I woke up this morning to a dusting of snow on the ground – the sun is glowing and the sky is cloud-free, and other than a little wind blowing, it just added a sugar coating to a glorious morning.
We’re about 5 days into the spending freeze, and a good chunk of the grocery money is already used up. I budgeted $450 this month just to see how that worked, which is about $100-$150 less than we usually spend. That budget includes most of our meals – Eli works from home 100% of the time, and I do about 65% of the time. We rarely eat out, although I tend to have to when I travel, which is reimbursed. We pack the kids lunches 50% of the time, and breakfasts for all of us are home-based most of the time. We try to eat healthily, and our meals include lots and lots of vegetables.
I spent $75 yesterday at Trader Joe’s on both food and wine (it’s a spending freeze, not a life of bleak deprivation). Add to that what we’ve spent on things that arrive automatically and we should be ok, although this will be tighter than our usual. All we really will need is lunch meat, milk, and fruits and vegetables and a few staples.
Next week our Walden Local meat food order will arrive ($167), although because of the holiday and so many meals away from home, we still have a lot left from last month. We have some Amazon Subscribe-and-Save items arriving as well ($132.66) that will come in handy, especially the 30 lbs of organic flour that arrives 2x a year. And gets used, I might add. At about $1.42/lb, it’s more expensive to buy organic flour by a fair bit, but knowing that I’m minimizing our pesticide consumption helps. The next step is to get our flour locally, which will increase our costs but support a local, truly organic grower, but not yet. Add to that the food we’ve put up and purchased, and I think we’ll be in good shape, even though there’s a lot of January left.
We still have most of the sweet potatoes, a lot of regular potatoes, onions and 2 big butternut squash from our Thanksgiving weekend stock up. We’re also completely buried in fresh eggs, so fritattas, deviled eggs, quiche and lots of other options can be both breakfast and dinner. So long as we employ some creativity, we should eat well and healthily for the month.
Our biggest risk area for the budget is snacks – I plan to make some homemade granola bars next weekend (this recipe is great, even without the coconut, which is not my favorite), and there’s always cookies, popcorn, and homemade guacamole with some tortilla chips. Plus I stashed some Nutella-and-Breadstick snack packs for when the kids are completely frustrated by the lack of appealing snacks later in the month. It’s probably not a flawless plan, but it’s pretty solid.
Last night we finally used up the spaghetti squash that we came home in November with – I halved it, scooped the seeds and then baked it with olive oil, salt, pepper and a few cloves of garlic until it was soft. Then I filled it with a mixture of cooked ground lamb seasoned with garlic, and then mixed in goat cheese and pesto, and I topped it with a little shredded cheese. Spaghetti squash ‘boats’ stuffed with almost anything are a favorite of mine. I had no idea that my husband had never experienced spaghetti squash when I bought it, but he was so impressed by both Mother Nature’s ingenuity and dinner generally that we’ll be adding it to the list of things we grow and buy in bulk this year.
And on that topic, I’m thinking next weekend I might start some winter lettuce indoors to cut down on what I’m buying. I don’t usually grow much in the winter, but it’s a pretty low-effort endeavor to grow stuff from scratch, especially in small quantities.
When you are trying to eat what you have, it’s the time to use cookbooks and food websites as a starting point, not in order to follow recipes precisely. For example, find a recipe for stuffed spaghetti squash and then modify based on what you have rather than what the recipe says exactly. Tonight for dinner I need both kid-friendly food and to start to tackle the red peppers that have been sitting around for a few days. I pulled some beef bulgogi from the freezer, and that, along with a salad and some quick and easy popovers will cover down on dinner tonight and likely leave Eli some leftovers while I travel. Those red peppers will be sliced up along with cucumbers for the kids, who consume both without question.
I have mushrooms that need to get used up when I return as well, so I’m trying to decide whether to saute and freeze them now, or wait until I get back and turn them into something interesting, like a new variation of stuffed mushrooms, perhaps using more of the ground lamb that comes with our meat share.
Key here is to use cookbooks and web recipes for ideas. I’m lucky enough to have a freezer and my pantry completely full, so my options are great. But I’ve had times in my life where all I had was some flour and yeast, cheese and spaghetti sauce, and a few onions, and I made some really good homemade pizza with caramelized onions, which fed me until the next paycheck arrived. I’ve used solid white tuna as a cheaper alternative to ground beef in pasta sauce, and it’s really good. Surprisingly good.
Food writers, bloggers and chefs are always on the lookout for the newest and the freshest ingredients, and I love that – I have learned so much from so many about things I never thought I could cook at home, and flavor combinations I wouldn’t have ever considered on my own. But the reality is that it isn’t how most of us truly eat – most people have budgets, food preferences, limited time to cook, kids who will try a very few new things.
But what we all have is the ability to be limitlessly creative in the kitchen – the worst that can happen is that what comes out isn’t that great, and the best that can happen is you pair flavors you like and come out with a new greatest hit.
Little House on the Fairy Hill 