A constant theme for my blog has always been the rising cost of food! I have managed to keep our average monthly spending on groceries to around $500 to $700 for many years even with two babies in diapers. But wow this year, things are going crazy. We purchased a whole cow, and the garden has set a record but that has not been enough to control the spending. All five of us eat breakfast, lunch and dinner from our supplies most days. Lily is home and can use water or something here but everyone else takes drinks to work and school. We made a trip to Costco at the first of October to purchase mainly drinks. I grabbed a package of bath tissue because well because. I spent a total of $448 for this trip. I am in total shock! So again, I am trying to focus on reducing/ maintaining the cost of food!
We have actually been working on emptying our freezers since September and I can finally see a difference. We can now arrange the vegetable freezer so that things are not falling out and we have most of the meat in the chest freezer. As I was grabbing beef broth, I realized we were almost out. I did not have room for the bones when I ordered the cow and we don’t have any steaks with bones. I did find multiple packs of short ribs. The plan is to make the short ribs today and then use the bones for broth to can tomorrow. I can’t remember if I post that we ended up cleaning out the hall clothes of towels and sheets and made it a food storage cabinet mainly for canning!
We had at least two nights this week with the temperature below freezing, so last Saturday, I pulled all the green tomatoes inside and feed the vines to the chickens. I ended up dicing up several that had ripened to use in our stuff green pepper soup planned for Sunday. And stewed the remained that were ripe for Taco pasta on Tuesday! Using it before it goes to waste or chicken feed in this case.
We have a set of lights that is currently not working in the kitchen/ dining room. Matt has been spending time trying to locate the problem. It is a time-consuming task but at $100 an hour for an electrician, it is definitely a money saving endeavor.