Food Bill Reducing Tip Day!

I was reading about Stacey on her blog, My Friend Oprah, and learning how she uses whole, organic foods for her family, yet still keeps her food bill under $100 or so bucks a week. Ok. I just don't know how to do that. My weekly food bill can easily triple that, and there are times I have to run out toward the end of the week for more milk, bread, etc. Now... to be fair to us, we have teenagers, who eat constantly ($). And then they bring their friends over who eat constantly ($$). And we choose organic foods. ($$$) Another issue is our gluten allergy: 3 of us have it, and can't use wheat to make bread, pasta or pizza from scratch. So although we can keep the various substituting flours in the house to make these staples, the time involved is challenging for a busy mom ($$$$). So perhaps keeping the food bill under $100 is not very plausible. But I sure could learn to love even $200 a week for food. Just keep me away from the dreaded $300 mark!

So how do you keep your food bill down? What great tips do you have to share? In fact, I think we need to dub Thursday the official 'Mindfully Simple Food Bill Reducing Tip Day'. I will start with the following tip, that does help me (when I DO it):

Tip # 1: Make a menu plan for the week (or even 2 weeks). Create a list with the necessary foods for the plan and stick to it - don't waiver for those yummy looking chocolate covered somethings at Trader Joe's - you know what I'm talking about (don't do it!!).

Ok - Your turn. List your tips through the comments and we can keep a running tab of ideas.

Changes I've made

I went grocery shopping today.  I usually don't mind it, but lately, since I've been trying to take care of how much I spend at the store, I have begun each shopping trip with a bit of trepidation.  I get nervous that the items on my list will add up to more than I have budgeted.  What then?  Do I put some things back?  Do I make them last beyond the week and into the next?  No, what really gets me is I'm afraid that I will spend my whole weekly budget in one shopping trip, and then run out of food before the week is up.  I have a teenager and pre-teen at home, both boys, who eat and eat and eat.  In fact, just 30 minutes after my eldest swore he was stuffed to the gills at the dinner table tonight, he complained, LOUDLY, that he just HAD to have more food.  NOW.  How does that happen?  I'm beginning to think I need to feed them rib-sticking, cement-like, oatmeal 3 times a day just to fill them up.

But anyhow, about my shopping trip.  I have noticed little changes I've made, just to make the money go farther.  

1. Buy the large, 5 lb bag of carrots instead of the baby carrots in the tiny bag.  You get much, much more carrot for your $5 vs 2 little bags of teeny, tiny carrots.  Sure, they're cute, and fit into lunches easily, but they really taste the same as the big ones, and you can cut them into tiny pieces if you really want.

2. Make my own cereal by grinding roasted rice.  We have a gluten intolerance in our house, so we have to buy the very expensive, gluten-free oats for oatmeal, which we happen to love in the morning.  When we run out, it usually takes a while before I can locate another very expensive bag (they cost around $10 for 16oz and no one around here carries them consistently).  So I tried roasting brown rice in the oven at 350 for 15-20 minutes, then ground it all up to a fine powder.  I put it in the crockpot with tons of water overnight, with some cinnamon and dried fruit, and let it cook.  By morning, we had a great-tasting, hot cereal with a different taste from oatmeal.  By the way, when I do have oatmeal, I also make granola.

3. Buying boxes of sliced mushrooms for $1.99 gives you more food than a box of whole mushrooms at $1.99.

4. Stop buying juices.  I used to feel badly because I wasn't buying juice for my kids.  I had this thought that I needed to purchase apple juice to get in one more serving of fruit each day.  Then I watched my 11 year old drink down a huge glass full one day, followed by a sugar high, then crash.  I am a firm believer that you need the fiber from the actual fruit, over just the juice without the fiber.  That's pretty much straight sugar.

5. The jury is still out for me on whether the boxed baby lettuces are a good value.  We prefer organic lettuce for our salads, and buying them salad-ready is a real time saver.  The boxed variety seems to hold more than the equivalent of a head or two of organic lettuce, but looks are quite deceiving, I know.  And at $3.99 per small box, I may be overpaying.

6. I pay a ton, a literal TON, for gluten-free bread.  Making our own is tricky since it doesn't last beyond a day.  I work quite a bit, and travel around with after-school activities almost daily, so making bread every day is not practical.  However, at $7 per small loaf, I need to find an alternative.  To make the loaf last longer, I make quesadillas with corn tortillas, and encourage my kids when they are home to eat foods other than sandwiches for lunches and snacks.

7. I refuse to purchase anything in small, individual packaging.  If I need chips or popcorn for the kids' lunches, I buy the large bag and bag it up myself (or pop the popcorn).  I saw a commercial last night for individually wrapped prunes.  Folks were interviewed as saying, 'I just love the little packages.  It's like eating candy'.  Oh brother.

Do you have little tricks to make your groceries go farther?  Add your comments!

And the Winner is...CHILI!

So our dear friends came for dinner, and as you may recall from yesterday's post, I was planning on preparing pizza and fejoada.   However, we ate the pizza last night, so I had to come up with a new plan.  I was so intent on sticking to my challenge of not going to the market, but using what we had in the cupboard, that I had to do some quick thinking.  I found 3 lbs of dry beans, a zucchini, onions, potatoes, 3 tomatoes and garlic.  Sounds like chili to me!!  And the best part of it is that I was able to make more than enough for 9 people on less than $5!  With the chili, we had salad (made by our friends), all sorts of accompaniments for the chili and homemade tortillas.  I have recently discovered the wonders of masa flour.  With it, you can make all sorts of delicious foods: tamales, tortillas, and pupusas just to name a few.  I was able to figure out the balance between water, salt and flour just by using my hands - no measuring!- and had a blast mixing, forming and cooking tortillas.  I had always wanted one of those cool tortilla presses to make my corn tortillas evenly flat and round.  I fooled myself to thinking that I couldn't make tortillas, even though I loved them so much at my favorite Mexican restaurant, because I needed a tortilla press.  I have to have one.  Anyone who loves tortillas as much as me needs to have a press.  Anyone.  But I never got one.  I am the lonely cook without a press.  No homemade tortillas for me.  I could never really justify the cost.

But I figured it out tonight!  I improvised a tortilla press out of 2 plates to make a fine and dandy contraption, and wow, it was fantastic!  Pictures will come soon.  For now, we have tortillas and chili to last us through the snow storm tomorrow, after having a truly lovely evening with our friends. Yippee!

As a side note, I didn't want to go by the market, but I did.  At the last minute, I got nervous about not having enough milk or sour cream for the dinner (and huge snow storm about to hit), and purchased ice cream for dessert (which we didn't even use, but will tomorrow).  I was so good - kept it under $20, bringing my weekly total of groceries to $180 + $45 for Boston Organics = $225. Not bad since I'm bringing it down from around $300/400 (and probably more).

Friends Are Coming for Dinner...A Challenge!

Our wonderful friends are coming to dinner tomorrow night. I am so excited as we are also expecting several inches of snow as well, so it surely will be a magical night. I do have a dilemma, though: Being that I did not plan to have guests (additional 5 people) back when I did the grocery shopping this week, I did not purchase extra supplies for the big dinner. So I have decided that even though I am not completely prepared, I will challenge myself to come up with a tasty and fun meal for 9 people without grocery shopping.

“Why”, you may ask, “aren’t you going to the store to buy good food for these wonderful friends for dinner?” Well, all I can say is that in the recent past, I have been known to grocery shop, with or without a list, with every intention to ‘just get a few things’ for situations just like this and end up spending $80. Easily. And I could go back and do it again the next day. Whenever I had the whim of something tickling my gastronomical fancy, I would hop to the store and purchase much more than I ever needed. My pattern has cost me an exorbitant amount of money over the years, more than I ever budgeted for. It was the ‘sneaky’ money that crept away from my pocket without much thought. And at the end of the week, it accounted for much wasted, slimy foodstuffs.

So what if I play a little game and assume I have everything I need in the pantry to make a wonderful dinner for 9? My husband and I did this on Christmas when we discovered that we needed to bring a dish to the family meal. Instead of going to the store on Christmas Eve, battling the crowds and getting more frustrated, we chose to root around and create a dish with what we had on hand. We ended up with beautiful stuffed peppers, filled with chipotle sauced beans and rice. We had just received several red, green and yellow peppers from our organic delivery service, Boston Organics, and I could prepare the entire dish completely without having to shop at all. Lovely.

What will I make? Looks like mushroom and cheese pizza for the kids, and black bean fejoida with brown rice for the adults. Fejoida is a Brazilian dish, typically full of sausage and other meats. The one I make has black beans simmered for hours in sage and other great spices. Being that my husband is a vegetarian, I leave the meat out. It comes to the table accompanied by mandarin oranges (which I do not have, but I do have blood oranges), onions (which I have a zillion of) and cheese (good there). Since I have so many onions, another thought is to make onion soup for the adults. I have a box of gluten free cake mix (yuck, a box – but actually I find the boxed gluten free mixes to be a bit better than what I could do from scratch), and I think I have ice cream. I have popcorn for a snack/appetizer which I can pop and mix with curry powder and butter for a treat.

What to Eat When You Want to Go Out

Old habits really do die hard.

I came home late tonight after a really full day, hoping I could think of something quick for dinner. No, actually, I was hoping my husband would suggest we 'go out' for dinner. This is typically easier said than done as we deal with food allergies in my house, so finding safe places to eat is a bit tricky. More than tricky. Most often, we go out thinking we can find something good to eat that will meet our allergic needs, and come home with a bellyache. But we keep trying, somehow thinking that the next chef will truly understand what it means to be gluten intolerant.

Oh how I longed for a ride in the car to our closest Mexican restaurant, just to enjoy some enchiladas and chips and salsa. But no, my husband had not suggested it, and I really need to stick to my pledge. So I became determined to work out what this all means.

When I was young, I lived for eating out. I used to plead with my mother, and at other times, my grandmother to go out 'just tonight. PLEEEEZE?' And I'm not too proud to say I told my grandmother that 'It's Tuesday. We always go to Taco Bell on Tuesday'. This, of course, was not true. But somehow the quest for eating out was one for celebration. And as I got older, eating out became reward, social life and status all in one. But the point of this post is not about eating out so much as it's about what to do when you usually go out to eat when tired and starving, but have made a pledge to eat in instead.

So how did we move beyond my urges to feed my eating out frenzy? My DH helped me figure out what we had in the fridge and made a spectacular dinner! It was so tasty - 

Potato-Cheese Quesadillas

corn tortillas

cheddar cheese, shredded

sauteed potatoes and onions in olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

Broil until cheese is melted and all is heated through, top with salsa, sour cream and hot peppers.

Oh my. Much better than driving through icy roads to spend $60 minimum on dinner at the Mexican restaurant.