5 Dollar Dinners Workshop Recap

Oh, ladies! Let me tell you how much fun I had this past Saturday! Erin’s workshop about making $5.00 meals was fun, informative and very helpful; the coffee with the girls afterward was wonderful and exciting. It was worth every minute of the hour and a half drive, even considering the migraine I got on the drive back home. Worth. Every. Minute.

Erin’s workshop walks you through her process to create meals for her family of four for $5.00 or less. The first step is menu planning (using sales flyers or what you have in your pantry) to keep you from over-spending. I already plan our menus around here, but I still got a few tips for how I can better improve that process. Also, I mentioned a while back that I have been working on a new menu plan system? I put it down to ponder a few things and now, after hearing what Erin had to say, I am back up and running and hope to finish that new system soon.

I’ve also been grocery shopping for 2-3 weeks at a time for several months now, but I’ve been going to our local store where I can’t really make very good use of coupons or anything. I’ve been wanting to start leaving the children with my mother in law or husband for a day and take off the next town over (where they have all the big chain grocery stores) and shop all their sales, and start using coupons again – but I felt like I needed some pointers before getting into that. Well – now I’ve got them. Erin gave tips on finding the best coupons, matching coupons with sales, and all that sort of thing. I’ve got a wealth of coupon information now!

Throughout the course of the workshop, Erin also prepared a couple of easy and inexpensive chicken dishes for us to sample. They hardly took any work at all and they were delicious when they were done!

After the workshop, Erin, Alyssa, Stephanie, Rachel and I chatted over coffee and pastries for a couple of hours – but it didn’t seem that long, and I could have hung out with them even longer. I’m sure I talked their ear off, though I tried not to. My talk-o-meter gets cranked up when I’m excited though, so I’m sure that I probably did. They may prefer to stick to Twittering me from now on where I’m limited to 140 characters. 😉

Chatting with these ladies was wonderful, they were so fun and friendly. I, personally, felt very encouraged and renewed after getting away for the day, attending a workshop just for me, and hanging out with four like-minded bloggers – without kids, without timeframes or deadlines, without thinking about my house and what needed to be done or cooked or cleaned or whatever. I think it was just the boost I needed!

I guess I could have summed it all up by saying (but why WOULD I have??) :

Workshop – $5.00
Coffee and Croissont: $4.50
An hour and a half drive to spend the day with these ladies = Priceless.