Fast Food Alternative - Home Cooked Meals To Go

My husband and I have been very busy this week between last minute preparations for our church's Christmas play this weekend and my college finals fast approaching not to mention our home based business.  In spite of all the craziness, however, we still have to eat.  It is also important for us to keep our blood sugar steady and not compromise healthy eating habits any more than absolutely necessary.  You can only eat so many Subway sandwiches, so I decided to go back to my old friend Google and do some searching for meals that can be eaten in the car when my husband and I are on the run.

Here are a few things I found...

Big Red Kitchen's website has a very interesting series that responds to a busy mom with kids in sports that has to eat on the run.  You can read it here.

Planning Fun Road Trips has great ideas for vacation road trip recipes you can use everyday here.

A blog at Low Carb Friends has several ideas for healthy portable meals to eat on the run here. 

Eating consciously lists easy, portable and fast healthy vegan meal options to go on their website located here.

You can even find delicious brown bag recipe ideas at the busy cooks section of about.com here.

Who says you can't make your own fast food?  Fast food can be more in your control, healthier, and less expensive with some good meal planning and simple preparation techniques.

What is couponing?

Couponing is a relatively new phenomenon for many people.  A simple definition that I personally use is the effective use of coupons to save money, particularly on items you buy often such as groceries. 

So how would coupon use not be effective in saving hard earned money?  Well, it's simple really if you think carefully about it.  Here is an example.  Let's say you plan to buy milk for your household.  Your local food market offers name-brand milk for $3.99 and store brand milk (which you don't know is made by the same manufacturer) for $3.29.  If you have a 50 cent coupon that says "do not double or triple" at the top for the name brand milk, that would bring its price down to $3.49, still 20 cents higher than the store brand milk.  Now twenty cents may not seem like a lot of money when you consider just one item, but over the course of time 20 cents here and 20 cents there can add up.

Let's say you saved just 20 cents per day through smart grocery shopping.  If you multiply that by 365 days in one year, that totals $73.  With the cost of gas constantly going up I can definitely use that much extra cash.  With some creative couponing, strategic sale shopping, and buying generic store brands when you can't save more on name brands with coupons and sales you can even save much, much more than 20 cents per day.