Category Archives: Pantry Challenge

5 Things Friday

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  1. One of the things that I have realized while participating in the #3RiverPantryChallenge, is that over the past several years I have spent alot of money “stocking up” and really have not been making using of the items I already have. For example, in April 2020 I purchased 90# of chicken. I processed all but around 20#.  I currently have 3 or 4 bags of this processed chicken left.  I also realized that I am a food hoarder, even if I have a lot of stuff when finding food on sale I purchase. This is not neccessarily a bad thing, but I am spending money on items that are not really getting used. My goal for this year is not only to reduce the amount of money I spend on groceries overall but to use items we have in addition to only purchasing items that I know we will eat within a year.
  2. Our chickens are currently producing exactly the amount we need!   I have been able to use all the eggs we are getting and honestly have not put a single dozen in the fridge it.   The debate is currently do we just keep what we have with exactly enough or do we attempt to purchase more chickens?  This is a work in progress and a decision that I don’t have enough data to really decide at this point.
  3. Our living room is currently home to a table full of dirt. The hope and goal of this dirt is that we will have pepper and tomato plants to plant in the garden so far, our only seeds that have germinated have been a lettuce mix.
  4. We have decided not to plant sweet potatoes this year.  I realized that some of the potatoes we harvested back in October were beginning to sprout.  Matt and I spent several evenings baking the remaining sweet potatoes and bagging up in 1 pound bags. We currently have 13# of baked sweet potatoes in our freezer for use during the next year.
  5. I stopped at Walmart on my way home from work today. I decided to check out the marked down bread. I grabbed a loaf of French bread for $1.03. Half was used for  our garlic bread tonight and half is drying to use for French toast tomorrow. I was also able to find 2 bagels of everything bagels for $2.20. But overall my best find was bathroom cleaner with bleach for $0.98 each!

5 Things Friday

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  1. This has been a very long stressful week!  Matt’s surgery was on Tuesday and with me having a half a day workday on Thursday, I have remained confused and exhausted all week. Wednesday we attended a student’s vs staff basketball game at Zach’s school. Thursday, I delivered a meal to a friend. I am looking forward to a slower weekend.
  2. The meal plan was totally derailed however I am happy to report that we have not gone out to eat during this stressful week. Today, I stopped at a bakery and purchased several pieces of cake instead.  We have been using up left-overs and eating at home!
  3. It is time to start thinking and planning for our garden this summer. In fact, we already have some lettuce growing and have planted green peppers. No green peppers have sprouted but I am hoping this was not a waste of time. We plan to start tomatoes from seed on Monday.  I have decided not to plant sweet potatoes this year. We have been cooking up and packaging the remaining ones from the garden. Currently we have 11 pounds packaged up with another 4 or 5 pounds that need to be cooked and packaged.  This is more than enough to last us another year.  Now to decide what to plant instead!
  4. I do have plans for outside tomorrow. Matt’s building for his beetle needs two more pieces of tin placed on top. I need to trim the rose bushes, plant the strawberry plants and raspberry canes that arrived in the mail today. These are both replacements for items I purchased last spring that did not survive.
  5. The chickens are laying! We are currently receiving 4 eggs on a daily basis. On Wednesday, I made a huge breakfast bowl. After dinner I was able to package up 10 additional burritos that we can enjoy in the weeks to come!

Pantry Challenge Thoughts/ Update

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I was very proud of how we stuck to the pantry challenge in January. We ended up spending only $218 on groceries for the month.  I also realized that we were beginning to finish up and need to restock some necessary items in February.  Things like toilet paper and bread flour that yes can be bought in a small quantity but the whole idea behind the challenge is to save money not increase your spending.

So, in order to purchase items at the best price for us we headed to Costco. I am proud to say that we pretty much stuck to the list except for a couple of items that we needed for our Junk Food Sunday this week.  Nothing will go to waste!  I ended up spending $349 at Costco. This did include a chicken that was used for 2 full meals and we also made 9 pints of chicken stock.  I grabbed 200 paper plates as well.

While in Winston, we also made a stop at Target. I needed to get some hair spray.  This is also a need not a want. While at Target, I found and purchased 4 boxes of pint canning jars. The jars end up costing around $1.00 including the ring and lid.  I have not been able to find jars for less on Marketplace or in the Goodwill stores. In fact, $1.00 a jar is less than most of the jars I have found on Facebook Marketplace.  This Target stop added an additional $80 to my grocery total.

This places my grocery spending at $450 for the month of February. I know that I will likely end up spending at least another $50 if not $100 in February. However, adding the two months together still places us less than our grocery budget for one month.  So I am going to revise my goal for the rest of February and March. I have budgeted $975 a month for groceries this year.  My goal for the months of January, February and March is to stay under that total. I am currently at $675 which leaves an additional $350 in the remaining two weeks of February and March. This will not include my trip to Costco prior to our Disney trip.   I honestly think this is a very doable goal and will in the long term save $1800 for the first quarter of the year.  We are going to continue to eat what we have and buying/ restocking only items we are completely out of.  I have a list of 20 meals that we will begin to repeat and use next week to help continue to use our items. I am running low on sausage and chicken but will hold off buying these unless absolutely necessary. The chicken have significantly increased their production of eggs so that we should not have to purchase any for quite a while!

In the long run this allows us to enjoy food and save money.  The goal for the second quarter of the year will be to restock and replenish will continuing to stay under our grocery budget each month! .

Successful Sunday

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Sunday are usually a less stressful day around here. Today was less stressful but I am so happy with all we were able to get accomplished that I wanted to share.

We did the usual of course, church and lunch out! Then we came home and I got an hour nap which was much needed!
This afternoon, Matt worked on getting some plants started in our living room. I live in zone 7b, which means we have long summers but still not long enough to grow a ton of peppers. So this year, we are trying something different. We have sown approximately 35 pepper seeds in our living room. I am not currently planning to purchase any seeds this year so I am hoping that we get at least 15 pepper plants to grow!   I did purchase a grow mat to keep under the seeds until they germinate.  Matt also planted a batch of lettuce seeds.  If we get to eat some leaves I will be happy if not we have only wasted time.
We ended up purchasing a Costco chicken yesterday an ate for dinner. Last night I pulled off all the meat and threw the skin and bones in the crockpot. They finished 18 plus hours this morning before we left for church.  This afternoon I was able to can up 9 pints of chicken booth and used the remaining bit for dinner and for a chicken pot pie later this week. I used the remaining meat from the chicken along with several bowls of vegetable soup I found in the freezer to make a chicken pot pie. I will add a topping for dinner on Wednesday this week.
Matt was able to fry up 6 pounds of ground beef on the Blackstone. I used a pound for green pepper soup, a pound for a taco casserole I am going to try this week and the remaining 4 turned into my chili.  I ended up canning 5 pints of chill with one left out to use for Junk Food Sunday.
This week gets slightly more busy with baseball workouts starting but we no longer have swim in the morning.

Saturday Happening

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Wow has this been a day! We decided early last week not to spend time working on putting metal up this weekend due to a couple of factors. The main one was the weather. The temperature this morning was 23 with the expected high of 40.  That did not mean however that it was going to be a slower take it easy kind of day either.

This morning, Matt worked on installing a new clothes drying rake in our toilet room.  The one we have been using was broken and starting to cause problems. It can and was fixed with cable ties so we just moved it to the camper!  Of course this required a trip to Lowes as does any good project!  He also was able to fix my office chair for me. He had been waiting on a wrench to use!

The chickens were definitely part of the excitement of the day. Lily discovered 6 eggs around lunch instead of the expected 4. Her next discovery was that we had caught a possum in our trap.  We decided to relocate this guy to keep our chickens safe.  As though that was not enough, Lily closed the automatic solar powered chicken door to gather eggs. Unfortunately, it decided to not work after she closed. Matt, Lily and Zach spent around an hour working with it trying to get it to even just open. The final solution was to simply to remove the door. The chickens have learned and do go up in the coop every night and the entire coop is enclosed on all sides. The real benefit to the door was to help hold in some of the heat. Hopefully this is more of a convivence problem than anything else now.

Zach had a birthday party to attend in Winston-Salem so we decided to make a trip to Costco.  We ended up spending $349 but we were out of several important and expensive items. I stuck to my list except for a few extra items for the Super Bowl party next week.

Lily and I managed to file her taxes today!  And we ended up with Braxton spending the night because Amanda likely has the flu and needed some extra help!

Man am I tired!

January in Review

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January is always a slow slow month for us! In recent years it has also been a expensive month.  I started the year working on the pantry challenge. I have been mostly success with this and I want to continue to use up alot of the items we have. I will be buying items we are totally out of so but I plan to continue with limited meat and vegetable purchases until at least the end of February. Swimming has been the main event of the month!   I am glad these five weeks are behind us!

Groceries- Budget = $975.  Goal Met!  We spent $218 including stocking up on Diet Cokes and our Amazon subscription order!  I would like to keep the spending under $250 for February as well but I know I have a Costco trip so is this even realistic? A bright spot is that we have not needed to buy eggs this month. We are currently getting 2 eggs per day. This has been just enough and I look forward to more and excess in the coming months!

Auto/ Gas. Goal -= $600.  This does include any traveling as well. This month we are under budget just barely at $539.55. We did some extra weekly driving for swim meets.

Blogging- 15 post per month. GOAL MET!  This is post number 15 and I am not cheating and back dating either!

Exercise- Does tripping and falling count for the month.. Nope then the answer is NONE.

Expenses: This month did contain a few unplanned for expenses. First was the washer. Our 14 year old washer died and we ended up replacing with a new washer for $800.  I am hopefully that it will help decrease the energy we are using. Another big expense was we decided to put metal on the outside of the Beetle building. Most of the expense came from money that was designated for the Beetle but another $117 was needed. Finally a HUGE expense this month was our electric bill. This is officially the highest amount we have ever paid $345.  This include the extreme cold at Christmas along with the camper.

Overall not a bad month but hopefully we have gotten some spending under control!

 

Monday Menu Planning- Week 5 of Pantry Challenge

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Week 5 of the Pantry Challenge!  I still swear that someone adds an extra month into January every year!  I am excited that next week, I can begin re-using meals from my list.

Breakfast- Saturday- gravy and biscuits, Sunday-omelets Monday, Tuesday Wednesday and Friday- find it oatmeal, omelets cereal and milk, French toast sticks, bagels, breakfast burritos and pancakes. Thursday- homemade bagels or baked oatmeal.

Lunch- Saturday-beef nachos Sunday-Lorn horn Steakhouse, Monday- leftovers Tuesday- leftovers, Wednesday- out to meet, Thursday- soup of some kind Friday- workshop.

Dinner- Saturday-Cookout   Sunday-chicken and – Spaghetti Tuesday- Salisbury steak, green beans and rice. Wednesday- Cheeseburger Pizza Thursday-Chicken Angel Pasta (new recipe).   Friday-tacos

5 Things Friday

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  1. This week turned out to be fairly busy with doctor’s appointments, conference swim meet and regular life. Here are a few highlights.
  2. Kendall swam in the conference meet on Wednesday night.  She improved her butterfly time by 4 hundredth of a second. Next Friday, she will compete in Regionals with two relay teams. She decided that her goal for next year is to make it to regionals in an individual event.
  3. Matt had several doctor’s appointments this week about the basil cell skin cancer on his face.  He will have surgery either February 13 or 14th to have it removed.
  4. I have not bought eggs in the month of January!  The chickens are laying around 2 eggs a day. We have add some bedding and pine shavings to the chicken run to ease the mud.   I have purchased 2 bags of garden soil to start some seeds inside in the next couple of weeks!
  5. Tomorow, Saturday, we are planning a big project to convert the “Beetle building” from canvas to metal.  Hopefully I will be able to share some pictures soon.

Monday Menu Planning

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Week 4 of the Pantry Challenge!  This week you will notice some different items on the menu. I am trying a new soup and also pulling items from the freezer to use as well. I am so looking forward to February because I have a list of 14 meals already to start just writing in.  Some days it is truly a struggle to figure out what we are eating.  This is the first weekend that you will notice we are eating up left-overs!  Another exciting thing for us because at some points it feels like we have the never-ending leftovers!

Breakfast- Saturday- bacon, sausage, eggs and toast, Sunday-left-overs Monday- Zucchini Bread Tuesday Wednesday and Friday- find it oatmeal, omelets cereal and milk, French toast sticks, bagels, breakfast burritos and pancakes. Thursday- homemade bagels or baked oatmeal.

Lunch- Saturday-Left-overs  Sunday-Christos, Monday- leftovers from Christos, Tuesday Beef liver and onions, Wednesday- sandwich or roll up, Thursday- soup of some kind  Friday- out to eat

Dinner- Saturday-Left-overs   Sunday-Tomato Basil or Broccoli Cheese soup from the freezer with homemade bread. Monday- Grilled chicken, pasta salad, scallop potatoes and pineapple casserole Tuesday- Pizza Soup Wednesday- Eat out because of swim meet.  Thursday-Tortellini alfredo and bread.   Friday-tacos

5 Things Friday

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  1. We have been getting one egg a day this week and today we found a second one!  This comes at an awesome time as we have used up the last store-bought egg in the house. I am going to try and avoid buying any more eggs so that might mean we are stretching what we get. I am very hopeful that soon we will have an abundance!
  2. Kendall was home this week from school due to not having to take exams. I asked her to organize and inventory the shelves of food in our laundry room.  I was actually shocked at what was hidden up there. I was also surprised and a little upset about her finding 4 cans of pork and beans.
  3. My biggest score of the week was 3 cases or 36 jars of regular mouth canning jars for $13.97 I found at Walmart this week!
  4. We have managed to not spend anything on groceries this week. The grand total for the month is $50.46.   I do have a subscribe and save order that will arrive next week for $67.12.   Which means I should be able to keep the grocery spending to $120 for this month!
  5. Lily has begun teaching piano and also continues to walk a friend’s dog as well as babysit. She is doing an awesome job at saving money for college.