I have spent some time the last couple of days figuring out where we went wrong on the Grocery/Personal Care/Cleaning budget last month. We spend 20% more that the amount budgeted.

Because I rank among the world's biggest nerds, I actually went through each grocery receipt, categorized each purchase and wrote the purchase down on a sheet of paper with the category heading at the top. Christmas food purchases sank our food budget. Like most people we have special food items we buy during the Christmas season and some of them are expensive. The dollar amount of these purchases was almost equal to the dollar amount over food budget last month.

I showed my sheets of paper to Mr H. First he said incredulously "You went through every grocery receipt?" Yes, there were quite a few, and while I tend to be organized with receipts I wasn't last month and had to spend some time finding them. He came to the same conclusion regarding Christmas food purchases, then he said something like, "This looks pretty much like what we eat. I don't see how we can spend less money on food." I didn't say anything but I thought, "Them's fighting words - sounds like a challenge to me."

I like to make Stir-Fried Green beans every year at about this time if I have access to garden-grown green beans. The recipe is in the More With Less Cookbook, and it's a tasty way to use a pound of green beans for a dinner. You can use the large-but-not-yet-woody/rubbery green beans for this dish and it comes out well. Green bean gardeners, you know what I'm talking about. Those beans seem to come around later in the season after you've already eaten your weight in small tender beans. You don't really want to throw them away, but they just aren't as good (in my opinion anyway) as the smaller beans.

We visited our farm friends this past weekend, and they gave us about 7 pounds of green beans. I froze five pounds, used one pound for Stir-Fried Green Beans and still have a pound in the fridge.

One slight. . . issue with this dish is that the green beans must be julienned. (Julienned? Is that a word?) That means cut in long skinny pieces. My mom has a gadget that will do this. I don't have that gadget and it takes 30-45 minutes for me to cut them by hand.

The recipe calls for 1/4 pound of beef chuck (steak, I'd guess). I used 1/2 pound of a steak that was given to my husband's work at Christmas time (it's been frozen since then - not in the fridge!). I served this with brown rice for an inexpensive and good-tasting meal.

We went camping last week. We always have a great time - what's not to like about climbing trees, playing in the creek, riding bikes and hanging out by the fire? Mr H camped as a child and I camped with the scouts, and Daisy loves to go camping.

Usually we have some extra food at the end of our trip, and I create some leftover concoction for our dinner when we get home. After packing up the car, then unpacking at home, doing laundry and washing the camp dishes I'm really not up for a great deal of cooking. I'm getting better about estimating the amount of food for our trips though, and we didn't have a whole lot left over this time.

After we'd completed some of the chores Mr H and I were sitting at the table next to the food box. We had four hotdog buns left and somehow they'd gotten under a package of something else and were about half the height of their former selves. Mr H got a good laugh out of them, but I suggested hot dog bun french toast for breakfast the next morning.

That's what we ended up having for dinner last night - hot dog bun french toast. We even had Daisy do most of the cooking of it, furthering her life skills education. We combined this with leftover bacon and ham from our trip, and topped the toast with jam (we're out of syrup).

And Mr H gets extra credit. When we were discussing our dinner plans I suggested going out, and he said "No, I think we should make something from what we have on hand." Usually in this scenario we end up going out.