I'm honored to have a guest post featured on the ShopAtHome blog today on how we feed our family for $40 per week. I'm sharing the nuts and bolts of how it's done and how you, too, can significantly reduce your family's grocery budget as well. Check it out over here.
Super Savings Saturday: Organic apples and tangerines for $0.99 per bag!
Super Savings Saturday: Organic apples and tangerines for $0.99 per bag!
I went to Aldi and to the health food store this week. Plus, I got some farm-fresh eggs from my family.
Here's what I bought:
I got three bags of organic apples at the health food store for $0.99 each! (One bag isn't pictured because I shared it with my sister.) And the bags of tangerines were on sale at Aldi for $0.99 each, too! Looks like we'll be making some yummy fresh juice over the next few weeks.
All totaled, we've spent $25 from our $160 monthly grocery budget so far this month–and our freezer is full of meals! It's looking like we're definitely going to be able to stay plenty under-budget this month and have lots of wiggle room for some more bulk purchases.
Stay tuned for next week's menu on Monday.
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Did you snag any great deals or bargains this week or save money in other ways?
If so, be sure to post about them on your blog and leave your link
below. Please remember that this weekly round-up is to share deals you
personally got and/or money you were able to save this week. In order
to keep this weekly round-up focused on helping and inspiring others in
their efforts to save money, links which have little-to-no content
other than promoting affiliate links, etc. will be deleted. Also, to
make it easy for everyone to navigate quickly through the links, your
link must link directly to your Super Savings Saturday post.
The Method to My Madness: Start Where You Are and Learn As You Go
The Method to My Madness: Start Where You Are and Learn As You Go
Every time I blog about a Baking Day or a Freezer Cooking Day, I invariably get a multitude of questions that go like this:
Or this:
Or this:
For a number of months, I've just pretty much avoided these questions because I didn't really know what you'd think of me if I answered them. But I decided this Freezer Cooking Day it was high time I come clean on this whole freezing thing and what I do.
Are you ready for this?
I have no idea what I'm doing. Seriously. There really is no precise method to my madness; I just work with what I have and do the best I know how.
I'm not much of a "follow-the-directions" kind of gal (which is one reason I have a very hard time following recipes exactly!) so it's rather comical anyone is coming to me for advice–especially when it comes to cooking. I have a long history of flopped dinners. In fact, growing up, many of my family members were afraid to eat anything I made for fear of what it might taste like or be made of.
Practice has provided much progress in my cooking abilities, but I still have huge room for improvement. And as far as freezing goes, I'm just learning as I go.
So I'm probably not the person to go to if you're looking for specific and detailed instructions on how to freeze food. But I hope that my admission encourages you: it doesn't take much skill or knowledge or know-how to make up food for your freezer. It just takes some energy, some perseverance, and the willingness to make a few mistakes along the way!
Of course, I think it's helpful to check out books from your library on freezer cooking (you can see a few of my favorites here). But I think book-learning is almost always trumped by hands-on learning.
Now that I've confessed I don't know what I'm doing, here are the answers to your questions as far as what I do when it comes to freezing: I usually freeze half of the meals in the pans they'll be cooked in and half the meals in freezer bags laid flat (to conserve space). I usually try to use the meals in pans first as they are more prone to freezer burn. But I've rarely had a problem with this so long as they are sealed well.
I sometimes use a few foil pans–if I have some on hand–but most often, I just use freezer bags and glass or metal pans. I don't have a huge collection of pans (I'm a minimalist, remember?), but since I won't be doing much cooking because most of our meals are already made and frozen, I can tie up most of my pans for a little while without even missing them. I do try to make sure I set aside at least two pans of some sort since I usually have something or other I have to cook each week!
This is what works for me and for our family. It may not work at all for you or yours so please do what works for you. Amy has a post here with a freezing method that works for her. If you're the type who needs to have a detailed freezing tutorial, I'm sure they are out there. I've just never taken the time to look! (I take that back. I just did a quick search and found many different tutorials, including this one which is rather comprehensive.)
Think you're up for some cooking ahead (and I hope this week inspired you to save time and money by doing so!)? Don't be intimidated! Just start small, make a plan, work the plan, and learn as you go. You'll improve a little bit each time until you're soon an accomplished Freezer Cooking Pro!
Who says you have to have a big deep freeze to cook ahead? I don't! You know all the meals I made earlier this week? All 21 dinners plus 14 breakfasts? That's them all stashed in my over-the-fridge freezer along with some frozen veggies and bread. Get creative with your freezer space and you can probably do a lot more with it than you once thought possible! I know that's certainly been the case for me!
Wondering how you can pull off Freezer Cooking on a budget?
Were you inspired to try your hand at Freezer Cooking this week but skeptical as to whether it's possible to do on a budget? FishMama shares tips for Freezer Cooking on the Cheap for her Frugal Friday post today.
Just for the record, everything I used to make my meals this week was well within our $40/week grocery budget. Best of all? We've yet to even touch any of the grocery money for the month of November–and I already have a freezer full of meals! Which means–you guessed it!–I'll even have more wiggle room to stock up this month on bulk purchases (and maybe even to splurge on some more healthful ingredients–like the coconut oil I've been eyeing for the past few months!).
Truly bulk-buying and bulk-cooking are allowing us to eat much more healthfully on a very slim grocery budget. It's taken some practice and time to get there, but that practice and time is starting to really pay off.
Worth Reading Round-up
A few links I've enjoyed this week:
::IndiMoney shares how to make Whole Wheat tortillas from scratch here. I've done this before and they are quite simple to make and delicious, too!
::Abbi is hosting a Handmade Christmas Carnival every Thursday in November and December. If you're looking for inexpensive and creative gift ideas, be sure to head over to her blog.
::Need some efficient meal-planning help and ideas? Check out Jen's posts here, here, and here.
::My friend, Lorrie, who blogs at Natural on a Budget, put together a list of 50 Beans and Rice recipes here if you need some frugal meal inspiration.
Freezer Cooking Day: The final results (and come link up your posts, too!)
Freezer Cooking Day: The final results (and come link up your posts, too!)
I made it to the end of the list. Well, okay, not quite, but it's the end of the day so I'm calling it quits.
Compared to FishMama's accomplishments, it looks like I didn't do much at all these past two days. But she's pretty much Superwoman's clone, so I won't feel badly (I used to live in the same town as her and have spent lots of time with her and she's every bit as amazing as she seems on her blog–even moreso in real-life!).
Here's the fruit of around eight hours of labor:
Here are the final tallies along with links to the recipes:
2 dozen Whole Wheat Waffles
2 dozen Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins
2 dinners' worth Freezer Mashed Potatoes
2 batches Granola
3 dinners' worth of Turkey Meatballs
3 dinners' worth of Slow Cooked Pepper Steak
3 dinners' worth of Farmhouse Chicken
8 dinners' worth of Chicken Tetrazinni (I made two different varieties since we really like this!)
4 dinners' worth of Chicken Broccoli Rice
All in all, we now have 21 dinners in our freezer plus at least 14 breakfasts and some snacks and sides. That will most certainly cover our dinners for the next month (and we still have some meals leftover from last month's Freezer Cooking Day!) plus a number of breakfasts, too. What a great feeling!
Freezer cooking is not for the faint of heart. It's a lot of work and I won't be lying one bit when I say that there's a point in the middle of every Freezer Cooking Day that I wonder what on earth I've gotten myself into. But it is worth persevering through as it saves me so much time, energy, and effort the rest of the month.
In fact, I rarely cook much during the month outside of my Freezer Cooking Day! And we eat out a whole lot less when our freezer's full, too. So it saves me lots of mental thought and physical labor the rest of the month and it also saves us a lot of money, too.
Things I learned from this month's Freezer Cooking Day:
::Always double-check to make sure you have more than enough ingredients on hand (so you're not trying to make a big batch of granola without oats!)
::Don't try to do other things on Freezer Cooking Day. Cooking a month's worth of meals is enough work for one day. Sigh. Why do I always have to learn these things the hard way?
::It's better for me to start early in the morning instead of waiting until the afternoon. Otherwise, I run out of steam way before I run out of recipes I'm supposed to cook.
::And in the same vein, I think it works better for me to do all the cooking on one day instead of breaking it up over two days.
I'm making a game plan for next month's Freezer Cooking Day based upon the successes and failures I had the past two days and looking forward to implementing it the first week in December when FishMama and I plan to hold another Freezer Cooking Day.
But for now? I have a very messy kitchen to attend to.
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Did you have a chance to do any baking or cooking this week? If so, post about it
on your blog and leave your link below to your direct blog post. I'd
love it especially if you could share pictures and recipes so we can get ideas for our next Freezer Cooking Day! And I'm guessing many
others would be inspired as well.
Freezer Cooking Day #2: Pepper Steak and Healthified Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins
Freezer Cooking Day #2: Pepper Steak and Healthified Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins
I stuck the Pepper Steak in the crockpot to start cooking while I mixed up a batch of Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins.
We're experimenting with replacing refined sugar at our house right now so I redid this recipe to see if I could tweak it enough to make it healthful but still delicious. I used fresh-ground whole wheat flour, farm-fresh eggs, and 1 1/2 cups sucanat in place of the sugar.
They ended up turning out quite delicious! They are a little heavier than usual and wee bit less moist than the original recipe, but they are still very good and the girls didn't seem to notice any difference. I'm pretty sure that they'll gladly eat just about anything so long as it has chocolate chips in it!
Now if I could just replace the oil, make my own pumpkin puree, use chocolate chips made without refined sugar, and replace the storebought milk with organic farm-fresh milk, these would be the most nutritional muffins you ever did eat. But it's all about making little changes and babysteps, right? So I'll just guilt-lessly feed my family these healthified Pumpkin Chocolate Chip muffins!
Next up: Turkey Meatballs and Farmhouse Chicken
Freezer Cooking Day #2: Almost-Oatless Granola
After cleaning the kitchen, I went to mix together the granola and discovered that I had completely forgotten to check to see if I had plenty of oats on hand when I was making my grocery list. There was only about 1 1/2 cups left. Oops.
Instead of ditching the granola idea, I decided to get creative and see what I could come up with. I used this recipe here and what oats I had and then added in lots of wheat germ, sunflower seeds, flax seeds, coconut, wheat bran, almonds, and sesame seeds to make up for the rest of the missing oats.
It actually looks like it might turn out quite well. And it will definitely pack a nutritional punch!
Now I'm sticking the Pepper Steak in the crockpot and starting on the Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins.
Freezer Cooking Day #2: Starting at 8:00 a.m. instead
So I said I was going to start at 1:30 p.m. again today, but after going to bed so exhausted last night, I decided to revamp my plan for today and begin cooking at 8:00 a.m. when I'm fresh and energized. I should have known better than to attempt a big marathon cooking session in the afternoon when I'm usually tired and ready to put my feet up! You live and learn, don't you?
Hopefully I'll be able to do a better job of taking pictures and live-blogging today as a result of starting earlier. That just didn't happen yesterday while I was madly dashing around the kitchen trying to make it through my list in four hours.
First, though, I must clean up my messy kitchen. And then I'll start in on my list for today!
I'll be back with an update soon.
Freezer Cooking Day: Today’s Accomplishments
I'm wiped out! I thought it wouldn't be too hard to pull off my to-do list if my mom were here helping with the children this afternoon. I mean, after all, I usually have them and do this all by myself.
Was. I. ever. mistaken!
Oh, it was a huge help to have my mom here, don't get me wrong! I just bit off more than I could chew with trying to put in our normal full morning of homeschooling and homemaking, then a lunch date with my hubby, and then a whirlwind four hours of cooking/baking in the afternoon.
It's so worth it to have all this food in the freezer, but I'm going to devise a different gameplan next month because I'm not superwoman and ran out of steam very quickly this afternoon. I'm wondering if perhaps I'm more energetic in the mornings so starting out at 1:30 p.m. is just too late in the day for me to be as productive? I'm still mulling over it.
At any rate, despite all this, I did get quite a bit accomplished:
I chopped up some beautiful red peppers I snagged for $0.99 total yesterday at the health food store and used them in the Chicken Tetrazinni.
I made two variations of Chicken Tetrazinni (see the recipe here) since this is one of family's favorite freezer meals–one I made with red peppers and onions and spaghetti noodles. The other I made with green peppers and fettucini noodles. They both turned out looking delicious!
I also made four pans of Chicken Broccoli Rice. I wish I could point you to a recipe for this, but the truth is that I don't use one. I just mix brown rice, broccoli, cheese, butter, eggs, cream of chicken soup, and chicken together in amounts that look right and then freeze. Who needs a recipe when you can just dump some stuff together and call it "dinner"?!
After that was done, it was almost dinner time, so I hurriedly decided we'd have leftovers for dinner–since we had some in the fridge–and skip the meatballs I was planning to serve. I finished up the Freezer Mashed Potatoes (see the recipe here) and got everything ready to do in the freezer, and then I called it an afternoon.
So here's what I ended up accomplishing today:
1) Grind flour and mix together waffle batter and begin cooking waffles
2) Boil chicken
3) Get potatoes in the crockpot for Freezer Mashed Potatoes
4) Chop chicken, boil noodles
5) Quick clean up
6) Boil rice, make homemade cream soup, chop red peppers
7) Make Chicken Tetrazinni
8) Make Chicken Broccoli Rice
9) Finish Freezer Mashed Potatoes
It might not seem like that much, but here's a picture to give you a better idea:
All in all, I made 12 meals, 2 dozen waffles, and 2 tubs of Freezer Mashed Potatoes. For 4 hours of work, that was definitely worth it!
Here's the revised plan for Wednesday:
1) Make Slow Cooked Pepper Steak and put in crockpot
2) Make Granola
3) Make Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins
4) Mix together Turkey Meatballs
5) Make Farmhouse Chicken
6) Make Pumpkin Scones
7) Make Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough
8) Finish dinner preparations (Farmhouse Chicken, mashed potatoes, corn, apples) and clean up kitchen
9) Be thrilled with the finished results, put my feet up, and relax knowing I don't have to do much cooking for the next month!
Like today, I'm planning to begin baking again at 1:30 p.m. CST and will be tweeting my progress and posting pictures and details as I cross things off my list. And maybe I'll have more energy tomorrow?
For now, I'm heading to bed and hoping for a very good night's rest!
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Click here to sign upFreezer Cooking Day: Whole-Wheat Waffles, Freezer Mashed Potatoes, Homemade Cream of Chicken Soup
Freezer Cooking Day: Whole-Wheat Waffles, Freezer Mashed Potatoes, Homemade Cream of Chicken Soup
I just finally sat down to take a blogging break after going strong for 4 hours. So far I have made 2 dozen waffles plus I have 12 meals ready to go in the freezer. Here's a little peek at what I've been up to:
After grinding the flour, I mixed up a batch of Whole Wheat Waffles times five. I used our family's favorite recipe here but this time I used turbinado instead of regular sugar as our family is working on moving away from white refined sugar.
While the waffles were cooking, I boiled the noodles for Chicken Tetrazinni and peeled the potatoes to stick in the crockpot for Freezer Mashed Potatoes (see the recipe here).
By then, I had a nice big stack of waffles finished.
I kept baking more while I mixed up a triple batch of homemade Cream of Chicken Soup (recipe is here) to use in the Chicken Tetrazinni and Chicken Broccoli Rice.
In the timeframe that I put all of that together, my kitchen went from looking like this, to this:
And believe me, it will likely get worse than that before this Freezer Cooking Marathon is over. But if I only have to do one huge pile of dishes once a month, it's every bit worth it to me. Just remind me of that when I tackling them in a few hours, okay? 🙂
Up next: Chicken Tetrazinni, Chicken Broccoli Rice
Freezer Cooking Day begins…
It's 1:30 p.m. CST and homeschooling is done for the day, Grandma is here to watch the children, my apron is on, Pandora is playing in the background, and I'm about ready to make a very big mess in my just-cleaned kitchen… all for a good cause because I'm baking and cooking up a storm today!
I'll be back with an update in a few hours or less. In the mean time, you can follow along on Twitter.
Freezer Cooking Day: The Master Plan
Today's the day! I've cleared my schedule, made my list, done my shopping, got a good night's rest, cleaned my kitchen, and brought in recruits (i.e. Grandma!) to help with the children. And I'm ready to hit the ground running with this cooking and baking thing.
But not before I first make another list (yes, I'm one of those Type-A list-makers–sorry, it's just the only way things seem to get done around here!). This list is my Master Plan list which tells me what to do when–in detailed order.
I've found that it's great to have a Proposed List of everything I want to accomplish, but breaking it down into bite-size pieces of the order I plan to accomplish it in helps me be much more efficient and organized.
Last night before going to bed, I grated up all the cheese I'd need today and set out the milk and ground turkey from the freezer to thaw. Prepping a few things like that the night before help give me a little jumpstart to my Freezer Cooking the next day.
Here's my Master Plan for today and tomorrow (remember, I'm planning to work from 1:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. CST since I'm fitting this in around our homeschooling schedule):
Tuesday
1) Grind flour and mix together waffle batter and begin cooking waffles
2) Boil chicken
3) Get potatoes in the crockpot for Freezer Mashed Potatoes
4) Chop chicken, boil noodles
5) Quick clean up
6) Boil rice, make homemade cream soup, chop red peppers
7) Make Chicken Tetrazinni
8) Make Chicken Broccoli Rice
9) Make Granola
10) Make Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins
11) Mix together Turkey Meatballs, cook one pan for dinner, cook the rest and freeze
13) Finish Freezer Mashed Potatoes
12) Finish dinner preparations (Turkey Meatballs, Freezer Mashed Potatoes, Broccoli, Toast) and clean up
Wednesday
1) Make Slow Cooked Pepper Steak and put in crockpot
2) Make Farmhouse Chicken
3) Make Pumpkin Scones
4) Make Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough
5) Finish dinner preparations (Farmhouse Chicken) and clean up kitchen
6) Be thrilled with the finished results, put my feet up, and relax knowing I don't have to do much cooking for the next month!
As you can tell, I'm planning to do the bulk of my cooking today since Grandma is here to play with the children. It also gives me a little wiggle room if I'm not able to get to everything I planned to do on Tuesday; I can always bump it to Wednesday, if need be. And if I get incredibly ambitious, finish everything on Tuesday's list, and have extra time, I can always start in on Wednesday's list!
Need more help and ideas for making a game plan for your Freezer Cooking Day? Check out FishMama's post here.
Stay tuned for live-blogging and tweeting (follow me on Twitter here) this afternoon on my real-time progress complete with pictures and recipes. Don't forget to follow FishMama on her blog and Twitter or the more that 250 other women around the country who are participating in this Freezer Cooking Day and tweeting about it with the hashtag #bakingday.
Have you posted your Baking Day plans on your blog? If so, leave your link below so others can be inspired with ideas and new recipes to try. Remember to link directly to your blog post.
Three more recommended paid survey companies
I shared about a few of my favorite survey companies last Friday and
talked about how this was a little way I brought in some extra money
during our lean law school days. Since I posted that, I’ve done some
more research on survey companies and wanted to share some more links
to reputable companies which my friends have recommended.
SurveySpot–This is one of the companies I’ve heard the most rave reviews about in the last year or so. They pay up to $5 per survey and you can request payout when you have earned $5. So therefore, it’s not hard at all to earn enough to get a check. In fact, while I don’t have a lot of extra time these days, I’m seriously considering signing up just to see what it’s like! Go here to sign up.
LightSpeed Research—This survey site pays in points and they are fairly generous in their points given. Once you’ve accumulated enough points, you can cash them in for cash, online gift certificates, music downloads, and hundreds of
other prizes. Or, build up your points for bigger prizes in your
Lightspeed Points Account. Go here to sign up.
iPoll–Pays in point rewards for every completed survey. You can cash these in for instant win opportunities, sweepstakes, or cash. There are also opportunities to do free product testing. Go here to sign up.
If you have any experience with these companies–either good or bad–please tell us about it in the comments section. As always, remember that you won’t get rich taking surveys and it takes work and effort to earn money from surveys, but if you stick with it, you can create a small and steady sidestream of income through surveys.
Guest Post: Tackling Meal Planning–One Month At a Time!
Guest Post by Tricia from Once-A-Month Mom
planning can be a bit of a challenge to even the savviest of
organizers. Planning each and every week can sometimes be time-consuming or tiring. I use to plan meals one week at a time and found
that it worked for me most of the time, but other times, I was too exhausted or didn't have new ideas or I would make a great plan only to
have plans change and not be able to use the meals, thus ingredients
going to waste! That's when I started doing once-a-month cooking (also
known as bulk cooking, freezer cooking, power cooking, and OAMC).
people are overwhelmed at the prospect of making all of their meals for
the entire month in one day. They hear "8 hours in the kitchen" and
they leave about hyperventilate!
Don't get me wrong, 8 hours in the
kitchen is a long time, and tiring. But when you are finished, you have
enough meals to rarely step into the kitchen for another month! Not
only that, but you can also save money on your grocery bill as well because this method of planning and cooking will save you shopping trips and trips through the fast-food lane.
Here is a look at how a whole day in the kitchen can put more hours in
your day and money in your wallet:
cooking does require an 8-10 hour cooking day (or split amongst several
days). However, if you do the math on the amount of time that you would
have spent in the kitchen preparing these meals throughout the month,
it would be substantially higher.
Once-a-month cooking saves time
because you are cutting, dicing, mixing, chopping, sautéing, and cooking
"like" ingredients all at once. For instance, instead of chopping onion
several nights each week for the entree you are making, you can chop
that onion all at once, then cook and package the meal.
my most recent once-a-month endeavor, I spent 8.5 hours in the kitchen.
At the end of the day I had 30 meals (a mix of breakfasts, lunches, and
dinners). The time I would have spent had I prepared these meals when I
was serving them would have been at least 30 hours. I don't know about
you, but I can find lots of things that I can do with an extra 22 hours
during the month!
once-a-month cooking saves time is that you don't have to perform a juggling act to get dinner on the table. The
stretch between 4:00 pm and 5:30 pm has to be the most hectic time of
the day in our household. My husband isn't home from work yet; I am
trying to appease my son so that I can get dinner finished in a timely
manner; and all he wants is for me to play with him—it gets rough! I
find myself frazzled and easily willing to forgo my menu plan to save
my sanity. When I have done once-a-month cooking, I instead pull out
one of my freezer meals, stick it in the oven and go play with my son
until it is ready. That is precious time that I can't afford to miss!
am amazed at how cooking "like" meals can really save you money in a
month. The savings comes in the fact that you are buying large
quantities of products at one time, hopefully when they are on sale or
when you have coupons. If you plan to make things that are in season,
you can also save money by buying ingredients when they are at their
lowest price point.
For smaller families, these bulk savings are not
usually possible because large quantities of food often spoil before it
can be consumed. With once-a-month cooking, you are preparing all that
food at once and don't have to worry about it going to waste. And it
will last in the freezer for several months!
more than half by doing once-a-month cooking. I decide what we are
cooking, shop the sales all month, and then prepare the meals that we
will be eating the following month. I usually spend approximately $75 to $130 for a month's worth of meals. That is around $2.60 to $4.33 per meal!
looking for ways to make your dinner time less hectic, spend more time
with your family, spend less money on your grocery bill, or develop an
effective way to menu plan, you should try once-a-month cooking. You
just might surprise yourself at how much you can save, both in your
wallet and by your watch!
career as a stay-at-home mom in Ohio, where her family resides. She is
expecting her second child in December (don't ask the gender they
aren't finding out). She is trying to show others how to be good
stewards of their time and their money while still providing wholesome
and nutritious meal options to their families. Her website, Once-A-Month Mom, is dedicated to "making daily chores
monthly memories" by providing monthly meal plans, grocery lists,
instructions, recipes and more for families curious about once-a-month
cooking and baby food.
many make-ahead Thanksgiving recipes and lots of menu items that you
will find on sale right now at your local grocers. The November (Christmas) Menu is
meant to be shopped throughout the month of November, cooked at the end
of the month, and consumed in December. However, you are welcome to shop
and use the menu now. Each menu includes recipes, a grocery list,
step-by-step instructions, and labels.