Grocery Budget Overhaul

Maybe I should really call it a "lack thereof" budget when it comes to food. The last year has been a real struggle finding new ways to prepare foods without milk or soy ingredients for the sake of our one year old. My trips to Whole Foods have been extremely expensive and self-indulgent to cope with our change in diet.

After reading The Grocery Cart Challenge Blog, I feel recharged to get not only our menu, but our budget under control. If she can feed her homeschooling family of 6 on $60 a week, surely I can cut our budget down from...um...about $150 a week.

My biggest struggle? Continuing to eat mostly organic foods. In fact, in true lack-of-a-budget fashion, I signed up for Milk delivery...again. I'd cancelled it about a year ago because it didn't seem like it was cost-effective. THAT is why I usually don't answer the door from noon to 5 p.m. each day, I just can't handle it! The milk is good, hormone free and fresh, but it makes me committed to a certain amount of milk each month. I cannot be held responsible for salesmen at my door during lunch.

I can admit that my biggest problem with meals is the lack of planning. Each day I toil over what to make and we are ALL getting bored with my meals. We own a house with my parents (extended family philosophy) so I often cook for my dad (mom is on Slim 4 Life, so she is very strict with her food); he's terrible about eating a variety of foods (in fact, he does NOT eat green vegetables). I've somewhat catered his meals to what he likes, but from now on I'm going to have to stick to a meal plan that works for our family; that means that 1) he can eat what I make, including the hidden veggie purees or 2) he can nuke some nasty canned crap in the microwave ;) As for our breadwinner, my husband, he's usually pretty good at eating whatever I make, so I don't worry much about him.

I found a great resource online to plan our meals: www.mealsmatter.com
It's a free tool for menu planning, creating shopping lists, finding recipes. It's free because it's paid for by the California Dairy council. Did I mention it's AD FREE?!

With this site, I can add my recipes to my cookbook and click and add it to my menu. I can also create shopping lists.

My goal? Create weekly menus that include all three meals. I gleaned that from The Grocery Cart Challenge--she is a homeschooling mom of 4. Without a plan, it's easy to break the budget buying items that "might" be eaten for breakfast, lunch and snacks. With a plan, it's much easier to avoid overspending.

I'm wisely starting my weekly plan next Monday, December 15th. This will give me time to get some of my recipes typed in, a grocery list printed and organize the fridge, freezer and cabinets to get to know what we have "stocked." I'm also hoping to help integrate my kids into the whole plan--checking for food we already have, contributing ideas for meals, maybe even volunteering to cook? ;) Okay, they are still rather too young for that, but I can dream of the future, can't I?

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TEA!

My friend at Kathalog asked me if I'd had any new yummy teas lately. She knows that I, too, love tea!

I've had many favorites over the years, but my current favorites are:



Most of my teas are from Celestial Seasonings, produced here locally! They have a great selection of caffeine free teas and a variety of green teas.

The Holiday Teas are out again. My girls and I have a tea party every thursday and these are the usual choices the kids make:



DYK? January is National Hot Tea Month

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Product Review: Tovolo Ice Cream Molds

Tovolo Ice Cream Molds



I hesitated posting this review as I've never actually used the ice cream molds for Ice Cream. My infant is allergic to milk and I'm nursing, so I cannot have milk right now.

I have, however, used the molds to create shaped boiled eggs and shaped rice:



Notice the Cow Shaped Rice ball: Spray the molds with Pam, mix gooey rice with cinnamon and raisins, then smush in the molds.



For the cow and pig shaped boiled eggs: Boil the eggs, cool (but not all the way), peel the eggs and center them in the molds laying down. push the plunger down and place a rubber band around the mold. Put in the fridge for a couple hours.

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PROS: Very well-designed, a great size, and can be used for multiple purposes!

CONS: They are a bit pricey, but they are built to last.

COST: I found mine at an outlet home good store for $11.95. I've seen them online for anywhere between $9.95 and $19.95 (Amazon had a double set for $22.95)

RATING: (out of 4):

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Oh the Irony

I love caramel coffee flavor. And I love Milkshakes.

Unfortunately, I can't have dairy or soy.

On an unusual trip to get a treat at Chick-fil-A (some fries, all that I can have there). We got to the window and the lady says that they are randomly giving out free Caramel Coffee Milkshakes to promote their new product and do we want a free one?

HECK YES!

But I can't and DH hates coffee, so we declined.

Ah, the irony!

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The Perfect Brownie...and pan

There is a great company called Namaste that makes milk, soy and wheat free mixes. I bought a brownie mix and have been waiting to use it. I finally prepared it the other day to appease my chocolate craving and YUMMY!

I started to think about how I LOVE the crusty outside of the pan and the inside mushy part isn't as satisfying to me. I posted to some friends online about it and we got into a discussion about crusty vs. soft inside of the brownie pan.

Then one of my online friends posted this:



from Baker's Edge

Now there is a product I need!

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Problem? Or no Problem? Another plastic rant

I discovered today that the yogurt we buy for our girls--Yo Baby Yogurt--is packaged in a polystyrene product (Recycle number 6). I wrote the company about my concerns and in all fairness, this is the reply I received within hours (the formatting is a little off, ignore that some of the words run together, it was a byproduct of copy/paste):

Hello ,

Thanks for your inquiry about our packaging. We appreciate hearing from you. Because the use of any plastic can have an adverse effect on the environment, we continuously search for packaging materials with lower environmental impacts. For now, we believe the best option for our small cups is polystyrene.

Simply put, the best way to minimize the environmental impacts of our packaging is by reducing the overall amount of packaging material we use -less packaging means less consumption of resources, less pollution and less solid waste. We have significantly reduced the amount of packaging we use through a series of design changes, such as eliminating the lids on our 6oz. containers. The switch of our 4 oz. multi-packs to polystyrene was another step. By switching to polystyrene cups, we were able to reduce the packaging by 37% and prevent the manufacture and disposal of over 2.5million lbs of material. In addition, we are molding the cups at our New Hampshire facility, which eliminates the need to have empty cups shipped to us. This saves fuel, reduces pollution including global warming gases and eliminates additional packaging used to ship the empty cups.

From a food safety perspective, polystyrene has been determined by the both the U.S. FDA and the European Union (EU) to be safe for packaging that is in direct contact with food. The FDA requires the styrene content of the packaging be less than 5,000 parts per million (ppm). The styrene content in Stonyfield Farm’s polystyrene packaging does not exceed 400 ppm, or 92%less than the allowable limit. If the low levels of styrene in our cups still concern you, our yogurt can also be purchased in 32 oz. containers made of polypropylene.

Sincerely,
The folks at Stonyfield Farm

We’re passionately committed to making the best-tasting, healthiest yogurts available, and trying to do some good in the world while we’re at it. Visit us at Stonyfield.com!

Of course, I'm never comforted by the fact that the FDA approved such plastics. Frankly, the FDA does what's right for the economy more often than for people's health. If that were true, polycarbonates would not be available for infant bottles.

The jury is still out whether I'll continue to buy the Yo Baby yogurt; I may just switch to their other product for safety.

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Trail Mix

Another happy snack around our house is trail mix. The typical trail mix is not only expensive, but really high in salt and sugar, not to mention the added sulfur in the dried fruit. Our trail mix contains:

• unsulfured dried fruit (cranberries, mangoes, pineapple, etc)
• plain bagged bulk nuts (almonds, walnuts, pecans)
• fruit-sweetened yogurt raisins (no high fructose corn syrup, no added color)
• Kashi Heart to Heart cereal (the girls love the heart shapes)
• Cascadian Farms multi-grain cereal squares

Another favorite camping and road trip food!

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Breakfast Bars

I recently was the recipient of the book "Deceptively Delicious" by Jessica Seinfeld. She uses alot of the same kinds of philosophies my friends and myself already use (for instance, "spiking" spaghetti sauce with pureed carrots, spinach, zucchini, etc).

The breakfast bars are a great recipe (though I altered it, like I alter just about every recipe ;) It uses whole oats, butter or smart margarine (I used the Smart Balance), sugar (I used organic sugar and cut the amount), whole fruit no sugar added preserves (I didn't use any with Splenda, just the fruit preserves), and spinach puree.



This recipe uses a spinach puree mixed in with the all fruit topping. I used blueberry for half and black raspberry for the other half of the batch. The favorite in our family is the black raspberry.

These deserve and A+ rating! We made a big batch for our road trip and they were gobbled up. It was so good knowing our kids were getting their daily dose of spinach. If you cut the added sugar in the oat part of the bar, it is surprisingly low sugar. In comparison to the store bought bars (we buy the Envirobars--$3.50 for 6 bars) it is very LOW COST.

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