I learned the Midwestern meat-and-potatoes-and-a-canned-veggie kind of cooking as a kid. I knew from an early age how to bake pies and other treats from scratch. As a young mom, I wanted to cook healthier (and cheaper) food and at La Leche League meetings I learned about whole foods (lower case). The LLL cookbook Whole Foods for the Whole Family taught me how to soak beans, make yogurt and bread, use brown rice instead of white, how to make lentils (which I'd never had in my life) taste good, how to sprout my own alfalfa seeds -- I went way back to basics. I fed my family on an extreme budget -- we never went out to eat, I used meat sparingly and I never wasted a morsel of food. Jump ahead and I'm now married to a vegetarian, so I had to revamp everything. More bread and pasta (although I stopped making my pastas from scratch!) and veggies. No more big pots of chicken soup or ham in the beans. You know what you have to do: You need to make an actual menu! And you have to be realistic about it. Look at your credit card statements and determine how many times each week you are actually not going to eat at home, and then only plan meals for the times when you will be home. Also, uncook some meals -- my husband typically takes two mandarins, two bananas, two apples and a container of cashews to work with him. If there's fresh bread, he eats that. This is all really cheap. BTW, I agree that we're eating ridiculous amounts of protein. When my husband was doing manual labor, his co-workers were shocked to find he's been a vegetarian for around 40 years, because he's stronger and more energetic than most men half his age. The man is not suffering from his diet based on bread, beans, fruit and veg.