Budget Meals, a Food Blog & Finding Yourself During Residency with Christina Musgrave

The week we recorded this episode, Christina Musgrave's washing machine, dishwasher, and refrigerator were all broken. The dog was sick. Her daughter was starting school. Her husband had been on call for what felt like forever. She was in her first trimester with their second baby. She still made dinner. That detail has stayed with me. Not because it's impressive, though it is, but because it says something true about what happens to women in this season. We keep going. We find the one thing that centers us and hold onto it, even when everything else is coming apart at the seams. For Christina, that thing has always been cooking. She's the food blogger and recipe developer behind Tasting with Tina, a wife in her husband's chief year of neurosurgery residency, a mom to an almost-three-year-old, and a woman who built an entire career out of a $40 weekly grocery budget and a lot of free time that didn't feel free at all. Because here's the part of Christina's story I didn't expect. The loneliness is what made room for the business. When they moved to St. Louis in 2021, knowing exactly two people, eight hours from family, her husband working surgical intern hours, she poured every spare moment into a food blog she'd started just for herself. She wasn't building a strategy. She was surviving. And somewhere in that survival, she built something that would eventually let her walk away from a corporate career she was good at but deeply unhappy in. She describes the rest of her life as being "Miss Rabbit," the Peppa Pig character who holds every job and shows up everywhere. The cook, the bill manager, the school coordinator, the dog wrangler. Most of us in this community could draw that picture from memory. But when Christina steps into her kitchen, she's also just herself. A woman who has always found her reset at the stove. What I love most about this conversation is how practical it gets. Christina has been feeding her family on resident budgets her whole adult life, and she still uses the same strategies she used when $40 a week was the actual number. Shop your freezer first. Buy protein in bulk. She built a cookbook around the idea that dinner on a Tuesday night can still feel like a moment worth sitting down for, even when everything else is chaos. But the thing Christina said that I keep coming back to is this: wanting something of your own isn't selfish. For physician spouses who move when medicine says move, who manage everything and everyone while their partner becomes a doctor, who give and give and give, having something that's just theirs isn't a luxury. It's what gets you through. It doesn't have to be a business. A book club counts. The kitchen counts. It just has to be yours. If you've ever quietly wondered whether there's room for you inside this season, this conversation is your answer. What You'll Learn [04:00 - 06:00] How Christina turned isolation and a lot of free time into the foundation of her business [09:00 - 10:00] The month she felt inexplicably awful, and what she finally realised was going on [13:00 - 14:30] Why cooking is her mental reset, and what she means when she says it's where she feels most like herself [19:00 - 22:30] Budget meal planning for residency families, including the salmon strategy that makes three dinners from one purchase [29:00 - 31:00] What Christina says to physician spouses who are afraid to want something of their own [31:30 - 32:00] The one thing she wishes someone had told her at the very beginning Resources Mentioned • Tasting with Tina (https://tastingwithtina.com/) • Christina's Cookbook: Easy Weeknight Dinners (https://tastingwithtina.com/cookbook/) • Christina on Instagram: @tasting.with.tina (  / tasting.with.tina  ) Your Next Steps • Take the "The Hidden Cost of Being the Strong One" Assessment (https://itgetsbetternow.com/take-the-...) • Learn more about private coaching with Kendra (https://itgetsbetternow.com/) • Listen on Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...) • Listen on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/6N8neJ9...)