Remember a few months ago when I wrote about the brilliant idea of freezer-to-crockpot cooking that I discovered thanks to Stephanie at Mama And Baby Love?  It’s become a mainstay in my kitchen, and I can’t imagine not having bags of crockpot-ready food in the freezer.  Every few weeks I prep several bags of our favorite lentil soup and Stephanie’s BBQ veggies (you can add chicken or not – it works either way).  Then I can pull them out of the freezer and dump them into the crock pot on days when I know I’m going to be extra busy.  It’s especially great on days when I’m running errands and not home during the day – I love walking in to a house that smells like a yummy dinner, and I especially love that all I have to do in the morning – when I’m busy getting ready for the day ahead – is dump a bag into the crock pot and  add some water if it’s a soup.  Hard to beat that.

Anyway, Stephanie has created a cookbook of 20 of those genius freezer-to-crockpot meals!  She’s got vegetarian meals and meals that include meat, although I’ve found that some of the meat-based meals work well if I leave out the meat and then add chopped tempeh or Field Roast sausages near the end of the cooking time.  As an aside, I’ve also been adding some meat back into my own diet.  My husband and sons have always eaten meat, but I had stopped eating it for a few years.  It’s still pretty scarce around here, but I do eat it sometimes.  I love that Stephanie’s meals are a great way to include a little meat in a meal that is mostly vegetable-based (I tend to go heavier on the veggies and lighter on the meat when I make any meat-and-vegetable recipe).

Stephanie’s Slow Cooker Freezer Recipes includes shopping lists, nutritional info, and cute little labels that you can print out to stick on your freezer bags.  And the whole thing is only $5.99!  I love having these freezer-to-crockpot meals on hand for my own family, and they’re also a great way to take food to someone else, like a family that has just had a baby or is dealing with an illness.  The recipient doesn’t have to worry about keeping track of a casserole dish and getting it back to you, and if you squish the contents out a bit in your bag and lay it flat to freeze, it will make a nice flat brick that will be easy to fit into anyone’s freezer.

I’ve been making our favorite lentil soup and a couple of Stephanie’s previously-available recipes for several months now, and I’m definitely a big believer in the benefits of freezer-to-crockpot cooking.  So I’m especially thrilled to have Stephanie’s new e-book in hand (which she graciously sent to me so that I could check it out) so that I can add some new meals to our freezer stash.  I love how simple everything is.  No-frills cooking at it’s best.  There are no exotic or hard-to-find ingredients.  Stephanie reminds me of myself when it comes to her approach to food:  it should be nutritious, with no mystery ingredients.  She explains how she goes about prepping the meals and answers some FAQs at the beginning of the book (yes, she freezes potatoes raw and they turn out just fine).  This cookbook isn’t the one you’d turn to if you’re making Thanksgiving dinner for a group of foodies.  But for everyday meals – when you’re busy, tired, and stretched in several directions at once – they are perfect.

If your current fallback plan is pizza delivery on busy days, think how much money your could save – how much better your diet will be – if you spend a few hours a month chopping ingredients and stashing bags in your freezer.  Batch cooking lots of meals at one time and freezing them is a popular time saver in the kitchen.  But prepping for the slow cooker is even easier, since you don’t have to cook anything on your prep day – you just chop the ingredients and put them in the freezer bags.  I hope you enjoy Stephanie’s recipes as much as we do!

I’ve been focusing more on our grocery bill this year than I usually do.  It’s the only area where we’re not particularly frugal.  And for the most part, I’m fine with that.  Food is one of the reasons we’re frugal in so many other areas.  By shopping at Goodwill for most of what we buy, we can afford to spend more money on food.  And while our grocery bill is on the high end of the spectrum, our dining out bill is zero.  It’s also nice to know that we’re eating high quality food, organic and local when possible, no junk food, no processed food, no mysterious chemical additives, food colorings, empty calories, preservatives or flavor enhancers.  We’re not changing any of that, so our grocery bill isn’t going to drop to $200 a month.  But I knew that we could apply some of our frugal habits to our food bill and free up more money to put towards our mortgage payoff account.

I’ve started being more conscious of sales and stocking up on items that are a great deal.  When Vitacost was selling organic coconut milk for $1.69 a can, I added six cans to my first two orders (they had a limit of six cans per order at the sale price).  I now have a good little stash of coconut milk in the pantry.  I use four or five cans per month, so my current supply will last a few months.  My goal now is find another good sale and stock up again before my current supply runs out.

When one of the grocery stores in town recently ran a BOGO sale on vitamins, I stocked up on the supplements that we use and we shouldn’t need to buy any more for the rest of the year.  I’ve also used the “at cost specials” on The Raw Food World to stock up on things like kelp noodles and the greens powder that I add to my protein drinks – buying them for far less than they normally cost on sites like Amazon or at the local health food store.  When Nutiva ran a crazy deal on coconut oil (my go-to oil for cooking) several weeks ago, I bought a gallon bucket of it.  I’ve been using that to refill the little jar I keep in the kitchen cupboard.  We do the same thing with nutritional yeast (six pound bucket in the pantry), hot sauce (my husband loves that stuff, and he now has two gallon jugs of hot sauce that he can use to refill his little bottles instead of buying new bottles every time he runs out), chia seeds, hemp seeds, lentils, beans, etc.  I never buy canned beans because it’s so easy to cook dried beans in the sun oven or the crock pot.  I usually cook a whole bunch at once and then freeze most of them in mason jars to be used whenever I need them.

Our other favorite food trick is Costco.  We now live 45 minutes from the nearest Costco, so we don’t go very often anymore.  We went last month for the first time since September.  Since we knew it would likely be several months before we made it back again, we made the most of the trip.  We filled two carts – one was entirely full of organic frozen veggies and fruit (berries and cherries) and the other was full of all sorts of other stuff.  Our total bill was almost a thousand dollars, but our pantry and stand-alone freezer are now filled to the brim and we’re set for a good long while.  Especially since garden season is just around the corner.  For the last few weeks, I’ve been harvesting dandelion greens from the backyard for green smoothies – I love free greens!

Given all the stocking up we had been doing lately, I decided to set a goal of spending no more than $350 this month on groceries (our normal grocery spending is around $800 – $1000 a month).  I figured that with all the bulk supplies we have on hand, we could make this work without deviating from our organic, whole food diet.

In order to track our progress, I’m writing any grocery spending on the calendar that hangs on the wall in our kitchen.  Rather than an out-of-sight, out-of-mind place on my computer, the calendar is there every time we walk into the kitchen.  Each time we’ve bought any food this month, I’ve written the rounded dollar amount on that calendar day and put a circle around it.  So far, we’re at $180.  I just went shopping a couple days ago, so that total should stay the same for the next week or so.  That means we’re on track to be under $350 for the month, which feels good.

I think that the stockpile we currently have is enough to significantly reduce our food spending for at least the next couple of months.  And by June/July we should be starting to harvest produce from our garden.  So my goal is to stay below $450/month on grocery spending from now until October, which is the end of garden season around here.

That means my calendar tracking is going to continue for a while.  I like the constant visual reminder of how much we’ve spent.  And knowing that I’m going to have to write my spending down on the calendar where I’ll have to look at it for the rest of the month is a good reminder to skip the high-priced specialty items at the grocery store.

Obviously we had to spend a bit more up front to get our pantry to its current well-stocked state.  In January and February our grocery bill still hovered around $1000/month, even though I was focusing on bringing it down (I was also focusing on stocking up on stuff that was on sale, so the extra purchases cancelled out the savings).  And in March it was more like $1500 since we had the gigantic Costco trip.  Since we only go there two or three times a year now, we try to buy as much as we can fit in the car.  I paid $50 for the gallon of coconut oil (it also came with a free container of hemp protein and a free jar of coconut butter which sweetened the deal even more).  But considering that a 13 ounce jar of it is normally about $8, it definitely pays off in the long run.  All of the bulk supplies we bought lately were purchased when they were on a very good sale.  Not only does it make it more convenient when we run out of something and just have to “go shopping” in our pantry, it’s also a lot less expensive than buying everything in small quantities at whatever price it is when we run out of it.

I’ll keep you updated on our progress as the summer goes by.  So far, so good for April.

I have no idea how I’m just now discovering Vitacost, but I’m pretty darn excited about it.  Keep reading and I’ll tell you all about it – including how you can get $10 to spend there on your own groceries!  I’ve been focusing on our grocery bill this year, working to reduce the amount we spend on food, while not compromising on quality.  I’ve stocked up on some bulk items (there’s a gallon of coconut oil in our pantry right now, and a gallon of green Tabasco sauce on its way – no more little jars of either of those for a while!) and eliminated some of the more expensive items from the shopping list all together (bye bye gogi berries).  But mostly I’m focusing our grocery dollars on sale items and forcing myself to shop at more than one store.  With very few exceptions, everything we buy is organic and I’m not changing that.  But I’m finding that even within the parameters of only buying high-quality, organic food, I can still spend less than I used to on groceries.

I sat down at the computer a couple days ago to see if I could find canned coconut milk online.  My local store sells organic canned coconut milk for between $2.30 and $2.80 a can, depending on whether it’s on sale.  I thought if I could find a place selling it by the case online, it might be less expensive.  We go through a lot of it, and it seemed like a candidate for stocking up.  My internet searching led me to Vitacost, and I ended up buying almost all of the non-perishables that were on my grocery list for today’s scheduled shopping trip.  Their organic section has 2230 items in it – it’s a very well-stocked store.  I got organic coconut milk for $1.69 a can!  I got our boys’ toothpaste for about 40% less than it costs me at the store where I normally shop.  I got soap (including Dr. Woods liquid soap, which I’m very excited about.  Tons of great reviews comparing it favorably to Dr. Bronners – which we love – but for a lot less money), dishwashing soap, tea, mustard, hemp oil, evening primrose oil, red raspberry leaf in bulk, several bulk spices, and even a bag of mocha Teeccino as a treat for myself.  I still have to go shopping today for fresh produce and cold items, but my trip should be much faster and easier.  The stuff I bought from Vitacost has already shipped – for free!  They don’t charge shipping if you spend at least $49 (as long as you’re within the 48 contiguous United States).  And it was all much less expensive than what I normally pay.

Anyway, to say that I’m excited about this is an understatement.  It will definitely change the way I shop.  I’ll still “go” shopping for perishables, but I can do the rest of my shopping from my living room at 11pm after my boys are asleep.  So much easier, and a lot less expensive.  Unlike a standard grocery store, my “shopping cart” on Vitacost updated my total each time I put an item in it, so I was able to see exactly how much I was spending as I went along.  Before checking out, I removed a few items in order to bring my total down to my target amount.  I liked the running total – definitely helps to prevent impulse buys if you’re trying to shop within a budget.

So now for the exciting part!  Vitacost has an affiliate program, which I thought about doing.  But they also have a referral program where I can refer new customers and we each get $10 to spend on our groceries at their store.  I like that idea better.  Affiliate programs only financially reward the referrer – I love that this program rewards you and me equally, with ten dollars apiece.  You have to sign up for their referral rewards program though this link in order to get the ten dollars.  Once you sign up, as long as you make a purchase within 60 days, you will be able to spend the $10 towards your purchase.  You also have to be a new Vitacost shopper in order to get the rewards bonus.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

My little blog got a facelift today, thanks to my awesome husband.  It was time for a change, and I love the clean new look.  Both the boys are in bed and my husband is down in his basement office working late tonight, so I’ve had some time to just browse around online.  Well, and mop the kitchen and dining room floors.  For the first time since January.  Ahem.

So anyway, I found all sorts of great articles to share with you – I hope you enjoy my internet wanderings as much as I did!

I’m a week late to the party on this one, but Mr. Money Mustache has issued the Maximum Mustache March challenge.  If you’re looking for motivation and a group of other people all focused on making positive financial changes this month, head over and check it out.

I love this great homemade toy from Penny at Penniless Parenting!  It reminds me of similar toys that we made when I was a kid, although we just used yarn and string – I love the idea of using elastic hair ties to wrap around the nails.  Our son loves writing and spelling and he’s starting to really get interested in reading.  I think he would love this, and I’m thinking it will be a perfect project to do with him tomorrow.

This post at Simple Bites has a ton of recipes for making your own food from scratch.  Not just regular meal recipes, but recipes that tell you how to make staples like condiments that most people – even people who tend to cook all their meals from scratch – buy in a jar.

Another excellent homemade toy idea, this one comes from Budgeting With The Bushman’s.  Two tin cans and some string are all you need to make a pair of tin can stilts.  I can see our little guy having so much fun with this.  We don’t really buy any food in cans though, so I might need to raid the neighbors’ recycling bins first.  My dad made lots of stilts for us when we were little, and he would amuse us endlessly by making giant stilts for himself and walking all around the yard on them.  He just used long pieces of wood with little pieces of wood attached to the inside as a place to put your feet.

I love this DIY post about making blackout shades for your bedroom.  Monica and her husband spent just a few dollars to make their own blackout shades to go behind their bedroom curtains.  Looks like a relatively simple DIY project, and definitely less expensive than buying them already made.

Spring is coming… don’t throw your plastic containers in the recycling bin – plant something in them instead!  Here’s a great post about making your own mini greenhouse for seedlings out of clear plastic containers.  I’ve got a collection of small plastic containers right now that I’ll be using to start seedlings in the next week or so.  My parents start seedlings in clear plastic containers every year and they always end up with the most amazing garden.

Brave New Life is about a family’s journey towards early retirement.  It’s written by Mr. Brave New Life, but this post is written by his wife, giving her perspective on the whole adventure.  Although she was always the “spender” in the relationship and he was the “saver”, her post details how much she appreciates their downsized life and how much she’s looking forward to her husband’s early retirement.

Have a wonderful Friday and a great weekend!

Last year, we switched from regular whole-grain pasta to kelp noodles, and we love the change.  Kelp noodles have almost no calories (I think 6 per serving, or something ridiculous like that), and they absorb the flavor of whatever sauce you put on them (no fishy taste at all).  We like an Asian style sauce with lots of ginger and tamari and miso, and we sautee lots of veggies and tempeh to throw in the mix too.  It comes together quickly and the kelp noodles are a perfect substitute for wheat pasta.  One of the drawbacks to kelp noodles is that they are more expensive than wheat pasta.  I search for sales online (I can’t find them anywhere local) and stock up when I find a good deal.

This morning, I found a deal that was so good I just ordered 15 pounds of kelp noodles.  Thought I’d share with you guys in case any of you want to give them a try but are put off by the higher prices.  The Raw Food World has them on sale for $6.07 for a three pack (each pack is one pound).  This is about a third of what they normally cost, and about half of what I usually pay when I find them on sale around the web.

If you go to The Raw Food World website, just click on the “at cost specials” link at the top of the left sidebar.  There are all sorts of other great deals there too.  I stocked up on coconut flour and Ormus Greens, and also ordered some lucuma powder and mesquite powder – I’ve wanted to try those for a long time, but couldn’t justify the price.  Since they’re on sale right now and since I’ve been doing much better with our overall grocery bill lately, I decided to give them a try.

The link here is my affiliate link, so if you order something from their store, I do make a small referral commission.  It doesn’t change the price you pay though.  And the deals right now are too good to not share.  If you’re interested in specialty health foods, particularly the ones that you can’t always find at your local store, I highly recommend that you check out The Raw Food World.  I order stuff from them every month or so, although I make a point to only order from the “at cost specials” link – I don’t browse around in the regular price section, because I don’t want to be tempted to buy full price items.

If you try the kelp noodles, let me know what you think – and if you come up with a great recipe that uses them, be sure to share that too!

There are no boxes of cereal in our house.  No frozen waffles or toaster pastries either.  Sometimes there are homemade muffins in the freezer, but we usually eat those as dessert or a snack.  Breakfast around here is an oat/quinoa mixture that my husband makes for us every morning while I’m cleaning the house sleeping.

As far as economical breakfast food goes, bulk oats and quinoa – even the organic stuff – is pretty high on the list.  We buy our oats in 50 lb bags that we special order at the health food store (they give us a 10% discount for ordering in bulk).  Our quinoa comes from the bulk section, 5 lbs at a time – although we should probably look into ordering a bigger bag of that too.

Anyway, here’s what he does.  I asked him for details this morning, since he works his kitchen magic while the boys and I are still asleep – when we wake up, breakfast is ready for us, so I rarely see the preparation phase.  This is what I wake up to:

He never measures anything, because oats and guinoa are pretty forgiving – if you have too much water, just let it cook a little longer.  Or if you didn’t put in enough water to start with, you can just add more.  And after you’ve done it a few times, you can eyeball it in the pan and know that it’s right.  But he uses roughly one cup dry quinoa and two cups dry rolled oats.  He rinses the quinoa and then adds everything to a saucepan with roughly six cups of water (as long as you have about twice as much water as oats/quinoa, it will work).  Then he adds about 1/2 cup raisins and about a tablespoon or two of blackstrap molasses.  He brings it to a boil (watching closely, or else it will boil over), stirs it around, and then turns the heat off, letting the pan sit on the warm burner (we have an electric stove – with a gas range you might have to keep it on low for a while before turning it off).  It takes about 20 minutes then for the breakfast to be ready, but since the stove is off it doesn’t require any babysitting.  He can go about the rest of his morning, since breakfast is on autopilot.

Once the water is absorbed, breakfast is ready.  We spoon it into bowls and then add toppings.  This is where we can mix it up and make our breakfast different from one day to the next.  We always add hempseeds and chia seeds.  These are powerhouse foods – lots of protein and essential fatty acids.  We also usually drizzle some flax oil or Udo’s oil over the bowl.  Then we add fruit (blueberries today – just depends on what we have in the freezer or on the counter) and sometimes almond milk or coconut butter.  I often add a scoop of protein powder and some shredded coconut too.  The sky’s the limit – add whatever sounds good and will add a nutritional boost to your day.  We stay away from sugar and syrup – those don’t add any nutritional value to the meal and we can get all the sweetness we need from fruit.

We used to have just oats in the morning, but we started adding quinoa several months ago in order to maximize the nutritional content of our breakfast.  The chia seeds, hemp seeds, molasses and flax oil also give the meal a nutritional boost.

Since it’s so easy to change the flavor of the breakfast depending on what toppings we use, we never get tired of this meal.  It’s simple, easy to make, far less expensive than boxed cereals, and gives us a great start to our day. 

Many thanks to Mr. Frugal Babe for making our breakfast every day! 

What do you eat for breakfast?  How do you make sure you’re getting a solid meal before heading out the door, without blowing the grocery budget?

I recently came across Mr. Money Mustache in my internet wanderings.  If you haven’t already discovered his site, I highly recommend it.  He reminds me a lot of myself – he’s like a guy version of me with a few more rants and some colorful words sprinkled here and there.  Oh, and he’s retired too (we’re not there, but we’ve been working from home for a decade now, which is pretty awesome).   He also has a wife and a child, which makes him seem much more realistic from my perspective (since we have two children) than some of the ultra-frugal bloggers who don’t have children and live on next to nothing.

Anyway, I was browsing around his site and it got me thinking about our spending.  We already save about 40% of our after-tax income.  We put more than a full mortgage payment into our mortgage payoff/emergency fund each month.  We save for retirement.  We have an HSA that would cover several years of having to meet our health insurance deductible.  We’re saving for our boys’ education (not a lot, but we put $100/month into each 529 account).  All of our “stuff” comes from thrift stores and Craigslist.  We are frugal in just about every regard.

Ever regard except food.

Our food budget is very high.  My rough estimate is that it was running about $1000/month for the past year or so.  We don’t eat out (seriously – we’ve eaten out once since September, and that was to take a dear friend out to dinner for his 90th birthday), so there’s no dining-out expense at all.  But still, $1000/month on food is a bit crazy.

I’ve written several times about what we eat.  I refuse to compromise when it comes to what my family eats.  I cook nearly everything from scratch.  We don’t eat foods with long ingredient lists, preservatives, food coloring, artificial sweeteners (and avoid added sugar most of the time too – treats around here usually rely on the natural sweetness in fruit).  And almost everything we eat is organic.  That means that I almost never shop at the local grocery store here in town, because they carry very few organic items.  Instead, I drive into the larger town nearby to shop.  And for the past year or so, I’ve been pretty much making it a one-stop shop at the health food store.  That – combined with Costco every few months – has resulted in some pretty large grocery bills.  We’re squarely in the “liberal plan” on this USDA chart for a family of four.   Although I have to assume that most families have a dining-out budget that is higher than zero dollars per month.  So that helps me to justify our food bill a bit.  But still.  It could be much better.

While I’m extremely budget-conscious with pretty much every other aspect of our spending, I had let myself get lax when it came to groceries.  Although I would snap up things that were on sale, I would also buy pretty much whatever I wanted to cook, regardless of whether it was on sale or not.  I didn’t go online to look at the sale ads for the larger grocery stores in town (they have much larger organic selections than the small store here in our town, but obviously not as much as the health food store where I normally shop – but I should at least be looking to see what they have on sale each week).  I basically told myself that it didn’t matter how much we spent on food.  We’re very healthy, and I work very hard to keep it that way.  I’m convinced that diet is a huge factor in health, which is why I won’t compromise when it comes to our diet.

But I could be much more frugal and still not compromise.  I’ve known that for a while, but I’ve justified my lax grocery budget in lots of ways.

• We can afford it (true, but we could save even more if I put more effort into keeping the grocery budget down).
• We deserve to buy great food, since we eat all of our meals at home (also true, but why not focus on great meals that can be made without spending as much money?)
• I love to cook, so a high grocery budget is ok.
• I don’t have time to stop at multiple grocery stores with the boys in tow (I don’t want to drive all over town, but there’s a major grocery store about two blocks from the health food store where I normally shop.  Is it really that hard to make one more stop in the same general area?)
• I love to browse food blogs and find new recipes to try, which often means adding new ingredients to the shopping list.
• We’re very frugal in every other area of our lives, so it’s ok to spend a lot on food, which is what matters most to us (true, but if we can eat just as well while being a bit more budget-minded with food, doesn’t it make sense to do so?)

I thought about all of this, and decided to make some changes.  That was about three weeks ago, and so far, so great!

• I’m limiting my grocery trips to three times a month instead of once per week (in the summer, I always cut down to about every other week, because our garden gives us so much fresh produce.  But in the winter, I’ve typically always shopped every week).  To facilitate this, I’ve scheduled my grocery trips on the calendar.  I have a visual reminder every day of when my next shopping trip is, and can plan our meals accordingly.  I had found that even going every week, I was still spending a lot at each trip.
• I’ve unsubscribed from the food blogs that I used to read every day.  I can still go to their sites when I want, but the emails aren’t in my in-box every day, tempting me to try new recipes.  This is good in a few ways.  First, it keeps me from always adding new ingredients to the shopping list.  Second, it saves time in the kitchen because I’m mostly cooking meals that I’ve prepared before.  And third, it cuts down on my computer time, which is a good thing.  Don’t get me wrong – I love food blogs.  But I was spending too much time on them.  I already have a Google Docs file with several pages of recipes that the whole family loves – I could cook them every day for a month and not repeat myself at all.  There comes a point when enough is enough.  For now, I’ve reached that point.  I’ll just continue to make the meals I’ve already perfected, and – mostly – avoid new recipes for a while.
• I’ve started preparing meals for the crock pot and freezing them.  This has been a huge success.  I just bought ingredients to make several more bags, which I’ll be prepping tomorrow or Saturday and stashing in the freezer.  The soups and veggie concoctions I prepare are relatively inexpensive (even though all the ingredients are organic) because they mostly rely on root veggies, beans, and lentils.  The bullion I had been using was relatively pricey, but I tried making my own and it worked perfectly – for about a quarter the price.
• No more exotic superfoods. (or at least a drastic reduction in how much we buy)  Gogi berries are great.  But do we really need them?  Pecans are delicious, but almonds are a third the price and work just as well – we can save pecans for a rare treat instead of tossing them in the cart every time we shop.  Sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds can be substituted for a portion of the nuts in many of the nut-based recipes I like, and they’re dramatically less expensive than nuts.
• The money we’re saving is already accounted for – automatically.  We upped the contribution to our mortgage payoff/emergency fund by $300/month, because that’s what I’m estimating we can save on groceries.  That means the money won’t be burning a hole in our pockets.  If it’s not there, we won’t spend it.
• I’ve started looking at the sale flyer for the major grocery store in the area of town where I normally go shopping.  It paid off in a big way this week – they had vitamin supplements on sale buy one, get one free.  So I stocked up on all of the supplements we already use.  For the rest of the year, we’ll be shopping in our pantry for supplements instead of adding them to the grocery list.  The vast majority of the stuff in the sale flyer is never going to make it into my cart, since most of it is processed food.  But I found a great deal on organic potatoes and apples in addition to the supplements.  Definitely worth the extra trip (I spent $167 and the savings total on my receipt was $118 – not bad).
• I’m being much more selective with our produce.  Although I only buy organic, I’m focusing on the items that are on sale, and basing our menus around those, rather than creating menus and then just buying the food that I need to make the meals I’ve planned.
• I’ve always shopped with a grocery list, and I’m good at sticking to it – no impulse buys.  But I’m usually pretty lax about what I put on the list, and I don’t usually worry about what’s on sale when I’m making the list.  I just add things to the list as we run out of them, and I also add things to the list when I come across a recipe that includes a new ingredient.  These days, I’m being much more careful about what I put on the grocery list.  I’m looking at sales and I’m also questioning whether we really need to replenish each thing we use up.

Basically, I’m getting back to basics a bit more.  I will still only buy organic.  And I’ll still have a grocery bill that is higher than average (which I think is fine, given that we never eat out).  But I’m getting back on track with applying my frugal skills to the grocery budget – just like I do with every other aspect of our spending.

I’m feeling very good about all of this.  An extra few hundred dollars a month that we can put towards our goal of paying off the mortgage, and we’ll still be just as healthy and well-fed.  It takes a bit more planning and I can’t just throw whatever I want into the grocery cart, but that’s ok.  I’ve always justified the higher food bill with the fact that all of our other bills are so low.  We do all of our other shopping at thrift stores so that we can afford to buy our food at the health food store – but it doesn’t have to be all or nothing.  I can still buy very high quality food without spending quite so much money.

Many thanks to Mr. Money Mustache for the reminder.

What’s your budget soft spot – if you have one?  Do you justify high spending in one area by being frugal in other areas?  Have you thought about ways you could still honor the importance of that aspect of your life but spend a little less money on it?  And of course I’d love to hear your ideas for saving money on nutritious groceries.

Last week, I was browsing through a food magazine and saw a recipe for coffee-flavored muffins.  Although I’m not a big fan of coffee, I love coffee-flavored food (especially if chocolate chips are thrown into the mix!).  I used to be hesitant to even tweak recipes for baked goods, and I never would have thought I could come up with a recipe of my own.  I think I was convinced that there was some sort of baking magic that went on in the oven and that any deviation from the recipe would have very bad results.  Now that I’ve been cooking and baking for several years, I’m much more confident in the kitchen.  So I sat down and came up with my own recipe.  I was thrilled with how they turned out, especially given that this was really my first attempt at creating a baking recipe on my own.  I used an egg, since my parents have been providing us with amazing eggs from their backyard chickens lately.  But you could just as easily make a flax egg, so I included that option in the recipe.  I used coffee extract because I like coffee-flavored things.  If you prefer another flavor, you could probably substitute something else instead of the coffee extract.

These are relatively dense muffins.  I’ve found that most of the stuff I bake using almond flour and coconut flour is usually a bit more dense than stuff made with wheat flour.  But that’s just fine, because that’s how I like my muffins.  If you prefer light fluffy muffins though, these might not be your favorites.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.  Grease a muffin pan (this recipe makes 12 muffins) or line with muffin papers.

Dry Ingredients:

• 1 cup almonds, ground in food processor
• 1/2 cup coconut flour
• 1/2 cup oats ground in the food processor (use gluten-free oats if you’re sensitive to gluten)
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 Tbsp powdered stevia (I just buy the loose ground herb from the bulk section)
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1.5 Tbsp ground flax seed
• pinch of salt

Wet Ingredients:

• 1 cup almond milk (or whatever milk you like)
• 1 egg or a flax egg (I make flax eggs without heating them – works just as well as far as I’m concerned)
• 1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce (I made my own in the food processor)
• 1 Tbsp coconut oil
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 Tbsp coffee extract

Mix the dry ingredients in one bowl and the wet ingredients in another.  Then mix them together and fold in:

• 1/3 cup miniature dark chocolate chips
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

The batter will be relatively thick and on the dry-ish side.  Spoon into 12 muffin cups and bake for about 20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Enjoy!  These freeze quite well too.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how I had finally caved in an visited Pinterest, and wasn’t sure if it was going to be awesome or a total time sink.  I’ve since found that it cuts way down on the number of tabs I have open in my browser at any one time.  Instead of just leaving tabs open, I’ve been pinning them onto boards on my Pinterest page so that I can come back to them when I need them.  Whenever I come across ideas I like (anywhere on the web, not just on Pinterest), I add them to my Pinterest page in the appropriate category.  It’s like a visual to-do list and idea page.  I’m definitely liking that aspect of it. 

I’ve found that I don’t spend too much time browsing Pinterest, but when I do, it’s nice.  I can sit here and nurse our little guy while I scroll through ideas for bathroom tile (since we’re going to be putting a bathroom in our basement soon).  And I can easily save the ones I want to show my husband later on – without leaving eight new tabs open in my browser.  Good all around.

A few days ago, I was browsing around Pinterest and came upon this genius idea:  Freezer-to-crockpot meals.  Yes!  I can do this.  I love my crockpot and use it several times a week.  I also love the idea of just dumping a bag into the crock pot, adding some water, and letting it do its thing.  She’s got a ton of other freezer cooking recipes on her site too. 

I wasn’t sure about the idea of just putting the veggies into the freezer raw, since I know a lot of stuff needs to be blanched first.  Plenty of comments on the site indicated that people had no problems with it, but I decided to blanch some stuff first.  I read that potatoes can turn black if you freeze them raw, and I wasn’t sure about carrots.  So I chopped up a ton of potatoes and carrots and blanched them for a couple minutes before I prepped the freezer bags.  It only added a few minutes to the total prep time, and I was doing several meals at once – not a big deal.  If you try this and don’t blanch anything, let me know how it goes!

Here are my first two meals:

The recipe came from the Costco magazine (bottom left corner), and everyone I’ve ever made it for has raved about it.  I make it at least twice a month, and always make a double batch (which fills my crock pot right to the brim).  Instead of broth, I use water and veggie bullion cubes, so I added the bullion to the bag along with the lentils (rinsed), brown rice, raw onions, garlic and celery, and blanched carrots and potatoes.  A double batch fits nicely in a one-gallon ziplock bag.  All I have to do when I cook it is add 12 cups of water plus one bag to the crockpot.  And it was pretty easy to make a second double batch at the same time. 

This would make a great gift for a family with a new baby or anything else that makes cooking more of a chore than usual.  It would also be a good idea for a get-together with friends.  Each person could bring some ingredients and you could all chop stuff up, blanch whatever needs it, and then stuff a bunch of bags.  Everybody goes home with lots of different ready-for-the-crockpot meals.  Sounds like a winner to me.

I also roasted a bunch of onions and garlic so that I could prep this amazing tomato soup (I cook that one at least twice a month too).  I already have lots of roasted tomatoes in the freezer from last summer’s garden.  So I just combined the spices with some bullion (in place of broth) and the roasted onion and garlic and stashed that in jars in the freezer.  Now all I have to do when I want to make that soup is dump the onion/garlic/spice jar into a pot with a jar of tomatoes and a can of coconut milk and some water.  Couldn’t be much easier than that.  Roasting onions and garlic is easy, but it’s time consuming.  This way I don’t have to think as far in advance about dinner, since everything is already roasted and in the freezer. 

I also prepped the Healthy Mama BBQ Chicken recipe from the original site that I found on Pinterest (link is at the start of this post).  I left out the chicken though, so mine will be BBQ veggies.  I might add tofu or something like that after I cook it, but I’m sure it will be good either way.

I really love this idea.  It makes batch cooking for the freezer seem a lot more do-able.  I spent about 90 minutes putting together enough food to fill the crock pot six times (a full crock pot lasts us at least two meals), and I had a three-year-old helper the whole time.  Definitely not as challenging as spending the entire day in the kitchen for once-a-month cooking, but it will make my crockpot days a lot easier!

If you have links to other sites that have recipes and ideas for prepping crockpot meals ahead of time, please share them in the comments. 

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I’ve done a lot of decluttering over the past couple years.  I’ve taken numerous carloads of stuff to Goodwill, and have (except for last month when I was on a mission to find stuff for our son’s play kitchen) mostly stopped going in to shop when I drop stuff off.  I got rid of about half of my craft supplies, and I’ve cleared out closets and cupboards all through the house, tossing or recycling or donating stuff that we didn’t need anymore. 

I had already made one pass through the kitchen a year or so ago, getting rid of stuff that we weren’t using.  But I mostly focused on gadgets and excess glassware rather than food.  Last night, I was browsing around online and I came across this awesome blog written by a lady who has managed to get rid of 10,000 things by purging 100 items at a time!  Pretty inspiring if you’re thinking about getting rid of clutter.  Christine’s writing had me laughing out loud, and then it got me up off my butt and into the kitchen to do something about our too-full cupboards. 

I love to cook.  And to shop for groceries.  We eat all of our meals at home (and I do mean all… we took a friend out for his 90th birthday last month and he chose Olive Garden.  But before that, we hadn’t eaten out since September).  That’s how I justify our full pantry, freezer, and cupboards.  But I had noticed lately that there was stuff at the back of the cupboards that I was never using, and it was just serving to make the cupboards a little less useful than they would otherwise be.

So at about 11pm, I was standing in the kitchen surrounded by boxes and jars and bags of stuff that I didn’t need.  Some of it was a wee tad bit expired and went in the trash:

Yes, we moved to a new house in 2009.  I vaguely remember being in a big hurry to clean out the old house and I think I tossed everything from the fridge and pantry into a cooler and boxes without paying much attention.  But you would think that I would have noticed this when I unpacked.  Or at any time during the past 2.5 years.  Anyway.  Moving on. 

In addition to a couple of seriously expired things, I also found a few duplicates.  Two bags of dill seed (that’s going to take a while to use up…), three containers of cardamom, two bags of ground ginger.  Good thing I like to cook from scratch and use a lot of spices. 

By the time I finished consolidating, purging and cleaning, I had quite a pile on the kitchen table.  All of this stuff will either be donated to family or friends who will use it, or trashed if it’s expired, or recycled if it’s an empty container (I was able to consolidate a lot of stuff so that it takes up less cabinet space.  Three honey jars are now combined into one, for example):

I also found a few more gadgets and dishes that I didn’t need.  Three baby food grinders?  I think we’re fine with one. 

I came across a few nearly empty jars of cocoa butter and coconut oil that I had used a while back to make lotion.  So I dumped them into a saucepan, melted them down, and filled a container with my newly-minted lotion.  That meant I was able to recycle three containers that had been taking up space in my pantry.

I ended up getting rid of everything in that picture plus about half that much again by the time I was finished.  So much better.  I don’t have to root around in the cupboard to find what I’m looking for.  And everything in the cupboards is stuff that I use on a regular basis.  And none of it expired when I was in my 20s. 

Anyway, I hope Christine’s blog inspires you and makes you laugh.  And if you have anything in your kitchen that expired in 2004, please tell me about it to make me feel better!