Goals for Food

I think an important step of changing the way we eat for the better is to document my specific goals for our family.  So here goes:

1. Get all of us to eat healthier:  In talking with Ryan we all have specific eating needs, I just need to figure out the best way to meet all of them.
3. Eat more of a variety of vegetables.  I did a little spread sheet once of all the recipes we typically make and then divided the ingredients into categories like: pasta or rice, produce, dairy, canned goods, etc.  I discovered that basically the only vegetables we eat on a regular basis are: potatoes, green beans, carrots, celery, onions, lettuce, spinach, and occasionally other more "exotic" things like asparagus.
4. Stay in my grocery budget. Basically I am not very good at this.  We have some wiggle room in our budget that we can increase it a little bit if necessary but I need to decide, given our other food goals, what the best amount is for our family and then stick with it.
5. Grow a fair amount of produce we eat in our own garden. Ryan and I both grew up in families with large gardens and mothers that canned what they grew.  I am so grateful for this skill that our families past down to us and have big plans of turning our small weed patch into something much more productive and useful.
6. Waste less food.  I feel like whenever we get a lot of fresh produce inevitably a bunch of it ends up going bad and getting thrown away because I don't use it fast enough, I can't figure out what to make with it, or I just forget about it.  This may also be a menu organizing problem.  If I organize our menu in such a way that when I buy, for instance, something like spinach I include meals with spinach several times so that I use it all up before it goes bad.
7. Improve my cooking skills, learn what ingredients go well together, get better at making meals out of what we have.  Whenever I have something I don't know what to do with I always just jump on to allrecipes.com and see what I can find. Not that doing that is a bad thing, but I would love to have a better knowledge of fruits, vegetables, and especially fresh herbs so that I knew what goes well together and the best way to prepare it without always having to dig up a recipe.  I rarely ever buy fresh herbs and have never grown them because I just don't know what I would do with a large quantity of them.
8. Food storage. We have essentially no food storage and very little in terms of emergency preparedness.  I really want to get organized and have 72 hour kits, a week or so of water for everyone, and at least a three month supply of food that we are rotating through.  I have always thought of food storage as canning jars and mostly #10 cans full of wheat and rice, things that you store in case of natural disaster.  But really it is more for everyday emergencies like running out of grocery money (always happens), or a pay check or reimbursement is delayed, unexpected expenses, being temporarily out of work, city water line gets clogged or backed up (this actually happened once in Provo and we couldn't use the water for a good part of the day).  We even got a letter from our water company recommending we have at least a 3 day supply of water for everyone in our family.

So this gives me lots to work towards but there is no time to start like the present.