$100 a month on groceries....how I did it.

These musings are to give myself a pat on the back. Oh, I guess that's what this whole blog is. Well, here is something else I want to celebrate. And that is Thriftiness, Frugality, saving money, whatever you want to call it. Money has been tight around here the past month. So much so that we have had very little money for groceries. My grocery money was cut in a fourth for the past month in order to get caught back up on some bills. So I decided when I saw the cold hard truth in front of me via Quicken that there was no need to worry or panic or be depressed. We have food storage! Let me say though that we do not have the kind of food storage where we have absolutely everything we need to live off of. I wish! I strive for that but we are not there yet. So these are a few things that I have done to live off of a $100 budget for the past month.

1. Check out the weekly ads and make a list of the items that are a really good deal and buy those items.
Which has resulted in about one shopping bag per week. Remember that most grocery stores will take competitor coupons so you don't have to run around wasting your gas.

2. I gave 2 jars of my home canned chicken to a friend and she made both of our families enough chicken noodle soup for 3 meals.

3. Harvest almost everything that is left in my garden and eat it.

4. Borrow $20 from my daughter to go out to eat with friends. ( I was able to pay her back a couple days later)

5. Use up all those things in my freezer and fridge that I never feel like using.

6. Shop at the Franz bakery outlet. 10 loaves of bread for $4!

I was telling Chris that I was surprised at what I have been able to come up with in the department of dinners for our family. For example, Thriftway had acorn squash on sale last week. I was able to buy 2 large ones for $1.39. So my dinner started out with that as a base. I would have been fine eating just that but I knew that wouldnt fly with my honey so I looked in the freezer and decided that I needed to use up that other package of Falafels that I had bought at Costco. Remembering that Heidi didn't like them I decided to press forward anyway hoping I could disguise them to look like a meatball dish (which she loves). To see if I succeeded in this check out Heidi's blog here. Just don't laugh at the very disgusting looking picture she took. It really looked much better than that. I had used up the rest of the rice in our house the week before so I dug around in the back of my cupboards and found a box of couscous. Yay! So I mixed a can of cream of chicken soup (from food storage) with the rest of a carton of sourcream, added a little water and 2 tbsp of curry powder and let that simmer with the frozen falafels. We had that over a bed of couscous and had acorn squash with it.

In April my cousin, Marlo, had given me a huge chunk of ham from her freezer that they weren't going to eat. It had been sitting in my freezer since then. I have been putting off using it because I just knew it would have freezer burn. So i pulled it out on Saturday and stuck it in the fridge to defrost. Yesterday morning I pulled it out and cut off the freezer burn. (Just a note: freezer burn is not a safety issue, only a quality issue) I threw it in my crock pot with a couple cups of water and set it on low. When everyone got home from church I drained off the liquid and shredded it. I threw in a bottle of barbecue sauce from my fridge that needed to get used up. I was planning on just putting it on bread for barbecue ham sandwiches but then I saw the containers of Pillsbury crescent rolls that I had bought at Albertsons last week. When you bought ten of certain items those items were only $1 each. Normally crescent rolls can be spendy and I knew that was a good deal so we got about 6 containers. I also know how many things you can do with crescent rolls. I wasn't a pampered chef consultant for 4 years for nothing! So i pressed out the crescent rolls and put a dollop of barbecue ham and some grated cheese on each one and made barbecue ham bundles. The whole family loved them and I had enough left over to put in Makenzie's lunch today.

So we made it through the month and I'm feeling encouraged to be more diligant in shopping with the weekly ads in mind. I couldn't keep on living off of $100 a month because I have depleted most things from my freezer and a lot of our food storage but it's great to know that I can do it when I am prepared.

Oh, one other thing we did to cut expenses long term: we cut our size of garbage can in half and are going to be better about recycling. We just finished our first week with this and we did it! We even had room to spare in the garbage can. It's amazing how much stuff you can actually recycle now.