Recently, John and I have been working hard to make some extra money, and save as much as we can. John will be graduating soon from BYU-Idaho and we will be moving, which costs a significant amount of money. We decided that we would try to spend just $5 at the grocery store last week and see if we could use our food storage enough to make it the entire week without going shopping again. I cleaned out our pantry, took inventory of what we have on hand, and we went to the grocery store after going to the gym one morning. This is what we bought:
1 loaf of bread (it was only 79 cents for the really yummy wheat sandwich bread, so I bought it this week instead of making it from scratch), 6 bananas, and 1 gallon of milk (we were shocked at the $1.98 price tag, around here it's usually around $1.60, but has gone up recently and hasn't gone back down).
I made a meal plan for the week that looked like this:
Monday: Baked Eggs with Spinach & Tomatoes
Tuesday: Chicken Bake with Stuffing
Wednesday: Red Beans & Sausage
Thursday: Leftovers
Friday: Salsa Chicken
Saturday: Michelle's Work Party with Dinner Included
Sunday: Lasagna Roll Ups & Sunny Banana Pie
I work swing shift and so John comes home for lunch each day and that is our meal we spend together. I take the leftovers to work with me to eat for dinner and John usually just has a sandwich or bowl of cereal at home when he is home from school for the night.
We aren't big dessert eaters unless we're having guests over, which we happened to have on Sunday, so we added Banana Pie that night for something sweet after the meal. We snacked on bananas all week, which were so yummy! I made sure that some of them were green when we bought them so they would still be good by Sunday and I did need to supplement our gallon of milk we bought with some powdered milk to make it the whole week, but in the end,
I was so happy that we could actually make it an entire week on $5! Each recipe used some sort of food storage ingredient and we were able to make great meals for the entire week! We are thinking that once or twice a month, this may become a regular thing with us. It forces us to evaluate what foods we have in the house and rotate food storage we have. It really gave me the inspiration to learn new skills with cooking (especially with food storage) and being resourceful when we didn't always have the ingredients a recipe called for. It also taught us patience, because our 'eat out night' wasn't until Saturday, and usually we'll eat out in the middle of the week sometime, so this was a bit of a change for us. In the end, we are both so happy we did this challenge, and look forward to using what this has taught us in the future.
1 loaf of bread (it was only 79 cents for the really yummy wheat sandwich bread, so I bought it this week instead of making it from scratch), 6 bananas, and 1 gallon of milk (we were shocked at the $1.98 price tag, around here it's usually around $1.60, but has gone up recently and hasn't gone back down).
I made a meal plan for the week that looked like this:
Monday: Baked Eggs with Spinach & Tomatoes
Tuesday: Chicken Bake with Stuffing
Wednesday: Red Beans & Sausage
Thursday: Leftovers
Friday: Salsa Chicken
Saturday: Michelle's Work Party with Dinner Included
Sunday: Lasagna Roll Ups & Sunny Banana Pie
I work swing shift and so John comes home for lunch each day and that is our meal we spend together. I take the leftovers to work with me to eat for dinner and John usually just has a sandwich or bowl of cereal at home when he is home from school for the night.
We aren't big dessert eaters unless we're having guests over, which we happened to have on Sunday, so we added Banana Pie that night for something sweet after the meal. We snacked on bananas all week, which were so yummy! I made sure that some of them were green when we bought them so they would still be good by Sunday and I did need to supplement our gallon of milk we bought with some powdered milk to make it the whole week, but in the end,
WE DID IT!
I was so happy that we could actually make it an entire week on $5! Each recipe used some sort of food storage ingredient and we were able to make great meals for the entire week! We are thinking that once or twice a month, this may become a regular thing with us. It forces us to evaluate what foods we have in the house and rotate food storage we have. It really gave me the inspiration to learn new skills with cooking (especially with food storage) and being resourceful when we didn't always have the ingredients a recipe called for. It also taught us patience, because our 'eat out night' wasn't until Saturday, and usually we'll eat out in the middle of the week sometime, so this was a bit of a change for us. In the end, we are both so happy we did this challenge, and look forward to using what this has taught us in the future.
That's awesome! In my home ward in Missouri, our bishop randomly called three families into his office the last week of January and asked them if they would accept a challenge to live completely off their food storage for the entire month of February (since it's the shortest of the 12 months) and then they would be speaking about it the first Sunday in March. They did and they had some great things to share. It was awesome! I'm glad you guys were able to rock it. That's such a great skill to have!
ReplyDeleteWow great job Shel!!! That has totally inspired me to do that! We're low in the cash flow department so that would be great for us! Since I've already done the grocery shopping for the week we will try that next week. I'm excited to see how it goes. Thanks for the great idea! Love you!!!
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