By Grace We Build

Okay.  I am done talking about the things that stood out to me while reading Family Feasts for $75 a Week, by Mary Ostyn.  I encourage you to check it out (literally, from the library).  If you need to cut grocery costs, this book is a great place to start.  The first couple of chapters walk you through how to track how much you are spending, and then the author gives lots of ideas for chipping away at the grocery bill.  She encourages trying just a few tips, adding others later on when the first ones are mastered.  Baby steps!

Now, the last thing I like about the book:  Recipes! Three-quarters of this book is recipes and helpful hints for the both food shopping and preparation.  There are so many recipes that I want to try.  I can highly recommend the Really Big Biscuits.  My family raved about them.  I also love her recipe for baking brown rice.  It is so easy and makes the house smell so good as it bakes – and no messy spill-over on the stovetop.

I would love to know your ideas and money-saving tips!  It is always helpful to know what works for others.

Today is just a short list of some of my favorite money-saving tips, all of which are also given in Family Feasts for $75 a Week:

1.  Convenience foods – It is much cheaper to cook from scratch than with box mixes.  In particular, frozen skillet mixes and things like that are way more expensive than just combining the ingredients yourself.  Of course, sometimes it is great to have convenience foods on hand, but they are not good for the budget if they are the norm.  (I do hold thing like brownie and cake mixes as an exception to this rule – after all, they only cost about $1 at Aldi.)

2.  Coupons – actually, I have given up on coupons.  It is often hard to beat generic prices, even with coupons.  I would find myself paying for a newpaper, clipping coupons, waiting for a sale so I could get the most of my coupon, and then finding the coupon expires.  So not worth it for me.

3.  Cloth napkins – I bought several sets of cloth napkins at the thrift store.  They serve our family well for daily use, saving money on paper napkins that often get thrown out even if they go unused.

4.  Meal plans – It helps me so much to plan out meals every two weeks.  I then do one big shopping trip to Aldi and the regular grocery store.  On the in-between weeks, I can just hit the store for fruits, veggies, milk, and bread.  Having a plan helps to make dinner prep a little less stressful as I hardly ever have to deal with not having an ingredient on hand (which could mean a random trip to the store and a bit of impulse buying.

Praise God for the gift of Aldi. Seriously, judging by the way Ostyn talks about prices in Family Feasts for $75 a Week, I believe that she does not have an Aldi nearby.  Their canned food prices are hard to beat, as well as their cereals, dairy products, baking goods…  oh, everything!  Buying the staples there allows me to buy more nutritious things, like natural peanut butter, at the regular grocery store.

Here is a great money-saving tip from Family Feasts for $75 a Week:

Save bread bags. I have been doing this, but I am inspired to get even more out of my bread bags.  I usually use bread bags when we go on picnics.  I pack the sandwiches into one bread bag instead of individually bagging them.  But if we can keep bread in the freezer in those bags, they must be pretty good in quality.  So I want to keep my eye out for other things I can store in bread bags.  For example, those black beans that I cooked yesterday.  I bagged them in fold-top baggies with a twist tie, instead of in more expensive zip-tops.  Then I just put all of the baggies into a bread bag.  I’ll see how they do.  I have high hopes.

A freeing reminder as I read Family Feasts for $75 a Week:

I don’t have to do everything. There are always choices to be made when saving money, and sometimes we need to balance the money saved with the time spent.  For example, I make my own yogurt. It is cheaper than store-bought, plus we can avoid the high sugar content.  I have been making the yogurt for so long that it hardly seems like work, and it takes almost none of my time.

Now take dry beans.  Mary Ostyn points out in Family Feasts that you can buy dry beans much cheaper than canned.  So, I tried it.  I bought 2 lbs. of black beans for $2.20, and that was a sale. From it, I got the equivalent of a little more than 6 cans, which I can buy at Aldi for $0.55 each, or $3.30.  Savings: $1.10.  I am not sure that is worth the work for me – sorting the beans, soaking them, cooking them, and bagging them to freeze.  Perhaps I will do it again if I come across a better sale or if I am able to buy them in bulk at some point, but otherwise, I think I will stick to the cans.  To me, the $0.20 extra spent per can is worth it during this season.

One new thing I learned about while reading Family Feasts for $75 a Week:

Cabbage. Yes, I said cabbage.  I have never in my life bought cabbage other than pre-shredded to make cole slaw.  The author recommends cabbage as an alternative to other lettuces for a simple salad.  It is cheaper, tends to last longer in the fridge, and is very nutritious (I don’t remember what it has in it.  Jake looked it up, told me it was high in lots of vitamins and minerals, and that satisfied me).  So it tried it.  I made a simple side salad with cabbage and carrots tossed in Italian dressing.  To my surprise, everyone loved it.

I appreciate Mary Ostyn’s heart not just to be frugal, but to feed her family a healthy diet.  That is hard to do, with the prices of fruits and veggies.  Again, that means choices.  Perhaps no bag of chips so that we can instead buy extra apples or bananas.  (But we can spice up the bananas, can’t we??  We love to sprinkle brown sugar on them for a snack.)

A friend recently gave me a copy of the book Family Feasts for $75 a Week, by Mary Ostyn.  Now I like to think of myself as already pretty savvy in the area of food shopping, but I did get some new ideas from this book, as well as encouragement to stay-the-course in my efforts to feed my family a healthy diet while still sticking to a limited budget.

The author writes, “… being careful with your food budget will greatly expand your choices in other areas of your life.  Most of us only have so much money, so it’s not rocket science to figure out that spending less on food frees us to do other things with that money.”

Often on weekdays my girls ask to go out to lunch.  I am not sure why they do that.  I can honestly think of maybe 2 or 3 times when we did that with friends after going to a free summer movie.  I always give them the same response: “We are going to choose not to do that so that we can do something else as a family when Daddy is here.”  I was encouraged to hear someone else say that – that we choose NOT to spend money in some areas so that we can spend it elsewhere, whether it be going on individual dates with Daddy, ballet classes, or giving to someone else in need.

Over the next few days, I’ll tell some of the things I have learned or been reminded of as I read Family Feasts (tricky way to get posts, huh?  In this season of no-time-to-post, I need to make the most of what I’ve got!).

Anyone else feeling the “recession”?  I think we are definitely feeling it in the grocery budget.  I thought I would share some things that we do to keep our costs down a little bit.  Actually, these are not things that we have purposely done to beat the recession, but they are things that we have been doing for a while that help us now-a-days.  And as a bonus, they make for healthier breakfasts.

1.  Oatmeal – All of the girls and Jake love flavored oatmeal.  For a long time, I resisted eating it because of the high sugar content (I had to pass on the sugar here so that I could have sugar in other foods!!).  Then a friend gave us a great tip – make oatmeal with half flavored oatmeal and half regular/plain oatmeal.  Genius!  Jake, who is the breakfast maker in the house, has his own mixture – something like 1 1/2 cups of dry quick oats and 2 packets of flavored oatmeal – to feed 6.

2.  Not-so-sugary cereals – We always gave our girls plain old cheerios and such, but they have since gotten wiser and now want sugar or honey on their cereal (that is Jake’s fault – he is way too generous!).  Sometimes we will buy coordinating plain and sugar cereals and make a mix out of them.  Then the girls get just enough sugar to please their pallettes, and it is something a bit different from the normal routine.  Examples:  combine cornflakes with frosted flakes, or cheerios with honey nut or apple cinnamon cheerios.  I always try to go heavier on the plain cereal.

3.  “Adult” cereals – we do the same with our cereal.  We really like cereals like Banana Nut Crunch and the ones in that line.  We buy wheat puffs (one of the cheap cereals in a bag) and make a mix, heavier on the Banana Nut side.  The reason this actually started was because of the high sugar content of the yummy cereals.  They look all healthy, but they are deceptive!

** One other little money-saver is to save your cereal bags.  Cut out the seams, and you have wax paper.  I especially like to use them as “work stations” when baking with the kids.

Anyone else have breakfast money-savers?

I love that pump soap that comes out like foam.  Do you know you can refill them? Simply put 1/4 cup of liquid soap in the bottle (can be hand soap or even body wash) and then fill it the rest of the way with water.  There you have it!  You can add a drop of food coloring, if you so desire.

My favorite foam soaps are the kids soaps at Bath and Body Works.  Even after refilling, they retain a bit of their scent for 1 or 2 refills.  I can’t tell you how many times we refilled one bottle before the spring in the pump finally wore out – at least 5.   Now that is savings!

** I remember someone telling me years ago at a Pampered Chef party that you cannot put moisturizing-type soap into these foaming soap bottles.  I do not know if that is really true or not.  I just alway use soaps that are clear, even if colored, and it works fine.