Tidbit Tuesday...on Wednesday

The topic this week is...the secrets behind how I feed my family of 4.5 for 6 weeks on $300!!! (I have a step-son who is here part of the time so I count him as .5 on my grocery list)

Most of you have seen my menu for October, so you know what I am having to eat every day. If you haven't, head on over here. You may not know all the ingredients, but you have an idea as to what I need for most of them.  And some of my recipes I have already post so you do know some of it.

Well...I will start simple with my monthly plan.

It starts with a menu.  Yep, I figure out what we want to eat for the month.  As I explained in my October menu post, breakfast and lunch pretty much stay the same.  We just switch up a few of the variables with them: fruit, what type of pancakes (we make homemade every Saturday), etc.  So, I look at the previous months menu and see if there was anything that we didn't have, for whatever reason, and I make sure we still have all of the ingredients. The I look at what we do have to make dinners.  I always buy my meat in bulk (well chicken and pork), so I go look and see how many we have and what other types of meat we have to decide what kind of recipes we want for the month.  I also take into consideration what season it is so I know what kind of produce we can expect in our CSA basket (click here if you missed that post).

So, once all the going through of the cupboards and fridge and freezer is done, I have my "list" of my ingredients I have already and I go to work looking through my favorite cookbooks and my favorite online "cookbook" (allrecipes.com). My favorite cookbooks are Taste of Home quick cooking 2003 and 2008, Betty crocker slow cook and my regular Betty Crocker cook book, Rachael Ray 365, and some recipe cards I have.

I then start on the menu.

• Whatever we didn't have the month before, stays for the same day the following month.
• Every Friday is always easy: homemade pizza!!
• Blank days then get filled in.

My menu matrix is as follows: Mondays-family favorites, Tuesdays-mexican, Wednesdays-pasta (this fall is usually crockpot because my step-son is here on usual crockpot days and isn't a fan of those meals), Thursdays-crockpot meals, Fridays-pizza, Saturday-meaty/grilling, Sunday-anything goes!!

I follow this to fill in the blank spots on the menu, along with where I got the recipe from so I know where to go look for it.  Once the menu is done, I then get my grocery list out.  I took the time to make my own grocery list (for some reason when I uploaded this it went on 2 pages, but it's on 1 in the original file. If you want to use it, highlight it and then copy/paste in Word).  It has on it things that I buy the most throughout the year in order of how our store is laid out by aisle from left to right.  I even put extra lines for things I don't buy often.  I go through the recipes I added to the menu and highlight on the grocery list what I need.  When that is done, I see what else we might need for snacks or little extras.  I started putting an asterisk next to items that I have a coupon for.  No I do not extreme coupon, but I do use them and I do save $10-$20 a shopping trip.  To me, they are like money. 

So now when I go to the grocery store, I just cross of the needed items when I get them. 

You say "that's all well and good, but my bill is still larger than $300, even for a month".  Well, that's where I have my other posts come in.  I save money also because I have learned to preserve produce throughout the year.  I've learned to stretch my food so it stretches my money.  I LOVE to save money.  That's why I grow stuff and I can and preserve stuff.  If you read my post on corn, that corn is good in my freezer for 12 mths.  Granted it will be gone before then, but that is money saved until we do need to buy it.  I am going to be doing preserving for other veggies and fruits over the next several weeks because we are in the Harvest season.  To give you an idea of what I have canned so far that is saving me money on my grocery bill, here is a list of what I did this summer:

• 7.5 gallons of homemade seasoned tomato sauce and 5 pints of homemade ketchup from 100lbs of canning tomatoes. Cost $30
• 10 pints of canned green beans. Cost: FREE (grew)
• 8 pints of strawberry jam, 4 pints of homemade strawberry syrup, 1/2 pint dried strawberries. Cost $25 (we picked, local)
• 11 quarts of sliced peaches from canning peaches. Cost: $7.50
• 21 pints of sauerkraut. Cost: $12 for 6 heads of cabbage
• 5 pints of pumpkin butter (frozen).  Cost: FREE (pumpkins had some small soft spots so they couldn't sell them.  I just cut around the spots)
• 13.5 lbs of blueberries frozen for pies and smoothies, 8 half pints of blackberry jam, 3/4 lb frozen raspberries. Cost: $40 (we picked, local)
• 9 quarts of sweet pickle spears. Cost: FREE. I grew the cucumbers!

Hopefully this will give you some ideas for next summer.  And yes, I do have distractions.  I have 2 kids: 1 year old and 3 year old.  Not everything was done in one day.  It was done over the summer.  I chose to do it this way so that way we don't have to rely on store bought stuff.  Plus our food tastes more "real".  I will be talking about some fall gardening over the next few weeks.  That has also helped a lot.  I will be doing my November menu this weekend, so be on the look out for when I post the new menu!!

Happy planning!!!

Amanda