I’m self employed so doing my taxes is taxing. I go through my online bank statements to make sure that I get every possible thing that I paid for that might be deductible. I noticed something odd when I did that this year.

The majority of the times that I used my debit card it was for food. And I use my debit card for everything.

These weren’t big charges. A few dollars each time on average. Stopping for coffee or a snack. But it added up. It occurred to me that if I stopped doing that I’d be richer and probably skinnier too.

Immediately my brain rebelled. As soon as I thought, “No more stopping for food. Make it a challenge or something. Do it for a week,” my brain went nuts. It was screaming for me to stop somewhere, anywhere, please!!!!! It didn’t realize how much I had become accustomed to doing that.

So for the past week I’ve been conscious of what I’m spending on food. I’ve been making meals at home. The SO is even eating them. He swings both ways – carnivore to vegetarian – and he’s on the vegetarian side of the pendulum right now.

I haven’t been perfect. There have been some huge exceptions to my foodie financial freeze but I’ve been better. What’s scary is how unconscious it was. If you’d have asked me I would have said that I didn’t buy extra food that often. Guess I was wrong.

I found a great site today to help with dinners. Healthy Slow Cooking is a vegetarian site that has recipes that cook for a long time. A lot of veggie slow cooker sites cook things for 4 hours which doesn’t help when you work long days. This site also breaks a recipe down to what you do the night before to get ready so you just have to throw it all in the cooker in the morning.

Tonight we are having Santa Fe Spaghetti Squash Casserole and vegan tapioca pudding from my old standby FatFreeVegan.com.