Stretching the Grocery Budget

      I am always trying to make the grocery budget go further. With a husband who is a big guy, a teenage son, a super active preteen daughter, my in-home daycare center, and entertaining at least once a week we go through a lot of food.
      One of the best ways I have found to do that is Bountiful Baskets. Especially bulk add ones. Last week I purchased 50 pounds of tomatoes to freeze.  I will use them in pasta sauce, soups, and casseroles. Freezing them is super easy, but time consuming. Just drop them in boiling water for 60 seconds, and then ice water for 60 seconds, then peel and dice. Put in freezable containers with a an inch of head space.

 

Bountiful Basket always has two bread add on options. This week we got the assorted bread pack. It contained 2 loaves of nine grain bread, 2 loaves of English muffin bread, and a baguette. It is always fresh and the taste is amazing. They also have a pack of five loaves of the 9 grain, it is all organic. Sometimes we get it and put a couple loaves in the freezer. The cost of the bread add on is usually about $12.

One of the other things I have started doing is buying meat in bulk from the butcher instead of the grocery store. At Dickman's Meat and Deli I am able to purchase a 86 pounds of meat for $284. This works out to $3.03 a pound. The bundle includes chicken, pork chops and roast, and beef cuts including ground beef, roast, stew meat, and steaks. It also contains breakfast sausage, bacon, and ham.  Sure sometimes you can find it on sale in the grocery store for less than $3.00 a pound, but this is an everyday price with out having to go all over town to get the sales. Plus the quality of the meat from a butcher is so much better than the grocery store.

Of course there is a general theme of freezing to all of these tips. We purchased a chest deep freezer from a used appliance store 13 years ago for $90, but they have them everywhere now. Even the brand new ones are not very much anymore, although they do tend to be smaller than the older ones. I could not live without mine.