I talked a little bit on Monday about the changes/ goals I have for the next school year. My goal is to use up the food that we have both in the freezers and pantry. At the same time, I want to reduce the amount of money we are spending on food as well. My goal in that area is to spend less than $475 a month on groceries. I would also like to put at least $300 a month toward meat purchases next summer. The final piece of that is that we have to have meals that are easier to fix on some days just because of your busy lives.
After watching a video on You Tube, I decided to start a meal rotation to make menu planning a little bit easier for me. I tried to make a good list of all the items we have to use for meals. Looking at this list I am estimating that I have at least 100 full meals that can be made with the items we already have on hand. This should be at least 3 full month of meals. So in December, I may need to purchase some additional meats for the remainder of the school year. At that point it should be very easy to purchase what we need as we continue to use up the food we already have on hand. The hard part of this challenge is that we like certain foods and we gravitate to those foods/meals. I am going to have to be very diligent on making a variety of foods using what we have.
Part of my planning was to try a new recipe for each day for the next two weeks. On Monday I made BBQ short ribs. It was very good and it will definitely be something we do again. Tuesday was a Beef Enchilada, not a repeat, just not. Wednesday was chicken parmesan casserole, this one will be a repeat.
I have been canning ALOT this week. I always want to fill up all the empty jars so that we have plenty of food in the winter and this summer I am successful. I also filled the extra 5 cases of jars that I purchased from Walmart. I added 10 quarts and 2 pints of beef stock, 18 pints of pears and 6 quarter pints, 2 half pints and 8 pints of pearsauce to the canning closet.
Not bad for four days!
With the excessive heat warning for most days, I planned to get up and out in the garden before 7am. I spent I think 4 mornings in the garden, catching up with weeding and harvest for between an hour and an hour and half each day. The blueberries are awesome, we have been able to freeze approximately 2 gallons. More good news is that we have several watermelons that are growing and we have started the slow trickle of tomatoes coming in. Unfortunately, I dont think we will be able to harvest enough tomatoes for making all the salsa we need. Some of the romas are already dying out. I even tried treating for blight. We are also losing the majority of our peppers. We lost our first 3 squash plants to squash bugs but I am hopefully that I was able to save a couple of our zucchini plants. I do have a second wave of squash plants in front of the sunflowers so that we may get another harvest by the end of June. I also planted a couple more zucchini plants but I am not sure if we will get any more of those. We did start to make improvements to help things out, first our drip irrigation is just not working. The parts were several years old and just is not doing it. We decided to purchase a sprinkler. It arrived today and I will let you know how it works.
.And we even have some tomatoes forming
It is large and pretty but I want to plant another round of squash plants as the squash bugs are winning in the back gardens. When they finally win or when this planting starts to produce, I am going to pull out the squash plants and plant a “row” of cucumbers in the middle of the bed. I really want to harvest and can an abundance of cucumbers this year. On July 1st, I am planning to pull up the spinach and plant pumpkins in the bed in front of the office. I am also planning on adding a couple of green beans in the empty slots on the greenstalk planters and one additional zucchini in a bed in the back that has not successfully grown anything so far.