Money Tips: utilizing your groceries

One important aspect of sticking to my grocery budget ($325/month for a family of five) is utilizing every part of my groceries. I don't want any of my groceries (or my money!) to go to waste. The best example I have of this is my homemade crockpot chicken broth. This is so easy, you'll never need to buy chicken broth again!
I never throw out the vegetable scraps when I'm prepping dinner. Celery stocks, onion scraps, asparagus ends, garlic bulbs, they all get tossed in a gallon size bag that I keep in the freezer for making broth. Then, when I make slow cooker roast chicken (bone in chicken pieces rubbed in olive oil and sprinkled with seasonings, cooked on low for 7ish hours), I save the bones and the broth that's left and add the vegetable scraps to the crockpot. I fill the rest of the way with water and add whatever herbs strike my fancy (oregano, rubbed sage, rosemary, garlic) and cook on low over night. In the morning, all I have to do is strain out the solids and freeze for later use. I fill muffin tins with the broth and then pop each 1/2 cup disk out and keep them in freezer bags. Then, whenever I need broth, I can just grab the amount I need out of the freezer!
Another thing I touched on in my grocery budget post was finding multiple uses for each (especially expensive) ingredients. If I need to buy blue cheese for hamburgers, I use it on salads, in mashed potatoes, or on crusty french bread slices with fig preserves (yummiest snack ever!) to make it worth the purchase and get my money's worth. With Pinterest, food blogs, and Google, it's really not that hard to find multiple recipes using similar ingredients!
Next up: clothes.

Sample meal plan :)

After my last post, I had quite a few requests for a sample two week meal plan. This works for our family of 5 (Pearl doesn't count, because she doesn't eat yet). Also, Jason packs a lunch (usually leftovers) and has snacks at work, which come out of our monthly grocery budget. During the school year, I pack lunches for the girls a few days a week and they buy lunch once or twice, too.

1. Hamburgers with bacon and blue cheese, corn on the cob, watermelon slushies
2. Grilled shrimp tostados, lime cilantro rice, Brazilian lemonade
3. BLT pizza: I used romaine lettuce instead of arugula because that's why my family likes.
4. Leftovers/oatmeal and toast
5. Roast chicken, twice baked potatoes, cornbread: I lucked out a year and a half ago at Walmart and found 10 lb bags of fresh chicken thighs and drumsticks for $1 each (they were expiring soon). I bought 4 bags (wish I had bought 10!) and threw them in my freezer. They're perfect for slow cooker roast chicken! I still have 15 lb left, too :)
6. Grilled chicken drumsticks, veggie skewers, watermelon slushies
7. Greek chicken, hummus, flatbread, lemon butter rice, lots of veggies: I marinate chicken in lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, and oregano, then grill it and cut it into pieces and serve with lots of vegetables in flatbread.
8. Egg stuffed baked potatoes, crusty bread, smoothies, hash browns
9. Chicken salad wraps, chips, fruit
10. Deep dish pizza, salad with tomatoes and cucumber
11. Leftover/oatmeal and toast
12. Morgan's homecoming dinner at Jan's
13. Chick Fi La knockoff nuggets, oven fries, homemade lemonade
14. Homemade chili, corncakes, and tomato salad
15. Sweet and tangy chicken quesadillas, black beans and rice
16. Cool tomato basil soup, crusty french bread, salad

Breakfast

• Scrambled eggs and toast
• Egg in a hole
• Granola
• Oatmeal (quick cooking with brown sugar, honey, frozen mixed berries, craisins/raisins, etc)
• Pancakes/waffles
• Parfaits (yogurt and frozen fruit slightly thawed in the microwave)
• Smoothies
• Mixed berries with homemade meringues on top

Snacks

• Popcorn (air popped with either melted PB, or melted butter and cinnamon sugar, or melted butter and Italian spices + Parmesan cheese)
• Graham crackers and milk
• Crackers and PB or cheese
• Yogurt/frozen Gogurt
• String cheese
• Fruit/veggies
• Roasted chickpeas
• Hummus and pita chips
• Cinnamon chips

Treats

• Pioneer taffy
• Berry meringue mess
• Samoa brownies

Coming next in my Money Tips: Meal Planning series: a good example of utilizing your groceries to get the most bang for your buck!

Money tips: groceries!!

I am the money manager at our house and let me tell you, our budget is tight. It takes a lot of effort on my part to make it work, and I've accumulated a lot of tips on how to live well on a small budget. It is possible!

First up, grocery shopping. 

I've got a small budget here: $325/month. I just bumped it up from $300 because I kept going over, no matter what I did. I was at $300 for many years, though! 
First, some disclaimers:

• I don't coupon because I never see coupons for things that I actually buy: most seem to be for name brand, convenience items.
• I don't even bother price matching often because Walmart seems to always have the lowest price anywhere.
• I do all my grocery shopping at Walmart and no complaints from me. I feel like the produce is just fine (I've had worse luck with Costco produce, as far as freshness goes)

Now the tips:

• Limit your trips to the store. I shop twice a month, and that's it. If I run out of something before shopping day--oh well, we go without. My produce keeps just fine for two weeks. We usually eat up the produce that doesn't last as long the first week of my two-week menu, and then eat the heartier produce the second week (tomatoes, cucumbers, bananas, spinach, peaches, strawberries, etc first week; apples, carrots, oranges, Romaine lettuce, etc second week)
• MENU PLAN. I can't stress this enough. Do not go to the store without a plan. I plan out our dinners for two weeks (we always eat leftovers or oatmeal on Saturdays), plus breakfast and snack ideas, and a dessert for each weekend. When I make my menu, I think about what's in season, what's on sale, and what I already have at home. If I want to buy an ingredient that's more expensive than I normally spend, I try to find several recipes that will use it so it's worth the purchase.

• Take the time to prep foods the same day (or soon after) grocery shopping. I chop green onions and put them in the freezer, rinse strawberries in vinegar to make them last longer, things like that. If you let your food spoil because it wasn't properly stored or prepared, it's like throwing money away!
• Eat healthy food. My cart is probably 50% fresh fruits and veggies. I could probably save some money by cutting those out, but to me, it's important that we have lots of fresh produce.
• I make some kind of chicken almost every night. Really. Sorry, family, but it's cheapest, and I make it allllll the different ways, so it's not repetitive. 
• Go meatless a few times a week (pizza is good for this, or breakfast for dinner! I also like grilling a ton of different vegetables and serving it with poached eggs, shaved Parmesan cheese, toasted pecans, and crusty bread). Or use meat more sparingly and let veggies be the star of the 
• dish.
• We cut way back on milk and are down to a gallon a week--we drink it at breakfast and with treats, and that's pretty much it.
• Speaking of breakfast, I don't buy cereal. It's expensive, it's empty calories, and it's full of preservatives and junk. I do make homemade granola and we also have eggs and toast, quick cooking oatmeal with brown sugar and raisins, yogurt with frozen berries on top, things like that.
• Steer clear of convenience and processed items. Make that stuff from scratch if you have the time! You can make all kinds of stuff from scratch, trust me.
• Snack foods are a budget killer. Here, we snack on fresh fruits and veggies, yogurt (I splurge on Gogurts to freeze), roasted chickpeas, pita bread and hummus, air popped popcorn, smoothies, homemade tortilla chips, etc. I do usually keep a box of graham crackers around, too.
• Splurge on some things. Everyone needs a treat once in a while. I always have tons of baking supplies on hand to make goodies--chocolate chips, coconut, craisins, marshmallows, PB chips. That is one thing that I will always make room for in my budget! 

What do you do to save at the store?

mom's worst chore

I just did one of my most hated chores: made my two week menu and grocery list.

Feeding my family is so stressful!!

I don't mind the actual preparing of the food so much, but I really, really dislike planning the menu, making the grocery list, doing the shopping, unloading the groceries, and then putting them away. That's pretty much the whole process, isn't it?

We have a small grocery budget ($300/month) and I only go shopping twice a month, so I feel a lot of pressure to a) stick to the budget and b) make sure I have enough food in the house to last us two weeks. Getting ready for a shopping trip is a really long process, especially now that I have a Costco membership and I'm figuring out what to buy there and what to buy elsewhere.

So: how do you do it? What do you do that keeps your costs down and makes the process go more smoothly? Coupons, price matching, bulk stores, Bountiful Baskets, I wanna hear about it!