I am beginning to think I’m a little weird. Or at the very least, have a lot of time on my hands {which really, I don’t}. Since I started to post pictures of some of the foods I prepare for my family on a regular basis this year, I am learning things about myself that I didn’t really get before. I’m starting to connect the dots at how I make this frugal living thing work.
Which is strange because I’m doing the exact same things I’ve always done.
Take growing sprouts for instance. I usually only grow alfalfa sprouts when I’m craving an egg salad sandwich. They take about 3 days to grow. But when it came time to make my egg sandwich, we only had a four slices of bread left and I wasn’t planning on going to the grocery store for another 3 days. So I decided to just make a bowl of egg salad and eat it without the bread. So I could use that bread for my son’s peanut butter sandwiches instead.
Whoop te do right?
But by doing that, I saved myself from going to the store one day earlier than I had planned. Not a big deal in the whole scheme of things right? But it exhibited self control. Which is something I think most of us are lacking when it comes to spending our grocery money. We don’t have to rush to the store for that one thing. We can make do with what we have and stick to our plan.
I’ve also learned this year that I am incredibly lazy {or maybe smart, I’m not sure} when it comes to food prep. I like to cook double, triple, or quadruple portions of things to save time.
And of course there are those crock pot meals I adore so much.
Not only did I have two choices of soup for dinner the night i made them, but I was also able to pop 18 meals into the freezer for later use. The HH typically eats leftovers from the previous nights dinner for lunch, or some sort of soup or chili from the freezer I have frozen into individual sized portions. I can’t imagine how much money he has saved over the past 22 years by bringing his own lunch to work everyday.
In the beginning he brought packed lunches to work because we couldn’t afford take out. A few years later after he started making a little more money, he’d come home and tell me what the other guys were having for lunch and how they were spending about $10 a day on fast food. I guess he did the math and figured bringing his own lunch to work everyday was the smarter thing to do.
Chocolate brownie cookies. Have you make these yet? They are delicious! And if you use a 1 tablespoon scoop you can get about 6 dozen cookies out of 1 batch. And yes, they freeze beautifully. 🙂 Monkey Boy loves them.
And last but not least…
I have a total love/hate relationship with Costco bananas. They are either green and hard, or nice and yellow {rare} and get spots within 2 days. Luckily I have just perfected a Nutella banana muffin recipe {coming soon} so no bananas were tossed.
Even though I didn’t buy a whole lot of groceries this week, I still feel like we have plenty of good food to eat.
Spend less, save more and BE HAPPY.
~Mavis
Total Spent This Week $45.19
Total Spent Year to Date $154.66
Go HERE to read more Shopping Trip Stories.
This post may contain affiliate links. These affiliate links help support this site. For more information, please see my disclosure policy. Thank you for supporting One Hundred Dollars a Month.