Friday Food #35

Is it a coincidence that I’m on #35 and I just turned 35 last week?  Maybe I subconsciously planned to slack off on my Friday Foods so that these two events would coincide!  Actually, I’ve just had quite a bit going on and not always enough time or energy to get a post ready each week.  You know, having two bathrooms redone, trying to sell a house, buying a house in Colorado, being a single mom for weeks on end, getting ready to move. . . just a few minor things like that.

We aren’t a family who goes out to eat a LOT, but it is definitely something we enjoy.  We always go somewhere where there are healthy options, and if we can do it on a budget, all the better, right?  Last week, I was looking for somewhere that we could all go for Emery’s birthday, which was on a Tuesday night.  I went online and found a website that listed all the restaurants in Charlotte that have “kids eat free or on the cheap” nights.  Lucky for me, I realized that Moe’s (one of our favorites) lets kids eat for just 99 cents on Tuesday nights!  So off to Moe’s we went.  I guess since it was Emery’s birthday, they decided to give all the girls their meals for FREE—total cost for all four of us to eat?  $6.76.

Yesterday afternoon, I was wondering what I was going to make for dinner.  I’ve been on a mission to get rid of everything we have in our fridge/freezers before we move so that we can save money by not wasting all that food!  Well, my creative juices just weren’t flowing yesterday and I couldn’t figure out what to make.  Thank goodness my friend Katie has perfect timing.  As I was stewing over what I was going to scrounge up for dinner, I got an email from her telling me that EarthFare (a grocery store similar to Whole Foods) has a Family Dinner Night every Thursday.  With every purchase of an adult meal of at least $5,00, SIX kids can eat for FREE!  (Many places have a policy of one free kid’s meal per paying adult.)

Apparently this deal has been going on since March, so why am I just now finding out about this only one week before we move?  It’s not often that you find a kid’s meal that doesn’t have chicken fingers and mac-n-cheese as the options.  Each child fills out their own little menu like this:

My sandwich cost $5.99, so the four of us ate for just the cost of my sandwich.  The girls loved their meals (they would highly recommend the veggie hummus roll-up) and they were super excited when they saw that they had a face painter and a balloon maker there as well!  That place was HOPPIN’!

We will definitely be going again next Thursday if any of my Charlotte peeps want to join us (the packers will have all our stuff boxed up by then so we don’t really have an option to eat at home anyway)!  For those of you who don’t live in Charlotte, do a Google search to find out what healthy meals on the cheap are available in YOUR neck of the woods!  (Do I have to pay a royalty to Al Roker to be able to say that?)