Friday Roundup: Food, Recipes & Being Frugal.

Happy Friday DINKS. It’s Friday and time to make plans for the weekend.  How will you spend your Saturday and Sunday? Or, should I ask how will you spend your money this Saturday and Sunday?  I love to spend my money on takeout food and eating out in restaurants.  While sticking with my new budget, I will try and spend a lot less money on eating out.  Last year I spent an excessive amount of money on eating out, actually, I spent $4668 on food to be exact.

I have recently been researching ways that other personal finance bloggers are saving money on the cost of food. It seems that the major expense that people cut out when creating a new budget is the expense of eating out, ordering in, and expensive dining.

This year I gave up eating donuts for lent.  For our non Catholic friends, lent is the 40 day period leading up to Easter when we have to give up something or make a sacrifice.  My lack of donuts has saved me $3 a day at least 3 times a week.  I developed a crazy addiction to munchkins, the little donut balls.  Over the next 40 days I will save at least $120.  Hopefully in 40 days I will no longer crave donuts.  This will save me over $468 per year.

Here are some posts from around the web about the relation between personal finance and healthy eating, as well as cutting back on the costs of food in our budget.

• Amber from Blonde and Balanced discusses how she cut out caffeine in her post Living Without Caffeine. If we spend $5 on Starbucks every work day that adds up to $25 a week, and $1300 per year.
• Green Panda Tree House discusses ways to be healthy both physically and financially in their post Tips to Becoming Financially Healthy.
• Brooklyn Bitches on a Budget gives us 10 different recipes to recycle and reuse our left over rice in their post Gourmet Edition: Leftover Rice. I recommend you check it out. Their delicious recipes include Easy rice balls, Chicken Soup with Rice, Rice pudding, and Risotto cakes.

Photo by Make Less Noise