Eating in vs. Dining Out

I love going out to eat. We go out to eat a lot! In 2007 I kept track of where all of our money was spent (at least the money that was spent using Visa check cards/debit cards and the cash that had receipts turned in - dear husband still doesn't have the whole "turn all the receipts in" down pat yet so my record keeping is off a little bit.) Anyway, after running the end of the year report in the program I use I was astonished to find out that we spent close to $5000 last year just on dining out in restaurants or fast food joints! That works out to $400.00+ a month! That's a whole bunch of Happy Meals!!Needless to say, now that I have a year's worth of income/expenses to look at I can see where we need to "trim the excess spending" and this is the FIRST PLACE we are starting. So far in January of this year we spent $150.00 and in February we spent $250.00 (but we were out of town on that Marriage Retreat for a week too.) I am shooting for even less in March!

Last night I made this delicious homemade pizza crust that I "stole" from Monica's blog - The Full Table. My husband could eat pizza every night of the week and we generally order it from Pizza Hut at least once a week. I made two pizzas last night because Dakota had a friend spending the night so there would be 6 people eating - we all ate and had some leftover. My husband said this pizza was way DELICIOUS!!! I'll definitely be making it again!

I didn't have tomato sauce so I substituted this:
1 can of Italian style diced tomatoes on the boys pizza - since they don't like to "see" tomatoes I blended them up in the blender to make it into a sauce; then the toppings I put on theirs was ground turkey I had browned and plenty of cheese.
Garden style Ragu - spread parmesan cheese on the crust first, then small bit of Ragu, then fresh spinach leaves, fresh mushrooms, and topped it off with cheese.
Thanks Monica - it was great!!