Tummy Treasure

This has been a haphazard week.  I’ve been fighting a yucky viral bug, which completely knocked me out for two days, and has been hanging on ever since.  We’ve also been back to our usual busy schedule of dance and church activities, but my free and lazy weekend has been suddenly eliminated by the need for me to make (make!) a whole pile of dance costumes- which need to be ready to go Monday afternoon.   My big confession though, is that I didn’t make a menu plan for the week- and I’m regretting it.

The nicest part of last month’s challenge was knowing exactly what I was making for dinner- and knowing that I had the ingredients all on hand.   I went shopping last week and spent a small fortune on food and fixings for a Super Bowl gathering, and then we ended up cancelling our gathering because I was really sick.  So here I sat, with a pile of fixings for pizzas, wings, and ice cream sundaes, and not much else.  *Shakes her head*.  So I mustered up the energy to still make homemade pizzas for Sunday night, and Andy assembled sundaes for him and the kids.  Monday night those pizzas magically transformed into calzones- a nice portable meal to take to dance.  Tuesday the wings made their first appearance, but then Wednesday I just didn’t want another variation on wings and pizza!

I sent Andy to the store.  One of our stores has a great deal this week where you buy a large chuck roast, and then they give you the potatoes, celery and carrots for free.  Almost $5 worth of produce for free- I wasn’t going to pass that up!  The roast ends up being priced more than I’d like to pay for it, but still, we paid just $12 for a large roast, 5 pounds of potatoes, a pound of carrots, and a bunch of celery.  And the roast was a very excellent quality.   So Wednesday night was a delightful round og Mom’s Pot Roast with mashed potatoes, dinner rolls and applesauce.  (The dinner roll recipe is forthcoming- very excellent!)

And here is where the January challenge totally came into play.  We didn’t eat all that roast that first meal, and I had plenty leftover.  After a month of making the most out of every bit of food, I felt completely and utterly obligated to use that leftover roast for another meal- making that $12 roast stretch for two meals.  I thought and thought about what I could do with that roast as a leftover, that wouldn’t just be a repeat, and settled on making some homemade empanadas.  Little pockets of meat wrapped in dough- meat pies, if you will.  I searched for a recipe for the dough and settled on one.  To round off our empanada meal?  I had Andy go through the fridge while we were at dance and pull out an assortment of leftovers to accompany.  It was another buffet night, and made good use of a bunch of stuff that I had no other use for.

Of course, the dough recipe I used was way salty, and the empanadas were almost to the point of being inedible.  We certainly didn’t taste anything but salt.  I’m still mad at myself for that- I knew better, and thought hard about cutting the salt in half, but didn’t.  I really wish I had, because the kids were excited to try the empanadas, and I fear that should I make them again in the near future, they won’t even want to try them.  They were really not good.    But, the meal did make use of a bunch of other things in the fridge, and I did try to be responsible with my grocery dollars.  Today, as the snow is flying again, I’m thinking the last piece of that roast is going to become a nice hearty bowl of beef barley soup with vegetables, and some nice buttery rolls on the side.   I’ll need to go buy some frozen vegetables and beef broth to make it though.

Ten days into February, and I have to say that so far, the number one thing I took away from January’s experience was to make the most of every grocery dollar spent.  When I spend a portion of our grocery budget on something like cottage cheese- I need to make sure we use every bit of that cottage cheese, not allow it to languish on the shelf in the fridge and turn moldy.  Every dollar spent at the grocery store is important when you’re on a budget, and that’s where I call January a huge success.  Our waste has been drastically reduced.  Oh, there’s still a few things, a leftover item or two that never got another chance, but for the most part, we’ve made a great effort to use up every bit of food in one way or another.

Now, I’ve just got to get back on that menu planning bandwagon.  Next week is going to be way busier than I could have thought possible.  Must menu plan and figure out how to keep the family feed well while being harried, hustled, and pulled in several directions at once!

I didn’t get any pictures of this past week’s shopping trips, because there were two, and both were pretty rushed.  It was a birthday week here, and I had to plan accordingly to pick up fresh food for the weekend festivities, hence the second trip.

I didn’t do so hot this week, sticking to the budget, but considering that I could have gone WAY overboard with the birthday, it ended up not as terrible as I had anticipated.

My first shopping trip for the week was over budget at $89.42, and then the second trip to the store was for $31.48, bringing the week’s total to $120.90.  So I was over my budget this week by $38.90… I can pretty much guarantee that the overage was a direct result of the birthday.  I’d purchased a few sodas, some K-cups, some flavored syrups for milk, a five quart bucket of ice cream, and actually now that I think about it, that overage could be completely explained by the cake.  I spent quite a bit on peanut butter M&M’s and Kit-Kat bars.

I’ve decided I’m going to be okay with going over budget.   There are still three days left in January, and I’m pretty sure they are going to be pantry days.  We’ll eat what we already have on hand for part of the week.  The thing is, I’ve been figuring on a budget of $82 per week, which I extrapolated out of the average food stamp benefit for a family.  That benefit is issued monthly- it doesn’t fluctuate if a month has four weeks or five weeks.  So if I look at the initial figure I started the month with, that would have been the national average of $384 dollars per month.  Figuring weekly, using my $82 per week figure, I definitely went over.  But, if I add up all my grocery expenses, my grand total actually comes out to  $374.83.

Technically, I was actually almost $10 under budget!

Eating and feeding my family on a strict and limited budget for January was definitely a challenge, but not in the way you would think.  The hardest part of the challenge, for me, was simply the planning part.  To take the time and really think over all the meals we would need for the week, and then plan out a menu really took effort on my part.  Planning within the budget wasn’t so terribly tricky, but there were moments where I had to change my menu on the fly because I wasn’t seeing what I wanted at the grocery store.  The week we planned a roasted chicken immediately comes to mind.  When I was actually at the store, the only whole chickens available were really small.  They were about $7 a piece, but I had planned on using the chicken for three meals.  I was going to have to purchase two chickens if I wanted the planned-overs.  I opted, instead, to change my roasted chicken to roasted chicken parts.  Buying the chicken already broken down for me, and then adding one extra package of bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts cost me just $8- a significant savings over buying two whole chickens.    And we did eat three dinners out of that chicken meal- plus a few lunches for Andy and I.

Overall, I think our little experiment at being budget conscious for the entire month was extremely successful, and- even better than that- we ate really, really well.  We ate such a variety of meals, and were quite well-fed while on a strict budget.   Most of the evening meals I prepared made plenty, so a lot of the leftovers became lunches, and that was quite welcome.

And so we look to February.  Andy continues to be laid off, so I will continue with the extreme grocery budgeting.  I’m not sure how much of it I will be blogging though… trying to photograph and chronicle the weekly grocery shop added an element that I didn’t care for.  I really only wanted to handle groceries once- I wanted to take them out of the bag and put them away, not maneuver them for a photo and THEN put them away.   What I am going to try and do though is stick with the menu planning through the month.  That really was a huge asset.  Though I hated the actual process of doing it, actually knowing what I was cooking every day was very nice and saved me the trouble of last minute scrambling.  (As it will be today… dinner is in less than two hours, and I have no clue what I’m making…)

So we’ll see what the weeks ahead will bring.  I was so focused on the grocery challenge this month that I kind of skimped on recipes, so watch for a few of those in the days ahead.  It’s also a busy month for us, as we officially begin competition season for dance, and that brings a whole other set of issues and craziness when it comes to keeping the family fed on wholesome, real food.  Maybe I should challenge us to stay away from the fast food this month?  Time will tell.