Friday, February 26, 2016

Functional Friday; Mostly Homemade Meals {Falafel and Hummus}

Recently, I've been trying to be more effective at my meal planning.  A huge component of that is not only budget but also time.  Sometimes convience is worth paying for, other times, cooking is actually easier, so I've started documenitng our mostly homemade meals, or partially homemade meals.  Meaning the time consuming ingredients are purchased premade, while the easy stuff is done at home with fresher ingredients.  This technique has been saving me a decent amount of time, and time is money, so it's good for your budget too.
This first meal I'm sharing is a falafel and hummus dinner I made last week.
The homemade items included veggies we already had, cucumber, tomatoes and green tomatoes.  It took all of five minutes maybe to cute FRESH organic veggies and add them to this meal. 
I bought this $10 hummus, baba ganoush, tabbouleh salad combo which is the perfect amount of variety and zero prep work for a meal like this.

Store bought pita bread but heated in the over for that fresh out of the oven home made vibe.
falafel from a box mixed and fried at home, in about a half inch of coconut oil, fried in a skillet I was able to get all the balls fried in one round so it was pretty quick. 
here's a look at my toddler's plate perfect portions and variety for their expanding taste buds, protein, veggies, leafy greens and just a few carbs. Well balanced and pretty quick to make.  I feel really good about the components of the meal and I think it was close to $20 for the whole meal and it was enough to feed a family of four and have plenty of leftovers.
The girls seemed to enjoy it.

What are your meal prep. and food budget tips? I'd love to hear how to be more efficient at this whole making dinner and feeding my family thing.

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