ball? I mean, I don't, I don't know. I don't, I feel like I'm just gonna live on the edge here and serve it to my children and be okay with it. Um, another thing I prepped, um, we had a night where I needed tortillas, so I have a really delicious sourdough tortilla recipe. It comes together really quickly and really easily, so I'm gonna share that too. And then the final thing that I prepped this week in advance were roasted chickpeas. My two little ones are home with me. They're one and three, and they both really like chickpeas, and I love roasting them with really yummy spices, so that's what we did. Um, so I told you that our original Trader Joe's Monday shop was$171. I had to go back to the store Wednesday and reload up on fruits and vegetables. Um, my kids are also at the point where each of them has like at least two to three apples andor pears per day, and there are four of them, so that's a lot of apples and pears that we go through, um, especially the baby. I feel like now she like after watching her brothers and sister walk around with apples and pears and just grab it out of the fridge, that's like her new thing, too. So I feel like my apple and pear and orange budget has wildly increased. So my midweek Trader Joe's shop was another$75.94. We also had to go to Costco. This was something I had been kicking down the road for like three weeks at this point, and I just needed to go. So I backed out all the toiletry supplies. Like we I think we got paper towels that run and maybe a couple of other things that weren't grocery related. But for the grocery items, I spent another$61.76. We like basically live off of bread here, so I like never not get bread flour when we're at Costco. We live off of almonds and cashews, olive oil, and butter. So they were pretty basic things. Like it was there were no impulse buys over here, but you know, it is what it is. So the total for that week was$309 on the grocery front, but zero on dining out, which I'm really proud of. Oh wait, no, that's not true. Okay, so let's go through the week. So Sunday, we're gonna start our weeks on Sunday. Um, Sunday we were actually at the airport traveling home from Arizona, and the between the flights and the times, whatever, we like just had to pick up lunch at the airport, which is always an unfortunate situation. Um, we ended up grabbing airport sandwiches from Pete's coffee shop. They just had a Pete's and they had like pre-made sandwiches. We split a bunch of things, and for the six of us, it ended up being$63.77, which isn't terrible, but I mean, it's just for the quality of the food, it wasn't like ideal. Um, so dinner when we arrived home, I ended up um in between unpacking and watering the plants and getting the mail and just settling in and like you know, doing all the things after you get home from a trip with four children. Um, made a batch of rice, and then we split one of those like really large-size Costco cans of tuna and then just had them with crackers, and like that was the best we could do. Everyone was exhausted and just cranky from traveling, no one really ate much, so you know that was fine. Um, Monday again was President's Day, the kids are home from school, um, and it was just a really good day to like resettle in, um, do our big Trader Joe's load up. Um, and again, we were out of like everything, so that shop was nearly$200. Um, but it was nice because it allowed me to deep clean the shelves and the drawers and the fridge before we left. Um, you know, like getting in there with a vacuum and um like spray and a cloth, like it was good, it was much needed. Um, so for lunch we had sandwiches and I made a big snack plate for all the kids to share of, you know, those berries, carrots, cucumbers, bell peppers, crackers, nuts, what have you. Um, so Monday night for dinner, my husband wasn't feeling great that day, so I decided to go ahead and do a chicken noodle soup with a sourdough loaf, and um we ate pretty early that night since our three-year-old has ice skating on Mondays. Uh, so that was a nice little Monday dinner. Um, Tuesday, I had lentil soup from several weeks prior that was frozen, and so I thawed that out when we got back from our trip and I split that lentil soup with the baby once she woke up from her nap. She really, really, really likes lentil soup. So that's always fun. I feel like it's like a good, healthy, easy meal for a one-year-old. Um, and if you like drain the soup part and you just give her like the cooked lentils, carrots, and celery, it's actually like pretty toddler friendly. So yeah. Um, our three-year-old that day for lunch just had a bunch of different snacks because you know he's three. And I was able to prep dinner while the two of them took their joint naps. My husband was at work and the older two were at school. Uh dinner that night was meatloaf with a big batch of mashed potatoes and roasted Brussels sprouts. I like to boil and do um at least three pounds of mashed potatoes at a time. That way I can use them either later in the week for another meal, or even if there's like more than like two meals worth of mashed potatoes, throw them in the freezer for a following week. So it's kind of like a little gift to myself. Um, we're also getting to the point where perhaps it would make more sense to bake two pounds of ground beef instead of one. Um, but either way, it was a huge hit. We had like no leftovers to speak over, to speak of, which was kind of sad. Um, because usually I will pack my husband dinner leftovers for lunch, and so that's kind of like what he does. He, yes, has his own bento box that I pack for him. It's a little bit more sophisticated than the children's bentoco boxes, but it's essentially the same idea where it has like different compartments where I can put stuff in there for him, and it's really lovely. Um, so yeah, we do that. Um on Wednesday for lunch, I ended up having the last of the chicken noodle soup for lunch, and then dinner was slow cooked chicken taco bowls, and so this is just one of my favorite things. I um just throw in boneless, skinless chicken thighs in my slow cooker. I season them with a bunch of different, like yummy, um, it's like a paprika base and has like onion powder, uh, garlic powder, um, and just like a couple of other spices that makes it like Mexican-y. Um, and then uh at the last like 30 minutes of cooking, I'll throw in black beans. Um, we use the rice that I had cooked on Sunday, and then I made homemade guacamole, just a few simple ingredients, just avocado, lime, salt, um, a tiny bit of shallot, and then fresh cilantro that's really easy to whip up. It takes like less than 10 minutes from start to finish. Um, salsa and then sour cream. I'm using air quotes, you can't see, but I use Greek yogurt and just tell my kids that it's sour cream because it's healthier, and then um homemade tortillas. I love making homemade tortillas. I feel like they take way less time than you would think. Um, they just need a 30-minute rise and they come together in like four minutes. What I you use your hands to mix them up, let them rest. Um, I usually do that right before I leave to pick up my kids from school, and then when they get home from school, my daughter likes to help me finish them up by like baking them into balls and rolling them with a rolling pen, and then I will do the like cooking on the griddle. It's so easy and it's so much fun, and it's a fun way to involve them. And they actually like they're like, wow, this is great. Um, so that's that, and it has like four ingredients, which like you can't go wrong with. Thursday, I made myself a big salad for lunch, and I roasted a couple of cans of chickpeas for that day. It's lunch for myself and our three-year-old and our one-year-old, and then also saved some for Friday night. Uh, dinner on Thursday was roasted sheet pan. Um, I had a big bag. You guys know those like big, like seven dollar bags of frozen vegetables from Costco, like it has like carrots and then broccoli and uh cauliflower. It's it's like this enormous bag. So anyway, I usually will buy one and it takes us forever to go through, but it's just a nice way, it like saves a little bit of money. So I did that, um, and then we had leftover mashed potatoes along with the sheet pan salmon and the Costco frozen broccoli. It wasn't anything fancy, but I got the job done. Um, my husband does not like that we serve salmon to a one-year-old. I don't blame him. You know, they're just so gross and it's greasy and oily, and she like never not rubs the salmon grease in her hair or her skin. So Thursdays or whenever I do salmon or pasta, it's just like an automatic bath for the one-year-old. So that was alas the situation that night as well. And then Friday night was Shabbat, and I forgot to mention on my like what I prepped this week. Um, of course, since we had like nothing uh that week, I ended up making a fresh batch of homemade khala, which is one of my favorite things to do on Friday morning, um, just to kind of get that dough set. It rises most of the day, and then my kids love to help me breed it when they get home from school. I love like cracking over open a bottle of red wine around like 4, 4:30 in the afternoon and just like easing into the Sabbath. It's just one of my favorite things. I ended up um just sauteing a couple of pieces of uh steak. I made a big salad with just super simple like carrots, uh, carrots, cucumbers, and tomatoes, and then roasted chickpeas. I made a delicious balsamic sauce, and then um we had my cousin come over for Shabbat dinner, which is another one of my favorite things to do on Friday. Um, it's just like a really good Shabbat. I I didn't record what we had for lunch, probably just leftovers of whatever was in the fridge. And Saturday, again, leftovers as well. Um, I've decided that I'm just like done cooking on the Sabbath, like just done not doing it anymore. Um, so I try my hardest to bulk up whatever we have throughout the week so that Saturday can just become for lunches and dinner, just like leftover day. And then that's a good way to kind of like clear up the fridge and start fresh because I usually grocery shop on Mondays. So that is everything that we ate over the week, um, how I prepped and what I spent. So the total for my two Trader Joe's runs and a Costco run was$309, which isn't crazy, but that's definitely a little bit more than we spend every week. I usually try to keep our grocery budget under$1,200 a month. Um, as a family of six, I don't think that's terrible, but I don't know, you tell me like, should I be doing better? Um, and that is everything uh I recorded for this week. Thank you so much for tuning in to another installment of what we ate, what I spent, and what we prepped this week. Thanks and have a good one.