toddling along and bitching about food

I've been on auto-pilot a little bit the last week. I don't think I'm overspending, but honestly I sort of stopped paying attention. I'm back on the "next week I'll figure it out" cycle, and I need to kick it. I have to get back on a good schedule of grocery shopping and cooking. If there's one thing that kills my budget every damn week it's eating out.

I read recently on get rich slowly about the lost art of meal planning. It makes so much sense to prepare ahead of time and have things on hand when you want to cook them, but it really seems like a joke even thinking about it. A generation ago I would have probably been married and bought a house by now, and even if I had a job I definitely would be home every night cooking and getting the laundry done. It's no wonder meal planning is a lost art; I don't even know where I'm going to be every night until I'm there. And cooking for 1 is such an enemy of frugality. Buying in bulk saves money, but I ate lentil soup for 5 straight meals last week (excluding breakfast) and wanted to throw the rest all over the windows. And if anybody out there wants me to make a few things and freeze them, listen up: I have 4 roommates. I can barely get an ice tray in there. I'm similarly limited in refrigerator space. Produce goes bad because I'm the only one eating it (this has been a problem for 9 years now), which makes keeping meat out of my cooking that much harder. This is all in addition to the fact that I'm not a very good cook and I don't even enjoy doing it by myself.

I don't think there's an easy answer to this, or I wouldn't still be struggling after all these months and years. But I'm going to try not to get discouraged. No matter how silly it seems, I think I'll at least research making meal plans. Maybe there's a good way to adapt it to my unpredictable lifestyle. I've never actually stocked a pantry with staples, so that might be in order, as well.

In other news, I'm posting from my computer at home! So that's an improvement.