Groceries on a Budget

This week I was asked a very good question about whether or not a grocery budget is a good idea and if it is how much should a grocery budget be.  I believe that a grocery budget is definitely a good idea, in fact I think it is a must. Jacob and I like to work from a budget worksheet that has a specified amount of money in each category that we spend money in, that definitely includes groceries. We try to account for each and every dollar we spend. Our budget worksheet is something we work on together at least once monthly and we have done this throughout our marriage. It is something we both like to be involved in so we do it together.  As for how much a grocery budget should be this is a question that can only be answered within your own family. There are many variables that go into figuring out and deciding how much a grocery budget should be. The size of your family will be one of the biggest factors, but you also have to consider the types of food your family eats, the stores you normally do your shopping in, and the cost of food items in the area you live, and of course your monthly income.                                                                                                          
I think one of the best ways to begin to determine what your weekly food costs will be is to plan a weekly menu. Try to plan a menu that includes a variety of foods that you eat on a regular basis. The menu needs to include breakfast, lunch, and dinner. From your weekly menu make a grocery list. Be sure to include items that you might already have on hand, but are required for your recipe. You need to include these items in your budget to maintain your food storage. Once you have your list you can do one of two things, go out and buy the items on your list or take your list to the store and simply calculate the cost of the items. Now you have a good idea of what you might spend on groceries for a week. From here you can easily calculate your monthly expenditures. You will need to include a little money for some staples that you probably wouldn't include on your weekly list like, flour, sugar, spices, etc.
Once you have your monthly expenditures figured you can add an appropriate amount of money to the budget for additional items to either replenish or bolster your food storage. Please refer to the new guidelines for home preparedness given to us by church leaders to help you in figuring out how to build your home food storage.  Once you have a good monthly grocery budget in place then you can focus your attention on saving money in this area through couponing, clearance shopping, etc,  As you save money each month on your grocery budget keep that money in the grocery category on your budget worksheet. Don't spend it on other items. Eventually you will have enough excess in this category for those months you need to replenish some of the things you need to buy in bulk, like flour, sugar, etc. or for when you come across a great deal on something and you would like to stock up.

Goin' Bananas

Last week I was so thrilled with myself when I found this: 5 lbs of Bananas on the reduced produce rack! Yeah! And I got them all for $0.89. As an added bonus they were organic.  So at regular price which is $1.29 per lb. for organic or $0.69 per lb for conventional they would have cost me about $6.45 or $3.45 respectively. That is an 87% savings. This is a great way to save money. I usually check out all of the clearance and reduced racks when I make a trip to our local grocery store to see if I can find deals just like this one. I know these bananas are way too ripe for eating but they are perfect for Spinach and Fruit Smoothies and Banana Bread and they keep well in the freezer. Just put the whole bunch into the freezer and then pull out whatever you need when you are ready to use them. (They turn brown in the freezer but the inside is still perfectly good to use.) You can also peel them, cut them into chunks, and them freeze them on a cookie sheet. After they are frozen put them into a freezer bag. This way you can pull out whatever you need for your smoothie. 

I used three of my bananas to make some Banana Bread and threw the rest in the freezer for later. A couple of years ago when I was packing to move to Texas. I packed my Banana Bread recipe a little too early so I was forced to look for another one. After I found this recipe I was so glad I had packed my old one because this one is delicious:

 Ingredients:
2 Cups All-Purpose Flour
1 tsp. Baking Soda
1/4 tsp. Salt
1/2 Cup Butter or Margarine
3/4 Cup Brown Sugar
2 Eggs, beaten
2 & 1/3 Cups Mashed Ripe Banana

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease loaf pan. In a large bowl combine flour, baking soda, and salt. In a separate bowl, cream together butter and brown sugar. Stir in eggs and mashed bananas until well blended. Stir banana mixture into flour mixture; stir just until moistened. Stir in chocolate chips or nuts if desired. Pour batter into prepared loaf pan. Bake for 60 to 65 minutes until toothpick comes out clean. Let bread cool in pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto wire cooling rack.  I usually bake mine in some little mini bread pans.  My kids love the little slices. This recipe makes about 5 mini loaves. You will have to adjust your bake time accordingly. We always put chocolate chips in ours too! I also like to use a mixture of part all-purpose and part whole wheat flour in this recipe to get more whole grains in.  This would be a great recipe to try the white flour alternative in.  I haven't tried this yet, so if you do leave us a comment and let us know how it works.

Spinach and Fruit Smoothies

One of the things that thrives in our garden is spinach. We eat lots of spinach salads and add it to our sandwiches and burgers in place of lettuce and we all enjoy it except for our daughter. She hates all leafy greens. We can't get her to eat salad, spinach, lettuce, or anything like it.  Our son will eat it raw with nothing on it, but not her, so here is one way we have found to get some nice iron rich spinach into her diet. We simply blend up a bunch of spinach with some nonfat plain yogurt, some fruit, and a bit of juice if you need it sweeter.  I don't follow a recipe I just throw whatever we have in the blender.  We usually have some frozen berries and bananas hanging around. You can't even taste the spinach. My kids love them especially when I serve them with a straw!

Seed Starting Calender

Since we have moved to Texas it has been a learning experience getting used to having 2-3 growing seasons. We will start putting seeds in the ground this week (1st week of Feb), most of what we plant now we will plant again later in the summer. Then there are a lot of great things we can plant over the summer that take the heat really well and keep our garden beds full and beautiful during a received "off time". While we are planting now we are still harvesting; kohlrabi, broccoli, carrots, beets, turnips, rutabagas, fresh herbs (cilantro, parsley and dill) and snow peas. We will have a much more productive winter next year.

One thing that has really helped us know when to plant everything is a chart a local master gardener compiled, that lists what to plant and when. It also lists what to plant in the fall season too. This is a good guide and give a point for reference. We put the dates on our calendar so we can see what we need to plant each week. While this is a good guide it is not a set in stone time table. Planting guides are based upon the average last (or first) frost dates for your area. These frost dates can be different from town to town.

I have found a great site where you can find a planting guide based on your climate zone (searchable on the site). It is a good start and a good basic guide. It breaks it up by combining two climate zones... 5,6 7,8. So it's only a general guide. Also look up your local extension office. Gardening is a learn as you go process, you learn from mistakes... and mistakes are okay.

The first step is to look up your average last frost date. There are many places online to do this, I have used Zipdatamaps.com search by zip code. Also a lot of city websites will list this information too.

Once you know your last frost date you can begin to examine your seeds to see what needs to be started before and what can be planted after. Often is makes sense to plant the same seeds over the course of several weeks. So that if a sudden cold snap hit your haven't planted 100% of your seeds, you can also use row covers and other passive methods. By spreading out your planting you also start what is called succession planting, this will extend your harvest season, as each type of plant will produce on a slightly delayed schedule.

Shaun-ta's Chocolate Chip Cookies

Chocolate Chip Cookies are my all time favorite! I really love them. I tried them this week using the Alternative for White Flour that Jacob discovered and I think they turned out great! I wanted to share the recipe with you in case you love chocolate chip cookies too!

1 Cup Shortening
1 Cup Sugar
1 Cup Brown Sugar
2 Eggs
1 tsp. Vanilla
2 Cups + 4 Tb. Alternative Flour
1 tsp. Salt
1 tsp. Baking Soda
1 Cup Chocolate chips
Nuts (optional)

Cream shortening and sugars. Add egg and vanilla and mix well. Add combined dry ingredients and mix well. Stir in chocolate chips and nuts. Bake at 375 degrees for 10 to 12 minutes.

I have found that the secret to making really fluffy cookies is to use a recipe that uses at least half shortening in it and them beat them like crazy. I use my electric mixer or kitchen aid. With each addition of ingredients beat them really well until it is white and fluffy. If you prefer to use margarine or butter you can use it in place of the shortening or you can do half shortening and half butter.

I am so excited about the white flour alternative. I can't wait to try it in other recipes.

Healthy Alternative to White Flour

We all know that wheat flour is by far healthier than white flour. We make most things with wheat flour but there are times when we use white flour. White flour has to be "enriched" because the processing to make white flour strips so much of its original goodness.
We know the closer we can get to whole grains the healthier I came across an alternative to white flour using whole grains. I first heard about the from and interview on the TSP podcast . She calls it Wonder Flour.


Grind equal parts;
Oats (rolled or groates)
Brown rice
Barley
1 cup of each will make about 4.5 cups of flour (with rolled oats).


You can substitute various grains including Spelt, buckwheat, & kamut. I plan to try adding home grown Amaranth to the mix later this year.
This flour has 3 x's the Fiber, more Protein and many trace minerals. It also does not have to be refrigerated and is very shelf stable. We now have a bit 3 gallon bin full of this flour mix for easy access.

We really like the flavor and have used it most recently in chocolate chip cookies. It can be used any any recipe that does not require yeast. As this recipe has no gluten, (unless you use spelt) so it can be used for those with gluten sensitivities.
Give it a try you'll like it.

Homemade Dishwasher Detergent & Rinse Agent

You can make a Homemade Dishwasher Detergent using some of the same ingredients you purchased to make your Laundry Detergent. In addition to Washing Soda and Borax you will also need Kosher Salt and Citric Acid.

 

Here is the Recipe that I use:
1 Cup Borax
1 Cup Washing Soda
1/2 Cup Kosher salt
1/2 Cup Citric Acid

There are several options you can use for the citric acid. It can be purchased in bulk online or you may try and find it in or around the pharmacy area of your grocery store. You could also ask your pharmacy to order it for you. Unless you are buying a lot though it can be kind of pricey.  There are  also a couple of other options you can use for the citric acid that are very easy to find in your local grocery store.

1 - 15 packets of unsweetened Lemon Kool-Aid
2 - Lemi Shine
3 - Fruit-Fresh

Before I made the investment to buy a large bottle of citric acid I thought I would try out this recipe using some of these other items that I could buy in smaller quantities. The first batch of detergent I made I used 15 packets of unsweetened kool aid and it seemed to work okay, but I had a lot of caking occur so I ended up having to break it up with a butter knife. If I used this method again I might try to pack it into ice cube trays, allow it to cake together and then remove them so they are in individual squares.  My 2nd batch of detergent I decided to try Lemi-shine.  I used this product a lot when I lived in Utah to help remove the hard water spots from the glassware. It really works well and I had a bit left over so I decided to give it a try.  So far I like the results I have gotten with the Lemi-shine much better. I have had very little caking and I also think the dishes are cleaner, I especially notice with the silverware. They were clean with the kool aid batch but a little filmy and I have noticed with the lemi-shine batch they are much shinier. I like the results of my efforts so I think the next step for me is to invest in a large bottle of citric acid or continue with the lemi-shine, whichever is the cheaper route.

As I was researching this and trying to find a recipe that I wanted to try I read a lot of stuff saying that homemade detergents aren't recommended for dishwashers because commercial detergents have chemicals added to keep your plumbing clear.  This could be remedied however, by using a regular detergent every month or so to clean out build up and you can also make sure to use a good dishwasher cleaner every month or so as well. So far I have had good results from my homemade detergent. It seems to work well and it saves a ton of money!!!!

Rinse Agent

Rinse agents for the dishwasher are very expensive! I have learned that you can simply use white vinegar in place of your rinse agent. It works well and is so much cheaper.  White vinegar also works great as a dishwasher cleaner. Just fill a glass measuring cup up with 1 Cup white vinegar place it upright in the bottom rack of your dishwasher and let your dishwasher run it's regular cycle. This really helps remove the hard water from your dishwasher.