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More real grocery bills

Well, on a good note, I haven't really been to the grocery store since the beginning of the month! That's probably more because of lack of time as opposed to any real will power.  I have three 'bills' today - one is for Easter, which was a very low key affair at our house this year, one is for a last-class party and the munchies for that, and the last one is the real grocery bill. So I guess I have been to the store, but not for grocery shopping - and I LOVE grocery shopping, so this is a good thing! To be honest though, I did go out for lunch twice last week, after months of good behaviour and packing my lunch. One day was soup from the local awesome soup place, called Spoon Lickins, and the other was a slice of deep dish Hawaiian pizza from the local awesome pizza place called Vinnie's. Both cost less than $5.00, but that's about $9.50 added to my food bill this month.

I spent $44 on Easter candy for my three kids and I. No toys, no bikes, no new wardrobes -- Mr. Bunny is trying to support sustainable holidays and support the very poor people in the world. At least that's what he told me, and I told my kids. I had $50 budgeted for Easter, and I stuck to it. 

My after class party was $14 worth of goodies, and that was too much, really. I just wanted to make sure I got at least one tart of each kind, so I had to buy two packages. My prof's husband made us a chocolate cheesecake though, so the tarts weren't actually needed. I've frozen them and I'll pull them out next time I need some sort of treat somewhere. 

The grocery bill came to $52, and there was some stocking up in there as well. I'll have to figure out what exactly I've come into this challenge with - I've said it before, but I have a very well stocked pantry and freezer. When I separated from my husband I had this media-induced fear of going hungry and I think I've pretty well succeeded in making sure that won't happen!! But I'll save that for another post. $52 for groceries is the important point to remember.

2 more real grocery bills

Okay - two more grocery bills. One was a March 31 last minute run to the grocery store before class. Remember the first rule of grocery shopping on a budget - DON'T SHOP WHEN YOU'RE HUNGRY. Ugh. More on that in a bit. I spent $46.67 at the store, but $17.87 was paper products and household products, which means I spent $28.80 on food. I also had $2.58 in gas receipt coupons, so that brought the total down to $26.22.  Now, the problem with shopping hungry is that I spent $2.33 on cut up vegetables with dip. So essentially I spent $2.33 on what amounts to one carrot and one stalk of celery. I could buy pounds of either carrots or celery with that much money!! But I was soo hungry, and they looked so ... green. And orange. Stupid.

The second rule of shopping is to leave the kids at home, or school, or something! I swear I spend twice as much when they are shopping with me. Today we took a trip to the Farmer's Market in Sarnia, Ontario, and we had a really great time! It helped a lot that the first person in the door gave the kids a sample of cinnamon honey - they thought that was pretty cool. We spent $14.50 at the market, and that was actually a good part of the trip. The kids went crazy for the giant Golden Delicious apples we bought, we at all the cheese curds in the parking lot, and the little beignets ... oh my, the beignets. The troubles came up when we got to the grocery store. I was a bit tougher today, and didn't give in to too many demands, but at least half the bill was junk food they picked out. I spent $19.80 at the store today, and had no coupons to reduce the cost.

More real grocery bills

Apparently I have a hard time resisting the grocery store! Here's 2 more of my grocery bills, although both are somewhat of a stock up trip. Chicken breasts were on sale for $2.99lb (skinless, boneless), and 3lbs of Parkay Margarine were on sale for $2.99. I know, I know, you don't have to tell me that skin on, bone in chicken breasts are cheaper, and if I debone and skin them, I can make soup. I've done that. Now I'm lazy. And in this case, these chicken breasts were the same price as the skin on bone in kind. 

The margarine was a good buy, because I usually pay $1.27lb for No Name cooking margarine. This works out to $1lb AND it comes over-packaged in little 1/2 cup squares. Wonderful stuff.

My sister took a trip to the U.S. today to go shopping, and I couldn't believe the prices over there!! $1.49lb for butter! A gallon of milk for less than $2.00! I can't wait to go check it out on Sunday - I'm hoping to find some good deals on powdered milk.

All right, enough procrastinating - on to my grocery bills. This keeps me honest, and aware of what I spend, that's for sure.

My real grocery bill

Okay, so I like to brag about spending next to nothing on groceries, but I thought I should actually keep track of what I *really* spend. I am on a budget - I think we all are - so let's compare bills. My advance budget for groceries is set at $225 for the month, to feed myself and three kids. My ex-husband and I share custody of the kids, so they are not here every single day but I do still have to feed them.

I should point out that I do not buy meat at the grocery store. In January I bought a half of a cow and have it in my freezer, and last summer I bought a half of a pig and there's still a little bit of pork left too. Chicken is one thing I still have to buy, since I haven't found a source of inexpensive market farm chicken yet.  But I will! And then I'll stock my freezer full of that too. The total cost for the half cow averaged out at $1.95 per pound (one quarter from one supplier at $2.30lb and 1/4 from another at $1.60lb). The pork was about $2 lb. There is about $450 worth of meat in my freezer, so that will have to be worked into the monthly bill over the year.

What I'll do is list my grocery bill and then see how it compares to my grocery budget for the month. I don't quite fit with the $35 per week grocery challenge, but I'm sure this will show me some areas I could cut back. 

Of course, today was a terrible day as far as stupid spending!! This bill is loaded with things we really didn't need. On a good note, even though we Canadians don't get to 'coupon' like our neighbours to the south, I still managed to cash in my PC points for $20 off my bill, and to use one of my gas coupons for another $1.11 off the bill. It's not a huge amount as far as coupons go, but it still helped out a bit.

Artisan bread English Muffins

I really am on the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day kick right now.  I can't stress enough how easy the bread is to make, and how great it turns out! I typically use the Light Whole Wheat recipe from the book, and I cheat and bake it in a loaf pan (I don't have a pizza stone, which is the suggested thing to cook the bread on). It has turned out great, it's incredibly cheap to make, and I can make so many different things with the dough that is always ready and waiting in my fridge.

There is an english muffin recipe on the Artisan Bread site, but I wanted something easier, and I wanted to cook my english muffins on a griddle. The official website recipe calls for English muffin forms, and letting the dough rise, baking in the oven, and then the muffins turn out  rounded on one side. That actually *does* offend my sensibilities, so I did things a little differently.  

This is why I love this bread dough - I pulled my dough out of the fridge, freezing cold, and sort of patted it out/rolled it out on a counter sprinkled with cornmeal until it was about 1/4 inch thick (maybe slightly thicker). I made sure that both sides were well coated with cornmeal (yum! A favourite of mine), and with no rest, no rise, no warming up, I cut the muffins out with a clean empty tuna can. Then I put 7 of them on my electric griddle at medium heat. The time to do all this was at most 5 minutes, and it took about 10 minutes of unsupervised cooking to have the muffins finished.  Easy. Cheap. Did I mention easy, and cheap? The English muffins were fantastic to boot! The only thing I may do differently is to let the muffins rise slightly before cooking, more to allow the dough to warm up first - it was hard to get the muffins to cook through to the centre when the dough was so cold.

Budget cooking 1

No picture yet, but I might take a picture of the salad tomorrow when the lighting is better. I thought I'd post what we (the kids and I) had for supper tonight, with a cost break down included. It's become a cliche, but times really are getting tough, and food is an easy way to cut back on expenses. It can't be said enough, but shop local if you can, buy from local producers where possible, and think about the cost of driving a distance to get a bargain. I'm all for shopping loss leader sales - that's usually the stuff listed on the front and/or back page of the flyer - but sometimes it doesn't all add up to a great deal. It IS possible to eat frugal, cheap even, and not give up on quality or resort to Mr. Noodles and Spaghetti O's (I don't think we can get those in Canada, but I know what they are).

We had lasagna for supper tonight, with a salad and garlic toast on the side. The noodles were purchased at the local grocery store. The beef, though, came from a local beef farm, and the flour for the cheese sauce and the bread came from the Arva Flour Mill, a mill within 60km of my house which mills locally grown grains. The lettuce came from the grocery store - that's something to work on, I guess!  I made the bread for the garlic toast, using the Light Whole Wheat recipe from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. It's incredibly easy, and it really does only take five minutes per day. 

The cost breakdown is on the next page ....

Meat Pie

This recipe started out as the best of intentions to make a tourtiere for the site. However, after I started cooking the meat and onions I realized I didn't have any of the spices needed to make a tourtiere. So this is simple a meat pie, or meat tart, really, since I cheated and used some frozen pre-made tarts I found while digging in my freezer.  The meat pies turned out really well - a total winner with the kids!  They all loved them, so these are definite keepers. There are some ... well, herbs and herb blends that I couldn't identify and that I used on the meat, so it's not a cut and dried recipe, but a bit of a creative instruction.  This meat pie or meat tart also fits in with the $35 per week challenge, which is always on my mind if not on my blog.

A special note about the tortiere this was supposed to be: my mom's original recipe does not use beef. She would be appalled to see I used it at all, but I have 100 pounds of ground beef in my freezer, so I'm going to use it any chance I get!! And the spices I've used have nothing at all to do with a real tourtiere, so don't let them be any sort of guide at all.

Emergency pasta sauce

Tonight was one of those "oh my god I have no sauce and the pasta is in the pot already" nights.  

I like to have a bag or five of frozen ravioli and tortellini on hand in my freezer, for nights like tonight.  I had school last night until 9:30, a great visit with a friend, then worked all day today, then home at 6:00pm to cook supper for three incredibly  hungry kids.  It's a long couple of days, that's for sure!  And the thought of cooking at the end of them is just not my favourite thing to think about.  It's even worse when I've realized I've dropped the pasta in the boiling water, and there is no sauce to be found!

This is a recipe for a very simple tomato sauce that I made in a hurry for tonight's ravioli. Simple, natural foods are my favourite thing, and I may have just converted my kids from quickie canned sauce to this simple marinara type sauce.  Now, I do have a great meaty spaghetti sauce that I'll never share the recipe for (see mom, I told you I wouldn't), but for a quick weeknight meal, I've always just opened a jar of whatever-was-on-sale pasta sauce.  This sauce tonight was so easy and tasted so good though, that I may just use this from now on!  This is probably a half recipe of it, so just double it if you're feeding more than one adult and three children.

Sweet Tea, or Real Brewed Iced Tea

In Kentucky we had iced tea but it was called Sweet Tea. Up here in my neck of the woods (Canada) we just call it Brewed Iced Tea, as opposed to the powdered stuff. Whatever it's called - I'm hooked. This is a very simple recipe for Sweet Tea and the amounts can be adjusted to how much tea you want

 to make and how sweet you want it to be. I don't know if it's an 'authentic' sweet tea recipe but it tastes good!

  

Omele-quiche - an oven omelet

 

This is an oven baked omelet recipe that got two big thumbs up from me and two of my children. On the other hand, it got a big thumbs down from Mr. Chef, who felt it violated the idea of a classic omelet. I loved this recipe because it was easy to make, took less than twenty minutes from start to finish, and tasted great. I personally loved the texture of this omelet over the 'classic' version - it has a little more 'bite' to it. Mr. Chef was apalled. He thought it was thick, which I liked, and too much like a cross between a quiche and am omelet ("make one or the other"). I don't think either quiche or omelets, but I did this hybrid. My oldest son, who is seven, declared this "Yummy!" and ate two pieces; my two year old daughter ate hers. The five year old boy, well, he sided with his dad, but still ate some of the omelet. A winner, in my books, and a definite keeper. There are two ways to serve this omelet - either sliced, like in the pictures, or if you use a 9x13" pan you can roll the finished omelet and slice it for serving. This recipe is by Karen over at Recipezaar.