Winning Arguments: One Woman's Unhealthy Relationship with Grocery Shopping

If there is one thing I inherited from my mother*, it's my overall disdain for grocery shopping. So it was with great pleasure that I told my husband on Sunday I didn't need to go grocery shopping because I thought we had enough food to last us through the week. 

When I said this, I was full of fries and hamburger patties from our free Burger King lunch**. I was thinking that making bread from scratch and cooking several pounds of chicken would be a fantastic time-- that is, after all, the mark of a homesteader. And he really wants to homestead. But he also doesn't really mind shopping and he wasn't too excited about this. He remembered all the times this hasn't worked out. You can probably make that mental leap without a walk down memory lane with me.

But I'm thinking that any extra money we save this week can boost us next week. For some reason it is so much easier to shop with say, 70$ than it is with 35$. A 70$ trip might mean that we get to go to Costco (squee!). I should probably say here that I've never been to Costco. Or that 35$ can just stay in our pockets. We're expecting a huge expense soon that will drain our savings and so every penny helps, right?

But many of the best Burger King plans are laid to waste when Shakespeare gets hungry. Two days later we bought a 7 dollar pizza for dinner because I forgot to thaw everything.

It's tricksy finding delicious ways to stretch the food we have. I had enough peanut butter for one sandwich. No cheese, eggs, fruit or tomato sauce/paste. I did have a lot of frozen chicken and vegetables. George only eats on campus 2 days a week so I had to come up two meals that weren't leftovers (no microwave) and could handle a beating in a backpack after his bike ride to school. ~~SoO KEwT~~

And so began the day where I made a bunch of food I don't really like to eat to avoid grocery shopping and prove a point.

I had to figure out what can be made and taken to school with what we have. We're out of bread, so I decided to make sourdough rolls and chicken salad. Both are things Jordan likes, and I only like the sourdough rolls part. I decided to make a large batch of both. Bread making is not always fun.

We already had sourdough starter ready, but this was its first use out and sourdough tastes better and better the more you use and feed the starter. I followed a recipe I found online and it took FOREVER to knead it. It was a very sticky dough and difficult to work with, but the end result was-- tada!--very tasty.

Lil' muffin breads (*^▽^*)

I don't like cold salads (categorically), but Jordan does. I had everything I needed to whip it up, and after I cooked up the chicken and let it cool, I shredded it and added the ingredients. Only we were (and still are) out of pretty much every spice. Ack.

Though we had fresh onions (gag), he doesn't like fresh onions in his chicken salad. I ended up adding a little more dill and fennel (which I crushed with mah pestle); I also added spicy brown mustard to taste. His taste. He loved it.

"My wife is hott and smart and that was the best lunch evar"

And sauerkraut. Yes. That.

Cabbage has finally reached its (presumably) lowest price of the year at 19 cents a pound; we got one head. Who eats a lot of cabbage?

Anyways, I'm not a cabbage lover. Boiled cabbage couldn't look or taste less appetizing to me, but it's cheap. Also the sauerkraut. Jord loves him the sauerkraut.

It's actually very simple to make: chop up the cabbage into very small pieces, add kosher salt (1 tbsp to 1 cup) and shove down into a jar. The cabbage and salt become pretty briny right off the bat.

"S" is for salt, ya dingus

 I actually used 3 washed peanut butter jars for this-- I soaked them in a water/vinegar solution first to kill off any of the remaining peanut butter oil smell. They worked perfectly.

The taller one has been sauerkrauting a little longer, and it's obvious to everyone.

And so that's all, really. Not as dramatic as I made it sound to myself.

Today I'm making stock. Hopefully, my bad attitude will carry over. Hurray!

Oh, and we ended up staying under our budget by 46 cents, including the pizza. Boom.

*Also: dramatic phone conversations; caffeine addiction; my magnetic personality and charm
**They were giving out free fries for St. Patrick's and we also had a 10 dollar gift card from Mypoints. So yeah. We got sundaes.

Weak Coffee and Gardening.

I actually like weak coffee, so all of those above things are fun.

Before we moved from the south, neither of us had a strong desire to drink coffee. Geord likes very strong coffee (i.e. chickory) and will drink it if we're sitting at a Cracker Barrel, but I've always been an orange juice or soda or chocolate milk person*.

Mostly a soda person. A Diet Mountain Dew kind of person.

This is no big secret of mine, and those that know me well could tell you that about me. Maybe that's all they could tell you about me**, but it's a very well known fact.

Boston doesn't really care for DMD. They sell it in overpriced grocery stores but not in vending machines or hotdog stands.

And when we realized we had to hoof it back with this cancer causing drink strapped to our backs, I started to wonder if it was all worth it. -dramatic pause-

Shakespeare gotta get her caffeine.

My mother is a confessed coffee addict, as is the older of my two younger brothers and the girlfriend of said brother. When my mom came up to visit for the first time, she gamely brought instant coffee-- this is something she hates. She'll drink it-- oh yes, she'll drink it-- but she's a traditional coffee drinker at heart.

She was staying for 8 days, and my tender heart couldn't stand to see her mix one more powder into her mug***. The day she arrived, I ordered a 13$ french press from Amazon. I anticipated its continued use during my mom's stay and when my brother comes up to visit.

This little guy makes about 2 cups and has a convenient hook for us to hang him when he's done. While my mom was here it definitely served it's purpose (read: he was in constant use-- we're talking 4-5 times a day). When my mom left, we washed him out and hung him up.

Occasionally we would get him down and whip up a couple of cups, but it was a rarity. As soon as the weather changed, we changed. Suddenly we're drinking coffee like 4 times a week (compared to the everytime everyday schedule I'm on with DMD).

One of the most common money saving tips that makes it to all those helpful top ten lists is to a.) not buy coffee out and b.) reuse your grounds.

As I've never bought a coffee out (once, okay) the first part doesn't really apply to me****. The second part now does.

I don't wholly reuse them, in that I don't use the same exact grounds, no more no less, another time. I add half the amount of fresh grounds before I make a new batch and store the french press in the fridge with the grounds inside. Every few days we clean it out. I guess this stretches our coffee, but I've never had any coffee experiences to compare this with. We're still on the same Starbucks blend coffee we got when my mom was here (2 months ago).

Also, what I said about never wholly reusing them is not entirely true: I accidentally just did that. So weak.

While I'm finishing up this weak cup, I look over and see a seed packet on our counter. We're planning on starting a garden this late winter/spring. We don't have excellent prices on produce-- in fact, things that are seasonal, like carrots and cabbage, are ridiculously expensive at our local grocery stores. We're limited in our store choices (after all, we're limited in our money right now), so we've decided to grow some of our own. Hopefully we'll have enough to feed ourselves, though we know we'll have access to a local farmer's market in the summer that has pretty good prices*****.

We're planning on growing tomatoes, arugula, zucchini and squash. These things are supposed to be pretty low maintenance and grow well in containers.

After seeing a post on growing celery from the chopped off ends, I may do that too. I'm not sure-- I helped out with a pretty large garden when I was young and I really didn't like it. Now I'm all excited. Hm. This may not last.

Anyways, my constant goal is to keep our grocery budget for two people under 100 a month. I haven't been able to do that (well, this week being the exception) since we got here. I think a garden will be the just the thing.

*I'm also other kinds of people. I'm a Abraham Lincoln person. Also a basketball and sleeping-in person.
**They might know about my obsession with videos featuring cats, but I don't know. I don't want to speak for them.
***She was on like her eighth one. Also I tried it.
****I regret it to this day.
*****We only got to go on the very last day. We were exploring our neighborhood and stumbled on it. They gave us mounds of leftover produce for 5$.

The End of the Month Challenge

Today I finally felt like doing financial stuff. We're coming up on our 6 month Boston anniversary and I'm just now taking care of business.

Before we moved, I knew where every cent we earned went. I analyzed auto drafts, meter readings, gas costs and interest rates on our accounts.

Lately I haven't really felt like it. I haven't really felt like doing anything, but the lack of concern I had over our finances was disconcerting.

So today, after seeing the enormous amount* of money we just had sitting in our ING checking account, I realized how careless I had been. We weren't writing down transactions, and because we knew that we had this huge cushion I wasn't too bothered with curbing my impulsive buys. I know I may not seem like an impulsive type of person (lol), but I do sometimes just arbitrarily travel on the T for no reason (at like 1.70 a pop) or get a snack while I'm out.

Now I pretty much have to track it, kind of.

After putting everything where it needed to go**, here's the final tally:
39.00 in ING checking
29.00 in Citizen's checking
22.00 in cash money
23.62 on a Visa gift card
like 3 bucks in change. =116

Here is our schedule:
Dinner at a friend's tonight
Dinner out with friends tomorrow
Church
Grocery trip
Small group thing on Tuesday
Jordan's school travels. =37.60 in transit fare (bare minimum)

That leaves 78 dollars for our monetary commitments:
Snacks for said dinner: 12.00
Dinner out: 30.00
Groceries: 35.00
Ship birthday gifts: I've got 1 doll hair. That's probably going to have to wait.

I kind of like doing this, really. Is that odd? I hope so. I probably think it's fun because I can transfer money from savings at anytime, so we're not all close to the edge.

When we were first married I sold my beloved jeep to pay rent. We were very close to the edge then and we didn't really know it. We had pity parties about not being able to order pizzas or see movies, but we mostly just enjoyed being broke and finding fun, free things to do. We also had family nearby and we ate meals with them frequently. In fact, I don't think my parents knew how broke we were until way later.

We normally don't eat out (with the exception of mystery shopping) or get invited to other people's house to eat***, but this week was different.


*Specifically, more than 125$ and less than 30,000$.
**We use ING subaccounts as a way to prepare for, say, large bills and stuff.
***We may be a little uncouth.