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Rice dishes are cheap and often healthy. I just used up the $1.88 ground beef I bought last week and my next dish will be a box of chicken flavored rice mix (store brand equivalent of rice-a-roni, 68 cents, will make 2-3 meals). Usually I include chicken in this meal but not on the heels of another meat dish.
Since I do not expect to buy food again until next week, I'll report this month's food spending at $133.75, all at home.
I'm amazed you can get rice a roni for .68 ! Lot more expensive here. I like to make my own from scratch.
That seems like a lot of work, cut them up. I just roast the whole chicken with herbs and butter, what don't eat go into a soup. You can't beat 77c a pound. Plus the heat from roasting heats the house up.
I agree, you can't beat that price. We never drop below a dollar a pound here. And roasting it and using it IS much easier for getting just the shredded meat off.
I'm amazed you can get rice a roni for .68 ! Lot more expensive here. I like to make my own from scratch.
It's a generic store brand equivalent which has no detectable difference from branded Rice-a-Roni, sold by a regional discount grocer. My local Kroger has its own equivalent for something like 79 cents.
I was going to say I'd try making my own from scratch if I knew how, but I see there are copycat recipes out there so I'll try that.
Sounds like you have extra food storage. I've never really been able to justify the extra expense of an extra freezer for myself to have that much extra frozen food.
You are right about homemade tortillas!!
I have a little chest freezer. One of my kids is very short and she's the other cook in the family, so I wanted a fridge/freezer that would be easy for her to use, without having to climb on a step to reach anything. We settled on a counter depth side-by-side, and it turned out to have almost no freezer space. We were always having to decide between using the freezer space for meat or for veggies, so we bought the chest freezer. I filled it up with bags of ice at first, and then gradually replaced the bags of ice with meat that I bought on sale.
My electric bill hasn't gone up at all since I bought the freezer, and the freezer itself was fairly inexpensive...maybe $150. So it hasn't been bad. Besides being able to store more frozen stuff so I can stock up when there's a good sale, it means I don't have to go to the store as often, which is a big money-saver because of the extra stuff we end up buying when we're there.
There were times in the past when I had to plan very carefully to be sure that we had food to make it until payday...there was a while during the worst of the recession when I only had $40/week for groceries, paper goods and toiletries for a family of four. Things got a little better when we didn't have a car payment anymore, but then the place my husband was working started handing out IOU's instead of paychecks sometimes. It was a rough couple of years and after that, I've always kept more food on hand than I really need to.
I have plenty of food in the cupboards, but I have the flu and I admit, I drove through the Little Caesar's drive-through window tonight and used a credit card to order a supreme pizza :-) Anything else just seemed like more work. I was already dressed to take the dog out, and thought, I'm just going to get in the truck and get food I don't have to cook.
This is exactly why I do not live paycheck to paycheck. This kind of stuff needs to always be an option.
Just achy and stuffed up, rumbly chest - that kind of flu so far. Or a cold? Froze the leftover pizza slices in baggies, so now I can just heat up a slice when I want one. Had the energy to make soup today. Yeah, pizza was kind of heavy, but it was easy :-)
Everything tastes like the Dayquil and Theraflu I've been taking right now anyway LOL.
Try aleve d cold & sinus. I swear it is the best stuff out there. One dose lasts 12 hours.
This thread makes me think I must have come across as being very needy. Not the case. I was just trying to create a conversation around frugality and food. I'm single now, the baby birds have flown the nest....well sort of...I do have two who came back to rest....but that's not the point. I was thinking of my younger mothering days when putting food on the table was challenging. My impression from this frugal group is that that would never be an issue. But to some, frugality is necessity and less of an option and creativity is essential. For a lot of people, it's a struggle to make ends meet and get by month to month, even with a frugal lifestyle. I think, perhaps, this forum could be called the "frugal by choice but not necessity forum." And what a great thing that is.
If your pay schedule necessarily has that much of an effect on what your food budget is for the week...hate to be the bearer of the news but you are broke.
Try aleve d cold & sinus. I swear it is the best stuff out there. One dose lasts 12 hours.
Thanks!
I can remember being a single working mom and being so broke that I couldn't afford toilet paper and would be scrounging newspapers, etc. But, somehow I always put food on the table. My daughter said I was an expert at making soup out of anything. I stocked up on cheap stuff or stuff on sale at the first of the month at a Cosco about 45 minutes away. We lived in the boonies. You get good at shopping when you do it once a month, and if you forget something - too bad!
It's a generic store brand equivalent which has no detectable difference from branded Rice-a-Roni, sold by a regional discount grocer. My local Kroger has its own equivalent for something like 79 cents.
I was going to say I'd try making my own from scratch if I knew how, but I see there are copycat recipes out there so I'll try that.
I just buy broken vermicelli, they have it where I live in the Hispanic food sections. Combine that with rice.
It's an old Armenian/Italian dish that's been around for long before Rice a Roni.
I can remember being a single working mom and being so broke that I couldn't afford toilet paper and would be scrounging newspapers, etc. But, somehow I always put food on the table. My daughter said I was an expert at making soup out of anything. I stocked up on cheap stuff or stuff on sale at the first of the month at a Cosco about 45 minutes away. We lived in the boonies. You get good at shopping when you do it once a month, and if you forget something - too bad!
Running out of milk for my coffee was the worst.
I remember those days. I remember having to count and estimate every single item and it's cost in the cart so that I wouldn't go over, because I only had cash and some pennies. I can still estimate within a dollar or two before we get to the cash register, that skill stayed with me. Yes, there was always food on the table, but I also remember writing out meticulous menus that considered all the foods I had available and exactly what and in what amounts I could make from that supply. When it's that kind of level, you don't have a food stock to fall back on. Today I saw a family in a truck. Two parents. Two young children and I just knew they were probably living in it. Then it's even harder because cooking may or not be an option.
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