A Peek at My Latest Projects

I didn’t mean to take a long blog break at the end of our spring term, but life has been pretty full for the past couple of months.  We had a high school graduation, Confirmation for the middle four boys, a two week driving school, Scout camp, weekly vision therapy for Chipmunk, a summer cold, and Andy was out of town for the better part of three weeks.  In the middle of that, the teenagers finished up their classes and I just sort of declared the younger boys done with their work one day.

But I’ve also been working on some projects — big and little — and I thought I might give you a peek.

So, the biggest project…

We’re expecting #9 in early February!

I’m still in that early pregnancy fog and probably (hopefully!) will be for another few weeks.  What that means for me is almost 24/7 nausea but no throwing up, so I’m just usually doing most of the things I normally do except at about 60% (or less) of my usual energy levels.  I’m also hungry all the time, but being gluten-free and corn-free and dairy-lite, there never seems to be anything to eat that I don’t have to make (to serve 10 people).  This also could have to do with having seven boys in the house.  Anyway, the other day you might have found me sitting on my bedroom floor with a two year old running circles around me, close to tears because all I want is a Reuben, God, would that be so awful??  But at this point I know the drill.

The Kitchen Saga Continues

The kitchen is in progress, too, but in a much scaled-down fashion.  We had already ditched our first contractor because the number he quoted us was almost as much as all four years of Gareth’s college tuition.  Then we were hit with some big expenses that wiped out the money we were going to use to replace the cabinets using Home Depot. (Ikea was really our first choice, but we don’t have an Ikea anywhere close to us and weren’t sure we could find anyone to hang the cabinets. Technically we could have done it ourselves, but with everything going on, time is a huge factor.)

So onto Plan B… or C… or possibly D.  We’re repainting the cabinets and replacing all the hardware.  We’re also going to replace the countertops, hopefully with Corian and a seamless sink.  The flooring in the entire house needs replaced, so we’ll just start in the kitchen, taking up the cheap laminate and replacing it with Pergo.  (Which we tested with hammers to simulate boy traffic.)  My cooktop and oven are over thirty years old and replacing them is going to take some extra work to make sure that the wiring comes up to code.  The refrigerator will stay because we can’t afford to replace it right now, but it’s already been repaired once and the other day, my two year old took a rock to the doors.

From my Instagram feed…

The cabinets, however, do look better in their navy blue paint.  We’re still using the kitchen, and I must say that the blue hides drips and dirty fingertips about 1000x better than the white did.

 

Continuing with the Food Theme

I’ve been trying to streamline our meal routines (for obvious reasons).  I’ve tried out a number of meal planning services in the hopes I could let somebody else tell me (or my daughter) what to make for dinner every night, but as a family, we present too many weird variables, and the meals are usually also either too involved or too expensive to do on a large-family scale.  (The “frugal” meal plans usually don’t include a gluten-free option and are filled with sandwiches and tacos, making them hard for me to adapt.)

So one thing led to another and I discovered this blog post and video about large family meal planning.  And I watched her videos about once a month grocery shopping, too. (She has seven kids and videos her trip to Costco, as well as the process of putting all that stuff away.)  And I read about once a month master grocery lists.  And I realized two things:

1. I am making dinnertime too hard.

2. I have read all this stuff before and you would have thought it would sink in by now.

Long story short: I started working on a master grocery list, which will serve as a pantry inventory.  From there I’ll make master lists for each store we go to or each coop we order from.  I’m also working on a list of dinners everyone will eat, but I have to be in the mood for that (i.e., I have to be able to stomach it).  My goal is to stock up for a month’s time on food that will allow us to make our favorite dinners, even if Mom has failed to make a meal plan yet again.  And hopefully this will help us to get back on track, because right now our budget is too high and my kids will tell you there’s never any food in the house.

I’m still fooling around with it, because I think I’ve made it too comprehensive in spots.

Enough with the food.  Do you think about anything else?

Well, before the first trimester fogginess set in, I was thinking mostly about writing.  I pulled out one of my old novels and wrote about 20,000 words on it… which was a nice feeling, considering how little fiction I’ve written in the past ten years.    I’ve started using Scrivener, and I really like it.  I can write scene-by-scene, which means I don’t have to scroll through long sections of text to get to where I need to begin for the day.  And everything is organized by project with pre-set folders for research, so I can keep everything right there and visible.  Then when I want to print, all the text is automatically formatted in manuscript format.

(It’s a sort of urban fantasy novel set in the Cold War 80’s. Fun to write.  But rough.)

I’m using Scrivener for fiction writing, but there are also preset templates for all kinds of writing, including nonfiction, poetry, screenplays, and term papers, which makes it pretty versatile for me and the kids.  I’m thinking about getting Gareth a copy to take to school.  (I’m not an affiliate, by the way, just like the product!)

But isn’t it planning season?

I’m slowly working on getting school together for next year.  Most of our books and materials are in, and now I have to sit down and put together some plans for an American History and Government/Early Modern Literature/Religion course for Katydid, which will (hopefully) go up on a blog I’m making for her.  George will be in the 7th grade this year, and I’m thinking about doing the same thing for him with options from AO Year 7 and this Young Men’s Unit which we threw around on the 4Real boards many years ago.  I printed out a copy of the thread and have kept it in one of my planning document boxes all these years. AO Year 7 is actually my favorite AO Year, but George didn’t want to focus on the history of the Middle Ages. So — as with his older brother and sister before him — we’re just using bits and pieces of it.

The boys are all in full summer unschooling mode right now, so I’m not worried about making a slow start on their account. They have recently attempted to dig a pond in the backyard and researched how to stock it with fish; dragged out all the books and CDS we own about classical music in order to learn about the different instruments of the orchestra; are playing a space game with Legos that involves a lot of research as well as watching NASA satellite launches online; and today George was watching a Youtube video about building HAM radios.  (This was a welcome break from his current Bigfoot obsession.  But you didn’t hear that from me.)

And the two year old is suddenly spending hours coloring…

Sometimes even on the paper!

Ikea Hack Farmhouse Table

After posting about my shelves, I realized that the post about our new kitchen table (which you can see in the shelf post) was still in my drafts folder!

We finally outgrew our old kitchen table this year.  To be honest, our table had been too small for a while.  It wasn’t a particularly big table, but with a couple of benches in place of chairs, a permanent leaf, and a lot of togetherness we made it work… until JM (#8) was old enough to sit in a high chair.  At that point, we couldn’t put off a new table any longer.

On the other hand, we didn’t want to have to mortgage our first born in order to afford a table big enough for all of us.

I have a friend who haunts Craigslist day and night looking for bargains.  Chickens, goats (she thinks I need goats), horses (ditto the horse), large conference table sets… you name it.  She’s been able to furnish her house for a fraction of the cost it would have cost if she’d bought the furniture new, and the way they made the large-family-table-thing work was to snag a large conference table set on Craigslist.  It doesn’t look like a conference table.  It looks like a dining room set. If you’re the kind of person who likes to watch Craigslist, it’s a great tip.

But I am Craigslist-challenged.  So what to do?

 Ikea hack, of course!

After putting together our wall o’ shelves that looks like a built-in bookcase, my husband is now hooked on Ikea hacks. So he was poking around the Internet one day, and he found these instructions for an Ikea hack farmhouse table.  At first, they seemed too good to be true. (Really, you should click through the link and check it out, because each of the Ingo tables that forms the base of this big one costs $69.  I feel like a used car salesman bolding that number, but we were looking at table and chair sets that cost $3500.  From $3500 to $69 x 2?  Wouldn’t you think it was a mistake at first?)  But after we pulled up the Ikea site and started looking at it, we realized that it was totally doable.

(Ok, I say “we” but I mean “he” realized it was totally doable.  The only thing I did with this table was to help get it in the house.  Although he did have a few other — smaller– helpers, too.)

 We actually ended up ordering two of the Ingo sets — 2 tables and 8 eight chairs all together.  The tables are basically fastened together by the tabletop built on top of them.  For the most part, Andy followed the directions for the hack, but he did make a few modifications.  Because the new tabletop is built on a subframe attached to the Ikea tables, there is a gap beneath the tables.  Because Andy is the father of a large family, he immediately thought of what would happen if little people spilled their milk and it leaked into the cracks between the tabletop’s boards.  So he drilled holes in the underside of the Ikea tables, and that has proved massively necessary.

(In retrospect, it would be good to find something to putty in the cracks in the board or otherwise seal them heavily.  Food — like rice, for instance — tends to fall into those cracks and get stuck.)

The other thing the original hack post doesn’t tell you is that, while the table is cheap to build, it ends up weighing roughly 3,000 pounds.  Andy is wearing his weightlifting belt in this picture because he needed it to protect his back.  You can see the two Ikea tables underneath in this picture with the farmhouse table top built across them.  If you think about it, that means that when you lift the table, you’re not lifting just one table.  You’re lifting three tables simultaneously.  It was really, really, really heavy.  Andy built the table on the driveway, and then we had to move it around to the back door in order to get it in the house.  We put one end of it in a utility cart and had two of us stabilizing the other end to get it to the door.  Lifting it to get it in the house and then flipping it over once we put the legs on was very hard.

Some people have even said that it will never move from this spot again, ever.

Now, instead of being all scrunched at the table, we have a hard time passing food down it.  We went from a 72 inch table to a table that is over 100 inches long.  It’s about as long a table as we can fit in our dining space and has been a great solution for us.

Pantry Challenge Update

 

The official Summertime Pantry Challenge at Good Cheap Eats ended two weeks ago, but we’ve been having our own sort of modified pantry challenge for the entire month of July.  We’re trying to switch to once a month shopping… and we’re trying to bring our average monthly budget down for the year.

Really, we’re going to have to cut our grocery spending until December if we want our average to be decent.  The first six months of the year had a tendency to be a little spendthrift.  And June? When we were trying to figure out how much to buy to get us through a month and stocking the pantry? 

Don’t even ask me about June.

Part of the problem is how to account for bulk purchases — and how to keep them in line with the budget.  I really struggle with this because I buy in bulk a lot.  I know that we will eat the food I buy in bulk and that it is cheaper to buy in bulk, but the hefty price tag of many bulk purchases can blow the budget much faster than a simple impulse buy of ice cream and cookies.

My homemade GF birthday cherry pie was better than store-bought cookies anyway.

That is essentially what happened this month.  Andy does the grocery shopping and tends to be an impulse shopper.  He tends not to check prices or labels  So in addition to what was on my list this month he also bought Honey Stinger Waffles, beer, ice cream, and a coconut milk creamer that contains sugar and titanium dioxide.  He also bought an extra package of xanthan gum because he didn’t notice how much they cost ($13.99 a bag) and since he doesn’t cook, he didn’t know that xanthan gum doesn’t run out too fast.  So all that added up.  

Grilled GF Zucchini Bread with maple syrup for breakfast… a good use for xanthan gum.

But what really killed the budget were two things I did.  One was, I forgot to adjust the Amazon Subscribe and Save account for the fact that we have enough sunbutter to survive a zombie apocalypse and I didn’t really want or need white rice flour or sweet rice flour.  Total of mistake = about $45.  Then I was offered the opportunity to buy a case of steaks cheap, so I did… even though they weren’t local or grass-fed, only hormone-free “organic”.  The steaks were cheap and we were running low on beef, but the case still added up to $194.

Stretching the meat in meatballs with leftover oatmeal seemed to go over well.

Another problem we had was that I didn’t figure the budget number for the month right in the first place.  Originally I had set it at $1350 for the month.  (Remember we’re feeding 10 people — 1 is a nursing infant but I have to eat extra to fuel those chubby cheeks, and 7 are boys.)  As I started looking back over the rest of the year, it occurred to me that the number looked a little high based on the other numbers.  So I added everything up again and sure enough, my number was high.  The budget for the month should have been $1278.

So how did we do?

Well, not too bad, considering my big mistakes.  We came in at $1353.41 for the month.  This would have been only $3.41 over the original budget of $1350.  But it was $75.41 over what the real number should have been.

Ouch.

(Incidentally, I’m trying to get the year to average out to $1600/month including the 9 month CSA and bulk local meat purchases, which will include probably two sides of beef and a whole hog.  This undoubtedly seems high to many of you, but like I said: 7 boys, nursing mama, plus lots of food sensitivities and a desire to eat local, organic, real food.  On the other hand, if I can reduce our budget over the course of the next few months, that’s what I’m going to do.  We have college looming over us in a couple of years.)

Stuff that wasn’t included in the regular grocery budget: 

Andy’s lunches during the week when he ate out
My birthday lunch out
Andy’s treats for the kids after swim lessons one night
A few assorted experimental items used to make Redwall recipes

What was included in the grocery budget:

22 pounds of IPM peaches, 15 pounds of IPM cherries, and 20 pounds of local, organic potatoes = $90.90
That case of steaks = $194
GF pasta, sunbutter, white rice flour and sweet rice flour = $109.41
An extra order of 4 bags of tapioca flour because I ran out = $11.98

So now we reset for August with the same budget of $1278.  We’ll see if I learned any lessons.

  

   

Once a Month Shopping and Pantry Challenge

So I goofed when I was figuring out the dates we would need to shop for on our once a month shopping trip, and now we have to make do for an extra week.  Oops.  Oh well.  It will be good for us. I signed up for the Summertime Pantry Challenge at Good Cheap Eats to make it a little more fun.  

 

This is what happened.  Andy gets paid every two weeks, so the dates vary every month.  I had it in my head that he would get paid before the weekend of the 15th, but doing the math, I discovered I was a week off.  That means we’re buying only dairy and produce until July 19th or 20th, a whole 5 weeks after our last big shopping trip.  That was the oops.  Oopses like that didn’t matter as much when we were shopping every week, but when you’re spending most of your grocery money for the month in one fell swoop… they really do.

Once a month shopping does take a little getting used to.  Before taking the plunge, I read a lot.  There is a good series of helpful posts at Blissful and Domestic. Authentic Simplicity has a good series, too, complete with a spreadsheet grocery list how-to for any spreadsheet nerds among you.  (I’m a pencil and paper girl, myself.) Holy-Spirit Led Homeschooling has a FAQ.  And if you’d like a book, you can find a good description in Cut Your Grocery Bill in Half with America’s Cheapest Family.

At this point I’m not sure that once a month shopping really cuts our grocery bill in half since it tends to play into my packrat stockpiling tendencies, but it certainly saves us A LOT of time.  And because Andy has been the main grocery shopper for years now (an adaptation to life with lots of little ones), he is definitely on board with the saving-us-time thing, because it’s really a saving-him-time thing.  We put in one weekend a month shopping in large quantities at a few different stores (Costco, Whole Foods, Kroger) and filling in the blanks with online purchases.  Then the rest of the month we make quick weekly stops to pick up milk and fruit, eggs if we’re running out, and the CSA box (which also contains a whole chicken once a month).  If anything else runs out, the rule generally is that we make do… although I have made exceptions for a good sale on bacon and cheese.  

Most (but not all) of the once-a-month shoppers I read about inventory their cabinets, plan their menus for the month, write their grocery lists, then shop.  This sounds emminently sensible to me, but it is, of course, not the way I have been doing it.  To be fair, this is not entirely my fault.  Our last big shopping trip is a case in point.

The last time we did a big shop was June 15, which also happened to be Leo’s birthday.  Leo loves going to Costco, so a big shopping trip on his birthday was actually not a bad plan.  June 15 was a Saturday.  I knew that Costco would be busy, but I hoped to go in the morning.  Andy had made the Whole Foods trip the night before, so that part of the shopping was done.  I had been hoping to make a meal plan but the week was just kind of nuts with Gareth coming back from Scout Camp and preparing to leave for Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico the next week.  Andy was going to Philmont, too, and he was scrambling to get ready as well, and there seemed to be something new he found out he needed every day.  So I gave Andy the standard Whole Foods list and I figured we’d shop from the standard Costco list as well.

(To give me some meal-planning ideas, however, I’ve been following Once a Month Mom’s monthly freezer cooking boards on Pinterest.  Except I just make them as regular meals, not made-ahead ones.  To keep them organized for grocery list purposes, I experimented with making a Once a Month Groceries board for early summer.  If you’re the kind of person who can decide on a real menu for the month and not pin every single recipe that contains the words “blackberries” and “cream cheese”, a board like that would probably work for you, but I think that for me, making up some seasonal food boards would work better.)

But back to the shopping trip.

We got up late Saturday morning because the baby had been up quite a bit the night before, Leo opened his birthday presents, we ate breakfast, the baby nursed and nursed and nursed, a friend dropped by to give my kids holy cards for their sacraments this spring, and Andy happened to check the Philmont trail menu and discover that it was full of peanuts, to which Gareth is allergic.

At this point, we began scrambling.  I hadn’t had a shower yet, and it was almost lunchtime. I had been supposed to go to Costco before lunch so we could have birthday cake after lunch, but now what I needed to do was frost a birthday cake and sit down and go through every stinking bit of a 3000 cal/day 10 day menu to see how many substitutions we would have to provide in order for Gareth not to starve to death.  (I mean, really, 1/3 or more of that menu was peanuts.)  So I did.  And I grumbled about how boys were supposed to hike 100 miles on a diet of squeeze cheese and pop tarts.  And Gareth ignored me.  Because he is used to me grumbling about squeeze cheese and pop-tarts.

Anyway, we didn’t get to Costco until 3 in the afternoon after I had given the cabinets a very cursory look-through.  Because Andy thought that he and Gareth might have to go to a number of other stores as well, I decided that we could all go and split up in the store to make things go faster.

Can you see where this is headed?  Have you ever seen a family of 10 in a Costco at 3 on a Saturday afternoon?  With a screaming 2 1/2 month old?  

No? 

That’s because other mothers of eight are smarter than I am.

 Good night, that store was crowded!  It was like bumper cars at the fair.  You couldn’t turn around without running into somebody’s cart (and my kids generally didn’t.)  And mostly the carts were empty except for one or two things.

Look, if you only buy one or two things from Costco, you probably don’t need to be at Costco in the first place.  Especially on a Saturday afternoon.  Just saying.

In contrast, we had two carts and a handful of screaming baby.  Plus a number of boys on an eagle-eye lookout for samples.  But we did meet a very nice Chinese woman who gave my kids extra lemonade.  Which was a nice respite from bumping into other people’s carts.  And Gareth scored enough chocolate chip granola bars, trail mix, Clif bars, and Larabars to keep him fed for ten days, plus enough overage to keep his brothers fed for… well, I think it took them less than a week to polish off the massive amount of extra Andy threw in the cart just to make sure Gareth didn’t starve. (Andy ate all the peanuts.  When he came home he said he never wanted to see another peanut in his life.)

Even Gareth couldn’t eat that many bars in 10 days.

Anyway, in spite of the fact that we had way too much of some things (chocolate chip granola bars) and completely forgot other things (lemons, limes, and some other stuff I’ve apparently done quite well without because I can’t even remember what it was now), we seem to have managed pretty well.  When I said that I didn’t know if once a month shopping (or stocking up as the case may be, since we do still make a quick trip to the grocery store about once a week as well) saved us money, that wasn’t quite accurate.  For about the same amount that we were spending to have convenience food around when the baby came, I was able to buy in bulk last month and not pro-rate the amount.  So in addition to the perishables that have to be replaced on a regular basis, I also got:

22 pounds of peaches
40 pounds (total) of potatoes (20 lbs local)
20 lbs of whole grain sorghum (to grind for flour)
25 lbs of organic cashews
32 lbs of GF rolled oats (which are usually about 4x as expensive as regular oats)
20 lbs of local carrots
5 lbs of teff
5 lbs of buckwheat
5 lbs of dried apricots 

Now, granted, my total for the month (including those bulk purchases) was higher than I would like it to be, but now that I’m thinking about our next shopping trip, I’m realizing that our pantry is actually still pretty stocked.  That’s a good thing, because we’re running low on meat and we’re due to pick up a whole hog in August and another side of beef in the fall.  

Ok, at some point this post has to end!  I feel like I’ve been working on it forever because I’ve just been writing on it in dribs and drabs over breakfast.  Right now I’m surrounded by most of the contents of our art shelves as I try to organize our dining/learning area the same way I’ve been writing this post… except not over breakfast.

After the Pantry Challenge ends, I’ll post what we ate and how much we spent and report on this month’s big shopping trip… and whether or not we survived Costco again.

        



  

 

Pantry Challenge Update #4, or The Lingering Smell of Cod Liver Oil

I’ve been participating in the Pantry Challenge at Good Cheap Eats this month. If you’re curious about what the rest of the month looked like, you can read my previous updates:

Pantry Challenge
Pantry Challenge Update #2
Pantry Challenge Update #3 

So this is the last Pantry Challenge update, and what have I learned? 

• It’s not so hard to avoid eating out as a family.  My attitude was what was getting in the way before.
• It is still hard for me to make sure Andy has a lunch every day.
• I wish I’d had a pantry full of produce from last year’s (pathetic) garden to use up so it felt like I was actually able to eat from my pantry (in my dreams it looks like this) instead of just using up the bits and pieces nearing the end of their food lives.
• We can stick to a grocery budget.
• I think it would be better to do a challenge of this kind during February and March, for Lent.
• My boys eat a lot.
• We need a cow. 

Last week fell apart a little bit because I was sick.  So I asked Andy to pick up some gluten-free convenience items that I normally try not to buy: hamburger buns, flour tortillas.

Let me just say that I did not foresee the day when I would put things like “hamburger buns”, “flour tortillas”, and “bread” in the “Convenience Food” category.  

Anyway, they helped.  I’m feeling better (with the help of my inhalers and copious amounts of this honey/apple cider vinegar stuff) and everyone had enough to eat last week, even when I didn’t feel like getting off the couch.

But the budget has gotten a little tricky here at the end of the month.  Since I’ve started keeping track of our expenditures again, it was easy to see why.  Mostly it was because of that bulk order I placed back in December.  But also it was because of a giant (and I mean ginormous) barrel of whey protein powder that Andy ordered at the beginning of the month to take to work with him for emergency breakfasts and post-workout drinks.  (He does Crossfit. He can now back squat 230 pounds, which means he could back squat my 6’2″ 16 year old and my 2 year old together.  I, on the other hand, am proud of myself if I manage a few wall pushups in the morning.)  

On the other hand, when I add up only what we spent at the grocery store this month (plus an estimate of the cost of food from the bulk order and the protein powder that we’ve actually used this month), that puts us about $300 under the monthly budget that we set.  To me, that means that going forward next month we can apply the lessons we learned this month to do a better job.  I just placed our coop order for February at about half the cost of the January order. 

And we’re also still learning how to manage this tag-team food management thing, where I make lists and cook and he does most of the shopping.  If I let him know exactly how much he ought to spend, he does a lot better than I do at keeping to the amount.  If I don’t give him an amount… he buys extra stuff to stock up or things he thinks are interesting (usually for me).  Not like Ho-Hos or anything but adding an extra free-range chicken to your list will push the total up.  But that’s easy to fix going forward. I just have to make sure I let him know what our spending limit is.

On Saturday, I actually made it to Kroger’s (Ralph’s, etc.) big Mix and Match sale myself.  I had a little over $50 left in the budget, and I must tell you that I am not the best at keeping track as I go through the store, and I also have a terror of getting to the register and finding I don’t have the money for the purchase, so I have resisted using cash to this point, even though I know (I know!) it’s the best way of keeping to a grocery budget.  

Which makes what happened next somewhat ironic.

So I was happy to get to Kroger by myself (!) and I was happy to find such good deals on stuff I actually do buy — like canned tomatoes, which I will need if I try to put some food in the freezer for when the baby comes.  It had been one of those mornings, the kind where you get up late and have to make breakfast for a bunch of starving boys and in the middle of trying to mix pork sausage you open the refrigerator for maple syrup and the door shelf containing all the cod liver oil falls to the floor and a giant bottle of strawberry-flavored cod liver oil for children shatters into a million pieces and makes all the towels you have to use to clean it up smell like cod liver oil forever and ever and even worse every single time you wash them, so you have to buy new towels.

Hmmm.  You’ve never had a morning like that?

Anyway, after my dear husband spent his morning cleaning up the mess because I can’t even bend over to put on my shoes half the time, I finally got breakfast made, took a shower, and headed out the door to Kroger.  I was very careful about keeping track of my budget.  I was very careful about making sure I brought what few coupons I had before I walked out the door.  And right before I got in line at the checkout, I was very careful (ok, so I’m a little obsessive) to check that I did indeed have my Kroger card, without which all my purchases would be much, much more expensive.  

Which was when I realized that I had brought neither cash nor debit card, and therefore, could not even pay for all my good deals.

Fortunately, I had remembered my phone, so I called my husband and he didn’t even say anything like, So my hands are going to smell like cod liver oil for weeks and all the towels are ruined and now I have to come rescue you at the grocery store?  He just very cheerfully got in the van and came to rescue me.

Usually stuff like this happens to me when Andy’s out of town and I’m in line with four or five (or six or seven) kids, half of whom are either screaming or punching each other.  So I felt like God had pity on me this time. Andy left Katydid at home in charge of the little boys, so we had twenty minutes with no kids, which at this point in our lives was kind of like a date.

Anyway, I ended up spending $56 at Kroger for food that figured into the grocery budget.  I also stocked up on some non-food items like laundry detergent that were on sale, and on food for an upcoming trip to my mom and dad’s, but I didn’t include those in the grocery budget total.

$56 put me over budget by $5.  So I guess I didn’t keep track as carefully as I thought.  For the curious, here’s what I bought:

8 lb potatoes (we finished our 50 lb box) – $1.99 (on sale)
almost 5 lbs organic Gala apples (we finished the 2 bushels I bought in November) @ $1.49/lb on sale
a little over 10 lbs of bananas @ .55/lb
2 8 oz blocks mozarella @ $1.99/ea (on sale)
2 8 oz blocks colby @ $1.99/ea (on sale)
2 gal whole milk @ $ 3.15/gal
10 cans Hunts diced tomatoes @ .49/ea (on sale)
10 cans Rotel tomatoes @ .48/ea (on sale)
2 bottles French’s mustard @ .99/ea (on sale)
1 bottle Pace picante sauce – $1.49
1 bottle green salsa – $1.49
4 cans Del Monte peaches @ $1.49/ea (- a coupon, I forget the amount, $1 or .90)
1 jar natural peanut butter – $2
4 bags tortilla chips @ .88/ea

Usually we don’t eat that many tortilla chips, because we usually buy the fancy kind made from nixtamalized corn at Whole Foods.  They are a lot more expensive, but also a lot better for you, and they taste about 25 times better, too.  But sometimes you just need something to eat, so you compromise.  A few things on this list were compromise foods — the chips, the cheap Kroger milk, the canned fruit — but some times you just have to do what you have to do.  On the other hand, I think I should have bought more apples instead of the canned fruit.  It was supposed to be for “emergencies”, but since all the apples were eaten over the weekend, we are now breaking into the “emergency canned fruit stash” for fruit.  (Most of the bananas are gone by this afternoon, too.  Do not ask me how.)  And though I was happy to have the chips, I probably should have just done without them.   

This wasn’t the only grocery shopping we did this week, by the way.  On Friday Andy made a stop at Whole Foods for non-homogenized milk, local free-range eggs, butter, cream, xanthum gum, and sweet potatoes.  That was a lot more expensive than the Kroger sale, but he hit the number I gave him to the penny.

 
This Week’s Menus:

Monday
Breakfast: Oatmeal porridge
Lunch: Leftover sausages, cheese, baby carrots from the garden, apples, tortilla chips
Dinner: Chili and GF cornbread

Tuesday  
Breakfast: I had been planning on fried potatoes and scrambled eggs, but at about 3 AM I remembered our vegetable peeler was broken.  Then I slept late because of my cold.  When I walked into the family room, the twins were sitting on the couch eating apples.  Apparently they had given up on me.  I made smoothies, and everyone was happy.  (I added some scrambled eggs and leftover potatoes from the fridge for myself.)
Lunch: Kraft Mac and Cheese for the kids, from an emergency stash supplied by a miscommunication between Andy and I last summer. I had leftover chili and a salad.
Dinner: Beef and Broccoli Soup, orange wedges 

Wednesday
Breakfast: Soaked Baked Oatmeal (with homemade apple butter from the freezer and raisins)
Lunch: Spaghetti Burgers + a salad for me, baby carrots and bananas for the boys
Dinner: Fettucini Alfredo (made by Katydid), broccoli, orange wedges

Thursday
Breakfast: Winter Squash Custard (I baked the butternut squash that was in danger of going bad on Tues.)
Lunch: Leftovers and/or melted cheese sandwiches on GF buns (for some of the boys; I ate leftover chili with sour cream and corn chips)
Dinner: Chicken Soup and GF biscuits (from Jeanne Sauvage’s Gluten-Free Baking for the Holidays)

(I also treated myself to a snack at Starbucks after my doctor’s appointment: an Izze and a gluten-free fruit and nut bar.  The kids ate gluten-filled chocolate chip bar cookies at Grandma’s… and the one I most suspect of having a gluten sensitivity came home with a lot of digestive upset.  He could also have a touch of virus, but… sigh.)  

Friday (Was supposed to be meatless)
Breakfast: Blueberry/banana smoothies (using buttermilk) + scrambled eggs for me
Lunch:  The kids had cheese, GF crackers, raisins, and carrots from the garden. Since I am still trying to kick this gunky, coughing virus, I had leftover chicken soup, even though it was Friday.
Dinner:  Quesadillas with purchased Rudi’s GF flour tortillas (found cheaper at Kroger). I goofed and forgot it was Friday and added leftover chili to some of them. Eaten with lettuce, sour cream, and avocado.

Saturday
Breakfast: Homemade pork sausage, fried potatoes (the last of the ground pork)
Lunch: Most of the kids had peanut butter or sunbutter tortillas. Otherwise, it was leftovers again.
Dinner: I completely dropped the ball on dinner, so we had nachos.  With salsa, since I had gone to the store in the morning. And apples and carrots.

Sunday
Breakfast: Leftover pork sausage and/or apples with peanut butter. Andy and I had scrambled eggs and fried potatoes.
 Lunch: More leftovers. The boys didn’t want leftovers, so they ate sliced Dubliner and apples (again).  Andy, Katydid, and I ate chicken soup.
Dinner: Katydid and Gareth ate at youth group, and the rest of us had GF spaghetti (this was the quinoa/corn variety, but most of the time I use De Boles brown rice) using up the homemade spaghetti sauce I’d thawed earlier in the week.  Andy and I had a salad, too.  

Monday
Breakfast: Oatmeal Porridge + scrambled eggs for me
Lunch: Baked potatoes with Dubliner cheese (and sour cream for those who wanted it), carrots from the garden, canned peaches + a salad for me
Dinner: Baked salmon, roasted beets (mostly from the garden), chard (from the garden), rice — this is what I’m planning for tonight anyway; originally it was supposed to be Friday’s dinner

Snacks have been apples, bananas, dried pineapple, cashews, GF crackers, peanut butter, sunbutter, cheese, homemade kefir

More Reading in Review

I’ve actually been reading quite a bit since the January 1, but haven’t taken the time to write it up.  

Books Read So Far in January:

The Dirty Life

The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times 

This one was pretty dense.  I actually got it for Christmas of 2011, but this was my second go at it.  I would not recommend this as a book for a beginning gardener, but if you have a little experience under your belt and you’re interested in self-sufficiency, this book has a lot of good information in it.  Carol Deppe’s writing style is very… empirical, for lack of a better word.  I liked her experimental approach to gardening, although I found some of her recipes a bit weird and heavy on the use of a microwave.  Her focus is on staples you can grow that don’t take lots of time, water, or care to produce (corn, beans, squash, potatoes, and duck eggs), and because she is writing from Oregon’s Willamette Valley, she focuses on varieties that do well in that climate.  It was a bit frustrating at times, being in Mississippi, to hear over and over again: “We grow this kind here and also this kind grows well in the Northeast.  I hear that such-and-such does well in the South, but I’m not going to focus on that.”  Understandable, of course, since we can only garden where we are, but still — a little frustrating if you’re a Southern gardener.  One of the most interesting facets of the book, however, is that Deppe has celiac disease, and so all of her recommendations for growing and cooking with various staples are gluten-free.

Fieldwork: A Novel 

I discovered this novel on a 2012 wrap-up list for 52 Books.  I tried really hard to resist adding it to my already full TBR shelves, especially at Christmastime, but in the end I crumbled and downloaded it onto my Kindle.  

Here’s the description from Amazon:

 When his girlfriend takes a job in Thailand, Mischa Berlinski goes along for the ride, planning to enjoy himself and work as little as possible. But one evening a fellow expatriate tips him off to a story: a charismatic American anthropologist, Martiya van der Leun, has been found dead–a suicide–in the Thai prison where she was serving a life sentence for murder. Curious at first, Mischa is soon immersed in the details of her story. This brilliant, haunting novel expands into a mystery set among the Thai hill tribes, whose way of life became a battleground for the missionaries and the scientists living among them.     

What’s interesting about this book is that it’s a story told by a secular Jewish narrator about a conflict between an anthropologist who is increasingly subsumed by the culture she comes to study and a family of Protestant Christian missionaries.  What’s more, I thought the missionaries were portrayed fairly.  They come through as well-meaning, but human characters, neither saints nor devils.  And — as a grad-school anthropology drop-out myself — I thought his portrayal of anthropology and anthropologists was very, very good.

The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850   

After a long warm period during the years of the medieval period, around the year 1300 the climate suddenly turned colder, with wild weather changes that made life in Europe and North America much more unpredictable.  Reading this book after Carol Deppe’s Resilient Gardener was eye-opening, since much of the book focused on how the weather ruined harvests and contributed to famines, plagues, political unrest, and emigration patterns.  A little shakier, in my opinion, is the author’s continued assertion that human industry is all that is driving current climate change, when he spends most of the book talking about how little is known about the mechanisms of climate change in general, and certainly about why the climate suddenly changed from warm to cold in the 14th century.

Plan It, Don’t Panic: Everything You Need to Successfully Create and Use a Meal Plan     

Lots of practical advice about meal planning in general, but especially when using unprocessed, whole foods.

Real Food on a Real Budget: How to Eat Healthy for Less (Stephanie Langford)


More practical advice on how to eat whole foods (especially items like raw milk, grass-fed meat, and organic vegetables) without breaking even a small budget. I thought this book had a lot of good ideas, some of which (like using cash) have been reiterated over and over again on the Internet and in books, but it was nice having it all wrapped up in one package and applied specifically to “real food” — which can be more expensive than the advertised specials in the typical grocery flyer.


I’ve also been doing some research on freezer cooking — trying to figure out how to stock a month’s worth of gluten-free meals for my large family when the baby comes.  Cookbooks I’ve been reading through — Not Your Mother’s Make-Ahead and Freeze Cookbook , Once-A-Month Cooking Family Favorites, and a very old copy of The Freezer Cooking Manual from Thirty Day Gourmet.  
 
Find more books and reviews at 52 Books in 52 Weeks! 

Pantry Challenge Update #3

  Continuing on with the Pantry Challenge… this will be a quicker update because I’m still trying to kick this cold.  It seems mild and almost non-existent for a while, I have a lot of energy and then… I overdo it and the next day I’m coughing and stuffy and worn out. Today is MLK Day and Andy was home for most of it, so I’m trying my best to relax a little.  He and Katydid are even making dinner tonight: chili and GF cornbread.  I got ahead a little last week by mixing up and bagging the dry ingredients for some of the GF baked goods I make from scratch.

The pantry is looking a little bare, though.  

This was actually after my kids had already put away the tomato paste we bought at Costco Friday night.

This side is a little better. Those buckets on the top shelf are full of local raw honey.

  

The onions, the garlic, and the half-eaten blue bag of tortilla chips came from Costco on Friday, too.

Well, except for all the oats I have to use up. 

I did some calculating and I’m a little nervous about coming in under our budget this month, mostly because of that bulk dry goods order I placed in December, which came due this month.  I have done a lot of thinking about how to account for our bulk orders, since we don’t eat them all in the same month, but now that I have been ordering from the coop for a few months, their schedule is seeming less haphazard.  There seems to be at least one order every month, so I think I just have to buck up and include the bulk order in the monthly total.  This month’s order included, in retrospect, some items I could have done without.  Some of the stuff I ordered that I thought was gluten-free was actually processed on the same equipment as wheat, and the dried mangos — while sweet and yummy — are so hard to chew that nobody wants to eat them. Chalk this one up to learning to ask more questions before ordering.  And I’ll have to figure out how to rehydrate the mangos a little so they’re easier to eat. 

We have been exercising restraint at the grocery store, though, and we’ve been doing really well about not eating out, which was our most important goal.  Last week Andy either ate lunch at home or brought his lunch every day, and we ate at home as a family, even on Friday night when we had to deliver Gareth to a Scout drop-off at 6 PM and I discovered I didn’t have any eggs to make tuna cakes with as planned.

(I made a tuna artichoke pasta that almost everyone liked.  I think I was one of the few dissenters.) 

Really, I think that this is more of a “learning how to eat at home within a budget without wasting food” kind of challenge.  My pantry wasn’t stocked enough to eat from it without much grocery shopping this month, but there were things I needed to use up because they’d been in there a while  — like the last bits of the beef from last year (gone, except for the liver), the frozen squash (gone), frozen cherries (ditto), the pork from last year’s hog (almost finished).

And since the ice has melted off the garden, we have a lot of baby carrots and some beets to eat this week, too.

So I don’t think we’re doing too badly, all things considered.

  

Pantry Challenge Update #2

 

I feel like I am doing the lamest pantry challenge in the history of pantry challenges.  That’s probably not true, since we are sticking to our major goal of “no eating out” pretty well (which actually makes up for my husband’s monthly pay cut almost exactly on its own), but seeing the tiny amounts of money others are spending on groceries this month is somewhat discouraging.  As circumstances would have it, this month also turned out to be when we could buy our annual side of beef and receive a big dry goods order from the bulk food coop that delivers to our area.  So I feel like I just spent a lot of money and my pantry is rather full at the moment, at least for things like dried fruit, cashews, grains, and beef.  

On the other hand… while it’s a big chunk of change to lay out all at once, buying in bulk saves us money in the long run. (I think. I am having a really hard time figuring out how to account for our bulk purchases.  Do I divide them up and subtract them from the grocery budget over the period of time we’re likely to use them? Do I take them out of the grocery budget the month that I buy them? Do other people expend this many brain cells trying to figure this out? I doubt it.)  

The grass-fed beef we just got ended up being a bit over $5/lb.  The last time I looked at grass-fed beef in the store (a year ago) it was $7.99/lb for hamburger.  And I got brisket and steaks, too.  So buying in bulk makes it feasible for us to eat much more grass-fed meat in a greater variety of cuts than we would normally be able to.  It’s still a significant investment, though. (Here’s a good post on how to buy local grass-fed beef, if you’re interested.) 

And, as I had hoped, we have spent a lot less on groceries this week after Andy went to Costco at the beginning of the month.  Hopefully everything will average out.

So this is how last week happened, food-wise:

(I included last Monday and Tuesday of last week in my first pantry challenge update.) 

Wednesday: Wednesday was rough.  I wasn’t feeling too well, and thus not very creative when it came to food.  I made the chicken sausages I was trying to eke out for lunch instead, and the 4 lbs of ground beef I was thawing to make enough soup to freeze turned into hamburgers for dinner instead. And the boys ate almost all of them — nearly 4 lbs of meat! Katydid made a big pan of homefries alongside, and those all disappeared, too.  What am I going to do when more of these boys are teenagers???

(**Note: more on the boy theme… every time I walk into the kitchen somebody wants to be fed.  So while I’m not saying anything about snacks, you must assume that there is snacking going on… sometimes on the food I was planning to make for dinner, which drives me a little crazy.)

Thursday: Lunch — Leftover buffet — the few hamburgers and sausages that were left + the leftover spaghetti carbonara from Tuesday night.  The boys complained about the lack of buns and the fact that they all had to share small amounts of the spaghetti.  
                Dinner — Pepper Chicken, from Not Your Mother’s Make-Ahead and Freeze Cookbook recipe for Pepper Steak, fresh, over rice noodles
               After dinner, I sat down to pit cherries from the freezer and a couple of the kids sat down with me and ate them as soon as I had pitted them. So that relieved me of trying to figure out what to do with 2 + quarts of cherries.

Friday:  Breakfast — Biscuits   
             Lunch — Pizza ( A rousing success. I used the last of the tomato paste to make the sauce and decided I liked using the tomato paste better, because it made a thicker sauce) 
             Dinner — Baked potatoes with Dubliner Cheese and Carmelized Onions (from Not Your Mother’s Make-Ahead and Freeze Cookbook, except I made them fresh because I forgot to thaw the salmon for what I was going to make, and they weren’t twice-baked… but still very, very good with just the toppings on a regular baked potato); Amy’s canned GF soup; apples

Saturday: Breakfast — Homemade Pork Sausage + bananas + eggs (for those who wanted)`
                 Lunch  — Leftover pizza and/or potatoes + fruit
                 Dinner — Leftover Pepper Chicken and rice noodles + salad with the romaine, red cabbage, and 1/4 of a red onion left in the crisper drawer + oranges from last month’s bulk order

Sunday:  I woke up with the twins’ sore throat and stayed home from Mass with them.
               Breakfast — soaked oatmeal porridge (I didn’t have any yogurt, so I soaked it with lemon juice)
              Lunch — Vegetable Beef Noodle soup, with the beef broth I made during the week + Tinkyada spaghetti style rice pasta + carrots, frozen green beans, the remains of a bag of frozen corn, and a can of tomato sauce. Everybody liked it, which surprised me. I ate mine with Bubbie’s sauerkraut.
              Dinner —  Steak, baked potatoes (again), and the rest of the salad. One of the ribeye packages from our beef order wasn’t vacuum sealed, so we thawed it to eat right away, along with the remaining small rib-eyes from the old cow. There were also pears.

Andy also made himself some Egg Muffins (using bacon and no peppers) for breakfast for the week.  I had been planning on making some for him, but since I didn’t feel well, he took over. Nice man.

Monday: Breakfast — Fried rice and quinoa cakes with some leftover sprouted rice/quinoa I needed to use up.  We ate them with lots of butter and maple syrup.
              Lunch — The rest of the noodle soup from Sunday + oranges
              Dinner — Cheese and/or steak (with leftover steak) oven quesadillas + apples. I had asked Andy to look for corn tortillas when he went grocery shopping on Friday, but to make sure they were really gluten-free. He couldn’t find corn tortillas, so he bought 2 packages of Rudi’s GF tortillas… more expensive than gold at $6.99/8 medium tortillas.  Then one of my kids put them in the fridge instead of the freezer, so I needed to use them.  They were very good, but my kids could have eaten another package… which would have made dinner cost just as much as when we picked up pizza from Little Caesar’s.  

Tuesday: Breakfast — soaked oatmeal porridge again
                Lunch — cheesy nachos + oranges
               Dinner — Um. Something with cube (minute) steaks.  Probably cooked in some kind of gravy. 

At this point, life is getting interesting, because we’re in the middle of an ice storm. Power hasn’t gone out as of 4:30 PM central time, but my husband has been working from home for the past day and a half and I sent him out this morning to replenish our milk, eggs, and coffee.  I boiled some eggs and made some kefir/yogurt, just in case we’ll be unable to have a hot breakfast tomorrow… but we have fuel for the camp stove, fire wood for the wood stove, and gasoline for our generators, so we should be all right.  

Pantry Challenge

 I’m all about the challenges this year.

 This one has to do with food.  I actually tend to follow along with Jessica Fisher every time she does this, even if I’m not formally participating.  It reminds me that we should actually be eating from the stuff in the pantry.  (Or the fridge or the freezer.) Otherwise, I go through periods where I throw away a lot of food, and that always makes me feel terrible.

So here is an update about how it is going with the grocery budget and trying to use what we have, with more detail than you probably wanted to know.

And just as a recap, these are our vital stats:

9 people… including a pregnant mom, a dad, a 16 year old boy, a 9 year old boy who’s hitting a growth spurt, four more boys age 7 and under (including a 5 yo I’m trying to bulk up), and a 13 year old girl.  If you’re counting, yes, that is 6 boys and only 1 girl.

We’re all gluten-free.  I’m gluten-free under doctor’s orders, but my husband tries to eat gluten-free for his migraines and we suspect that a couple of our kids also have issues with gluten.  Therefore, our entire family eats gluten-free.

In December

I actually began trying to eat down our pantry in December.  I used all my canned salmon and most of my tuna plus about 3 lbs of pistachios I found hiding in the freezer, I donated all the canned beans that nobody seems to like, all the canned pumpkin and coconut milk went to making custards, and we did a good job of eating the frozen salmon I discovered in the back of the freezer from when we’d stocked up at one of Whole Foods’ “One Day” sales some time ago.  I used up more of our stock of steel cut oats (though we still have a lot) and did better at serving leftovers instead of having to throw them away because they had somehow retreated to the back of the fridge.  The only bump in the road came around Christmas time when a stomach virus started going around (it’s still lingering, but I think everybody in the world has it right now) and nobody felt like eating the Christmas leftovers.

Week One

Since we had run out of some of our staples around New Year’s, Andy had to go to Costco to replenish them.  Because I never know how long it will be before we can go to Costco again, I told him that he might as well stock up — in the hopes that we’ll be able to spend less the rest of the month.  He bought maple syrup, canned salmon and tuna, olive oil, Italian seasoning and vanilla, 5# frozen green beans, a lot of frozen OJ, frozen fruit mix and frozen blueberries for smoothies, cheese (including some Dubliner), gluten-free chicken sausages, and milk, in addition to some produce: lemons, limes, and brussel sprouts.  He also stocked up on toilet paper and paper towels.  

Then he made a Whole Foods run to buy more milk (we go through about a gallon a day), eggs, cream, bananas (yes, I know they’re more expensive at Whole Foods, but I hate Costco’s bananas and we’re trying to keep our grocery runs to two stores) , and, um, bacon, which for some reason has become a staple around here when it never was before.  He also bought some GF crackers, tortilla chips, and kefir… to help us bulk up on our probiotics a bit because of the stomach bug.

All of that put us over our weekly budget, but hopefully it will all balance by the end of the month.

Here’s what we ate the week of New Year’s, as near as I can reconstruct it:

 Monday (New Year’s Eve): beef roast with mushrooms and home-brewed muscadine wine (a gift from a friend of Andy’s; it wasn’t all drunk upon opening, so in order to use it up, I made a sauce with it, which was very good), mashed potatoes, some kind of vegetable… maybe peas?

Tuesday (New Year’s Day): Dinner at my inlaw’s. I was able to eat the ham and green beans which she prepared, and I brought Hoppin’ John and homemade coleslaw. We ate leftover ham and some sweet potatoes from the pantry for supper.

Wednesday: pork chops with apples and onions, mashed potatoes, roasted carrots

Thursday: Crockpot ham and potatoes, made with the leftover ham bone, a few sliced chicken sausages, a parmesan rind I had been saving for flavor, and of course potatoes; frozen green beans

Friday: Spanish omelet (I make mine with feta… and happily discovered that the “little bit of feta” I thought I needed to use up in the fridge was actually a whole container of feta in brine!

Saturday: Nachos and/or chicken sausages.  We were out in the afternoon until dinner.

Sunday: spaghetti (with sauce I’d discovered in the freezer when I cleaned it out on Saturday, the mushrooms I needed to use up sauteed and added in), fresh carrots from the garden 

Lunches were mostly cheese and GF crackers with possibly some salami or beef snack sticks, leftover crockpot ham and potatoes or Hoppin’ John, or buttered GF pasta with asiago (that I found on manager’s special last time I went to Kroger).

Breakfasts (if I remember correctly): puff pancake (I use rice and tapioca flour), oatmeal porridge, oat and banana cakes (with leftover oatmeal and a very, very, very ripe banana), homemade pork sausage and eggs, and GF raisin scones and raisin bread (from Gluten Free Cooking for the Holidays).

Week Two:

(this week)

This weekend I cleaned out the big freezer and the weather was nice enough to work in the garden, so I made inventories of those to help me use what I have. I found 3 quart bags of grated squash in the freezer (the last remains of an old harvest) and used them to make this incredibly awesome gluten-free zucchini bread, which turned out better than any wheat-based zucchini bread I have ever made.  I’d been considering abandoning summer squash in the garden this year, since the squash bugs always decimate it come July and it still seems like we have more than we can use in the freezer, but this bread has changed my mind!

The other big surprise from my freezer was a big bag of beef marrow bones.  I thought I had used them all, but apparently not.  I roasted them and am making bone broth.  I’ll use some broth this week for cooking and freeze the rest.

I was also pleasantly surprised to find that many of our winter greens have shrugged off our recent snow and cold weather and are putting out new leaves.  These new leaves — of chard, kale, and bok choy — are especially good in salads, which I ate yesterday for lunch along with some leftover spaghetti (I found the sauce in the freezer, too).

We also pulled some beets which I roasted with olive oil for dinner last night, to accompany our lamb ribs.  I didn’t do a good job of thinning the beets, so we didn’t get many of them.  There are probably enough still in the ground for one more dinner.  

And I used up the sprouted rice/quinoa blend that has been hanging around for a long time.  

Today’s meals: 

Breakfast: zucchini bread (couldn’t resist) and milk for the kids, plus scrambled eggs for me

Lunch: Nachos (“Cheesy Nachooos,” says my two year old), oranges for the kids; leftover lamb, beets, and a green salad for me

Dinner: I’m planning on Spaghetti Carbonara, made with GF pasta, maybe some kale from the garden on the side

More goals for the week:

• Use up the 3 qt. bags of frozen cherries I found in the freezer, in smoothies or baked goods
• Continue to make and freeze bone broth
• Orange marmalade with the oranges I bought in bulk last month. I’m not sure how much longer they’ll store.

Keeping a Lid on the Real Food Grocery Budget

From books to budgets…

It seems like I always start to get alarmed about our budget in December.  And it’s not so much the Christmas gifts.  It’s the food. 

Of course, I know that we’ll have extra expenses: more flour(s), more sweeteners, good quality chocolate, a ham, summer sausages, fancy cheeses, nuts.  That’s not what bothers me.  Christmas food has its own category, and I am not stingy with it.  But why do all the other expenses — the normal ones — seem to blow up out of control around the holidays, too? Is it because in order to get through these busy times we fall back on convenience food or we eat out more often? Is it just because I lose track? Is it because everybody gets sick this time of year and I just don’t feel like cooking?

I’m not really sure.  Here I have a confession to make: I am not the blogger to tell you how to feed nine people on $200 a month. We are solidly mediocre with our money.  We aren’t that ultra-frugal couple who can pinch a penny until it cries out in pain, nor are we spendthrifts.  We learned our lesson about debt in the first few years of our marriage, when we moved 3000 miles on a promise and a pay cut, with a new baby, a modest amount of student loans, a car payment, and a credit card that saw some heavy use… especially when Andy was laid off six months into his new job.  Paying off those debts meant life was a little dicey at times, but oddly enough, I never learned to be Amy Dacyzyn, or even that homeschool mom you probably know with the big brood and a tight budget.  The only debt we now have is our mortgage.  Andy’s job is fairly secure at the moment, and his salary — thankfully — gives us some wiggle room.  

I got a little more motivation to clean things up last month, though.  While Andy’s job is a good one, his pay structure is a little weird: he receives a large chunk of his salary in the form of a yearly bonus that varies from year to year.  We make it a point to live on what he receives monthly rather than relying on that yearly number, which we use for savings and for purchases that require big chunks of income — bulk meat purchases, large home improvements, tuition for high school classes, etc.  In the coming year it looks as if his monthly income might decrease a bit while that yearly bonus has the potential (maybe) to rise.  That makes it a little tougher on us month to month, so last month we spent some time getting our numbers in order before his pay structure changed.   

I did two things last month: I tried to track our expenses better without changing too much, just to see where all the money was going, and (with Andy) I looked at our new monthly numbers to see exactly where we could pare down to compensate for the monthly loss of pay.  This is where I admit something a little embarassing: the one thing that is saving us the most money is having to be completely gluten-free.  This seems counter-intuitive, since I can no longer buy cheap wheat flour or wheat pasta, but what has happened is that we no longer eat out.  It’s not like we went out to lots of expensive restaurants before, but I would pick up a few pizzas if I didn’t feel like cooking, and there was always the drive-through.  That stuff adds up when you’re feeding nine people.  Another thing that was adding up was Andy’s Starbucks habit and his daily lunch out.  As Andy kept telling me when I bemoaned the grocery budget, focusing on shaving the grocery budget without addressing those other issues was like trying to plug a giant hole in the levee with your finger.

Anyway, in order to track our expenses last month I set up a few spreadsheets to break down our grocery receipts into categories (meat, dairy, fruit, vegetables, etc.) by store so I could see exactly where we spent the most money.  It was also easy to see where impulse buys cost us.  I’m basing these spreadsheets on the one I found at the blog Weekly Grocery Shopping.  Alas, she hasn’t updated the site in several months, because I found it very helpful.  Although her family is small, she follows a paleo/primal diet on a tight budget, and the process she details in her free e-book, Feed Your Family, is nice for people like me who have a problem breaking a big task (making a grocery budget, for instance) into small steps. 

Some other places I went to for research into managing real food budgets:

Real Budget, Real Food Storage — Kerry Ann Foster has fed her family real food out of her food storage and a very small budget for long periods of time during her husband’s extended periods of unemployment.  Our budget isn’t anywhere near this tight, but there are lots of good ideas here about how storing real food can help get you through emergencies and save money, too.

Real Food on a Tight Budget at Divine Health 

Real Food for Less Money

Whole Foods on a Budget (I particularly like the way she kept good track of her garden harvest and how much it would have cost to buy the same amount of food.  Although, to be honest, I think she was cheating herself a little basing her prices on conventional produce instead of organic.  She’s also gardening in containers in a tiny yard, so her blog is worth a look if you’re trying to grow your own food in the city or suburbia.)  

Nourished Kitchen posts: A Look at Our Budget and Foodstamp Challenge 

30 Day Whole Foods Thrifty Challenge

A note about “challenges”… They typically bother me a little.  There are exceptions, of course, but generally, they seem to have a certain theme: Person whose grocery budget is not that tight tries to shop on a much tighter budget, discovers how hard it is, and spends a lot of time talking about hard it is to shop on such a small budget and how we should be sympathetic to people who have to make it on food stamps or the equivalent.  While I think the specifics of these challenges an be very helpful, I’m not sure if the common tone helps or hurts.  If you are currently trying to make it on a miniscule food budget, I don’t think you need anyone telling you how hard it is! Of course, these challenges really aren’t directed to helping people make tiny budgets work.  They’re often targeted to relatively affluent readers who maybe could use a dose of reality.

Anyway, I did find these two particular challenges helpful, for two reasons: the “food stamp menus” from Nourished Kitchen contain recipes like “Mussels in Broth” and “Roasted Beet and Frisee salad with Pecans”, which made me think that upgrading my cooking skills might help… and the Whole Foods challenge was conducted entirely at Whole Foods… not the cheapest store on the planet, and one which gets a big chunk of our monthly grocery spending.   

And I also looked at the contentious USDA Cost of Food Data.  Any time I bring this up someone tells me that these numbers are inflated and how they feed their family for much less. (On the other hand, many real food advocates point out that Americans have a much smaller percentage of their income on food in the recent past than is perhaps borne out historically, usually in an attempt to convince people that the higher cost of grass-fed beef, raw milk, etc. is worth it.  Obviously I think it’s worth it, but I’m just throwing this out there… and of course I know that some people just do not have the money to spare.)   In any case, I’m just using the numbers as a guideline to make sure our budget is somewhat reasonable, and I have nothing but a humble respect for those who manage to feed their families on miniscule budgets. (Especially considering that I seem to have found it so hard to keep to low numbers when I’ve had to try to do it myself.)  What Andy and I decided is that we need to keep our budget to the “Low Cost” guidelines, which, in the month of October allowed a little over $1500/month for our family of 9 or about $350/wk. (This is only for food, by the way. Paper goods are not included… but the number does include all food, including eating out.)  I noticed that costs seemed to rise a bit in the new November data, and unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like that trend will reverse in the near future.  But our number needs to stay stable.     

 Here are our food priorities in case that number made you have a heart attack:

1. Our number one priority right now is to keep our whole family gluten-free, at least at home.  I need to be gluten-free everywhere, and Andy, with his migraines, probably ought to be.  My sister, whose epilepsy had been worsening for many years, has been able to get it under much better control by eating gluten-free, and considering my own problems with gluten, I have a feeling that what we may be dealing with here is celiac, which is a hereditary condition.  Therefore, it makes sense that some of my kids might be dealing with it, too.  Plus, it’s just easier for everybody to eat the same meals.

2.  We eat animals (and animal products) that ate their own natural diets and were raised humanely. We don’t really bend too much on this one.  We have both ethical and nutritional objections to grain-fed animals raised in confinement.  We buy hormone-free milk and dairy products (can’t afford raw milk, and it’s hard to find in Mississippi), grass-fed if possible.  We also buy free-range cage free eggs when we need to supplement our own backyard egg production… which we need to do now because a raccoon recently reduced our chicken numbers to a lonely 3 hens.  

3. We use healthy oils, including coconut oil and olive oil, instead of vegetable oil.

4. We buy organic produce, especially from the “Dirty Dozen” list. We try to grow a lot of it in our own garden, but our gardens have not been great the past couple of years.

5. We buy local when we can.

6. We try to balance money and time.  It’s just a fact of our lives and the personalities of some of my children that it’s much easier for my husband to do most of the grocery shopping on his way home from work.  Undoubtedly we pay more sometimes in order to keep our shopping to a minimum of stores and time, but I haven’t yet been able to figure out how to shop at more than 2 stores a week.   
 
My goal this month is to feed my family well for a moderate amount of money.  I want my five year old, who is currently below the 10th percentile on the growth chart, to gain some weight and grow a little bit.  I want to keep the behavior of some of my boys (which seems to be somewhat food-related) within normal limits.  I want to help Andy reduce or even (!) get rid of his migraines. And I want to be healthy enough to be a good mother, not a constantly tired, irritable, depressed, snappish one.  Over the years I have become more and more amazed at how closely all of those goals are tied to the food we eat.  So I do not want to compromise on my priorities, but I do need to keep the budget within some limits.

I won’t pretend that anything I say regarding this subject will be earth-shattering… probably instead I will seem bumbling and even incompetent sometimes… I will certainly make a lot of mistakes. But I would like to share some of my struggles and victories on the blog occasionally, and also I thought it might be helpful if I tried again to post a few weekly menus the way I did last January (although I should note that we are no longer grain-free), in order to add to the database of what it means to feed a large family gluten-free, real food.  I find there is a real lack of information out there for large families who want (or need) to change their way of eating.  In fact, most of the budgetary and dietary advice is for very small or small families of 3 or 4.  (An exception to this is Dyno-Mom’s blog, which is a real gold mine, although not gluten-free.  I recently instituted her picky eater policy at our table, and I have to say, I have seen good results and have only been tested once by one child.)

Anyway, I like it best when I can see real-world examples of what other families are actually doing, and so I thought I might throw some more examples out into the blogosphere myself.  As usual I can’t promise regularity… but “real-world” is something I can manage!