Thai Chicken Salad

So Merci did come over the next day. This is the dinner I made. It was supposed to be lettuce wraps, but the lettuce leaves were a little small. Merci and Spencer ate dinner as lettuce wraps, but Elliot, Gracie and I made a salad. Yum, yum!

I bought the peanut sauce and cashew tamarind sauce from the Cheesecake Factory when Elliot and I went in Atlanta. It was pricey to buy the sauces ($16 for both) but still much cheaper than going to the restaurant. There were about 10 generous servings in each jar. Lettuce wraps at the CF are about $12 - $14 each.
Lettuce Wraps... Or Salad? Your Choice!

Ingredients:
Lettuce
Cilantro
Shredded Carrots
Bean Sprouts
Whole Wheat Spaghetti Noodles
Chopped Peanuts
Chicken Breasts (Sauteed in a little Asian Vinagrette)
Peanut Sauce
Tamarind Cashew Sauce

Our First Test

Last night our friend Merci was supposed to come over and Heidi was going to make lettuce wraps. For some reason I'm not totally sure about, the whole plan got canceled around 6:30 and dinner hadn't been started yet. Heidi and I both immediately thought, "Let's go out and grab something," because that's what we normally would have done in the past, maybe go to Sonny's or Moe's. But instead Heidi found some frozen appetizers in the freezer, cooked them, and we had potato skins, chicken strips, and mozzarella sticks. Heidi also made Brussels sprouts, but I didn't have any because I can't stand them! Believe it or not the kids like them, so they had some of those. We missed seeing Merci that night, but at least we passed the test! Fortunately Merci came over tonight and we had the lettuce wraps. If you don't know what those are, Heidi took a picture so stay tuned.

A new year, a new plan

For me, the beginning of this plan came with a New Year's contest between me and Heidi. I told her my New Year's resolution was to not argue with her, so she proposed a contest: me not arguing with her versus her making dinners at home other then Friday night and Sunday after church. The first one to fail would lose. Sounded great to me, because I was looking for ways for us to spend less money and eat healthier. But what to do with that extra money? I assumed we would save it, but honestly would it really be saved? Despite our best intentions it would probably get spent on something else that we really didn't need. When Heidi suggested that we take the money and save it for a well, I thought it was a great idea! We already have so much that we don't need anything more. Compare that to the people we will be helping, who don't even have the basic need of clean water. What better use can we put that money towards?

How we came up with the idea

Note from Heidi 1/7/2011:

We, similarly to a lot of American families, tend to eat out a lot. We have a teen and a pre-teen, jobs, commitments, you know how that goes! And, I admit, I really enjoy eating at restaurants. I like that everyone can order what they want to have to eat. I like that I can be seated and involved in conversation while someone else brings me a refill on my drink. I like that there is no clean up involved in eating out, save the occasional tossing of old leftover containers from the fridge. Besides, it is so much easier to swing by a restaurant as part of the daily “mom’s taxi” shuttle service then to actually plan and cook a meal. 

So how did we decide on this project? Sometime during the last week or two of 2010, one of the mission collections at our church, http://www.trinitygnv.org/ , was for Living Water International, http://www.water.cc/, a program that drills wells to supply clean drinking water for those that don’t have a clean water source. I thought about what a great charity Living Water International is, offering the most basic need for a person to survive – clean water. I thought about how I would love to sponsor a well as a family someday and possibly even travel to the country to help with the set-up and drilling. Maybe in a few years, after the kids are done with college, when the mortgage is paid off, when we have some extra money, I thought. Suddenly, God put the idea in my head that a well through this program costs about $5000 – that’s only about $100 a week! For our family, that is eating at a sit-down restaurant two times during the week. We probably average about twice that. So, it seemed as if God was saying, “Give up some of your extravagance so that others may have the basics.” I set a goal. We will take $100 of our budgeted food money each week, saved by cooking at home, and put it towards our well fund. By the end of the year, we should have saved enough money to provide a well in a Central American country - a new year, a small change in our habits, a big difference! 

When I discussed this idea with the family, they were all excited about the idea as well. We all agreed we would continue to do our Friday night family dinners at a restaurant and have lunch out Sunday after church. The goal is not to have the plan be so constricting that we give up on it after a couple of weeks. We don’t want to live like paupers. We don’t want to give up on all our family fun and entertainment. We just want to be more conscientious- something a lot of us could improve on. I hope this blog will be of interest to you and help keep me accountable. Happy 2011!