Feeding my family

Okay, I don't have much to say on this topic I guess.  We don't spend tons on groceries and the best way I've found to save money is to make huge meals and eat leftovers.  It is rare for me to make a meal that we don't have for at least 2 dinners.  One way to do this is to make soup.  I love making a huge pot of soup that lasts for several meals.  My favorites to make are Zuppa Toscana and clam chowder.  Plus, soup is one of the only ways Savannah will eat vegetables :).

May

Hello!  I had a May thought, regarding good food and feeding our families.  What's one thing/recipe/whatever you want that you feed your family all the time because it's simple/stores well/they eat it so well/none of those, but you just love to make it.

One thing we make is chicken stuffed crescent rolls.

I've used this recipe before and often use this recipe for crescent rolls.  Don't make bread, buy the canned crescent rolls things.  I often don't follow a recipe for the stuffing at all.  Some combination of chicken, cream cheese, milk, cream of chicken, peas/broccoli/something not disgusting in a roll that is green, and onion.  Sometimes all those things, sometimes only a couple.  It depends on what's on hand really.  And as far as rolls, I buy zero attention to what kind of flour recipes require and always use whole wheat, since I've stopped buying any other kind (this is recent though, so I really need to make some cookies to make sure they're not disgusting).

Side it with some vegetable and rice and gravy and I think any family will be satisfied and full.

What we've been trying

Feeding my family healthy AND staying on a budget is one of the constant battles in my life as a mother/stay-at-home wife (if I wasn't stay-at-home, I don't think I would feel as responsible).

It seems like the price of groceries has tripled, maybe quadrupled, since we were freshmen (which is when I started noticing prices of food).

I'm open to all and any good ideas people have.  These are some of the things I've been trying to help my budget, my food storage, and the health of my family:

• Limits.  There are some foods we eat that are just expensive.  Cereal for example.  So what we do is at the beginning of each month we'll buy 1 or 2 of the bulk bags of cereal.  When it's gone, it's gone.
• Freezer.  When things that can freeze (such as cheese) are on a good sale, I buy up to $20 worth and put it all in the freezer.
• Cans.  Same as freezer things.  The things we use in cans (tuna, cream of whatever, corn, etc.) I buy a case of when they are an extraordinarily cheap sale.  I don't know what the prices are around you, but if I can find cans for less than 40 cents, it's a good price.
• LDS Cannery Items.  This is one I've been working with a lot and for several reasons.  These items can be so useful and the number 10 cans store for 30 years!  I try to purchase all of our oatmeal from here.  I also have some cans of dry milk.  I use it in recipes that require milk, but not real milk.  If you get it from the cannery it makes things cheaper, if you buy it from the store, it may not be.  Dry milk is super expensive in stores.  I use other cannery stuff too, this is just an example.
• Amazon.  I order some things off of amazon.  Not everything can be shipped, but I've found some items (such as peanut butter) are cheaper when bought online.  If you have a prime membership (free from buying baby things...formula, diapers from them), sign up for subscribe and save, and collect amazon gift cards from websites like swagbucks, you can get some seriously cheap, possibly free (depending on how much searching you do and how often you buy things from amazon) peanut butter.  I buy dishsoap this way too.  (It's not necessarily cheaper than buying the cheapest dish soap, but normal dish soap makes my hands bleed and I use a more expensive kind that does not.  Totally worth it to me to be hand pain free.)
• Make your own stuff.  This won't always save you money, so I think you have to be really realistic about how much something costs you to make it vs. how much it costs you to buy it.  My mother gave me her grain grinder, so I buy wheat from the cannery and grind it (actual whole wheat flower).  I use it to do, well, everything.  I haven't noticed a huge flavor difference.  I actually like it better.  The cannery sells wheat you don't have to grind too.  I usually spend about $20/month on cannery items.  We don't use all those items in a month, so it builds our food storage and it's stuff we use in our regular diet, so if there were a disaster, we wouldn't suddenly switch to a weird diet, ours would stay the same.  (I make bread [still searching for a recipe I'm in love with], tortillas, biscuits, pierogies, and pretty much anything else I feel like.)
• I try to make sure to always have at least one fresh vegetable and/or fruit in the fridge.  I would like it if I always had a few choices, but the end of the month it tends to dwindle.  This one saves zero money, but I've felt like it's a huge benefit to have these things available.  I clean them and put them in bowls so that if we feel like a snack an already prepared something healthy is available upon inspection of the fridge.
• Rice.  We eat a lot of rice.  We eat brown rice.  Is it better for you for real?  I don't know.
• We rarely make a dessert.  There's only three of us here.  When we make a dessert it lasts forever and we all get way to much sugar, so it really has to be a special occasion or we have to have company and even then sometimes we don't have dessert.
• Snacks.  I've come to be really realistic about snacks.  We snack when we feel like it, so I've started making sure something is available to snack on so that we don't eat the food that was intended to be our meals.  If you don't buy super expensive snacks, I think it can save money.  And when you have set things that are snacks already, you have a lot of control over how healthy too.
• Vegetables.  I've been trying really hard to make sure a vegetable accompanies every meal.  Sometimes salad, sometimes a can of corn, sometimes something frozen from a bag, sometimes just potatoes, but anything I consider a vegetable.  I don't know if it's actually helping us be healthier, but it makes me feel better about our eating habits.
• Left-overs.  When we have left-over breakfast, it is our snacks until lunch.  When we have left-over lunch, its our snacks until dinner.  When we have left-over dinner it becomes part of another meal.  This just seems like a good idea to me.  It's what Ryan's cousin does and she knows more about healthy everything than any person I know, so I always assume that the things she does are a good idea.  If you're curious about her this is her blog about being healthy.
• I've been working on figuring out an exact system for grocery shopping so that I'm always getting the same amount of the same things for the same price from the same stores with a dollar amount of flexibility for trying things.  It's a huge work in progress.  Sorry for the long list.  I've been working on this topic for quite a while now.

There are so many DIY things available online for other things to like shampoo or cooking oil or laundry soap, or a rinse aid...blah blah blah.  I've tried the baking powder as shampoo thing.  I hated it.  I love my shampoo and conditioner and will not try it again.  I don't buy cooking oil.  I have a misto can that I exchanged at a fancy department store from our wedding.  I just put some oil in it.  I've also heard of putting some olive oil and water in a bottle and spraying it on things.  Try it if you feel so inclined.  I've never used a rinse aid before, but I've been putting vinegar in my dishwasher (we have extremely hard water here) and it's been helping my dishes.  I'm going to start trying a 1 to 1 vinegar water mixture as an all purpose cleaner and disinfectant (when my stuff runs out).  I'll let you know how that goes, but vinegar really is amazing.  I'm also thinking of starting to make my own laundry soap.  I know of two ladies in my ward that make their own (both of their clothes look nice and they've been doing it for 5 years minimum).  It ends up costing you about $4 to make, what was it, I think 10 gallons of laundry soap.  The price has me sold on trying it.  I've been trying to research it for the sake of my clothe diapers especially.  So far my research is inconclusive, but there are lots of people who use it and write about it online.  All about the same recipe.  I have yet to hear someone who doesn't like it.  I get skeptical of these things, but with the purchase of our van, I'm looking for as many ways as possible to cut money that we can use to pay it off so that we can have a savings again.

That was long.  Sorry.  Ryan was nice not to complain that I was using the computer while he cleaned up dinner though.  :)

Congratulations if you read to here.  I consider it a feat.

March--April--May

I'm going to be lazy and do three months in one post.

For March: Gardening.
Well, I'm still renting and don't have a place to garden but someday I do plan to have a garden! Mostly a flower garden. I love flowers and they seem a little less intimidating than food. I have no idea what food I would grow. I think it'd be fun to have a couple fruit trees though! But definitely a colorful flower garden. :)

For April: Strengthening Personal Testimony
This one's hard, I think. I'm like Cathryn. It's really hard for me to make habits. I was really good at reading my scriptures and saying prayers every day and then it kind of broke when I got to college. I felt weird doing it in front of roommates and that carried into my marriage where I felt weird doing it in front Colin. I don't know where this self consciousness came from. Maybe I have a deep fear that I'd look self-righteous or that I would be doing it "wrong?" No clue.
Through many talks with Colin we decided that I pray daily better when he reminds me and we do it at the same time, so I've been getting a lot better at my own daily, personal prayers. Scripture study is trickier. I feel like it's also so much more important considering I'm in nursery and the only spiritual upliftment (it's a word now) is what I can get out of sacrament between dealing with my two girls. It's not exactly like I don't have the time to do it. Somehow I found the time to read 15 books in the last six weeks. It's just a matter of thinking to do it and then in that moment of thought actually doing it. I haven't gotten there yet. But I'm grateful to read your girls' words as a cross-country encouragement! I look up to you girls and it honestly helps to hear that I'm not alone in struggling to do it. I'll let you know how I do! I'm putting it out there so you can hold me to it. :)

For May--Good Food on a Budget
This is another category where I'm lame and useless. Being the poor med student family that we are we have been on food stamps for a couple years now and I don't remember how to be on a budget as we never spend the whole monthly allotment the government gives us. It's massive. We're actually going to use it to build a food storage soon! So, I'd love to hear what you girls have to say so I can file it away for two years from now when we no longer qualify for food stamps but still don't have a lot of money as we need to pay off loans. haha

Our yard!

This is totally cross posted from my other blog, but I figured I'd put it on here anyway...


When we moved in, our yard was BAD.  It hadn't been taken care of for a long time.  So, we're in the process of fixing it.  It's going to be a few years before our grass is super nice, but we're working on it!  We also want to grow a vegetable garden and we've planted some flowers and trees.  It's an uphill battle because our soil is absurdly rocky, it's clay, and we live in Utah.  But, we're determined to make it work.  Pictures!

Last year's yard

Classy, huh?

Our yard last Saturday

All the stuff we bought.  I thought that our budget of $300 was huge, but apparently it's not anything at all!  We went over that and will go even more over when we buy stuff for our vegetable garden in a few weeks...

Ugly gravel pathway we dragged our garbage cans through

This will be the vegetable garden, but we have to wait until after Mother's Day to make sure our plants don't freeze.

Our little gardener :)

Saturday after a long day of work!  

I actually took these today because it was dark then, but you get the idea :)

This is a Japanese cherry tree (pink flowers in spring)

A different Japanese cherry tree (more pink flowers!)

I planted a bunch of lilies and gladiolas here.  I hope they grow!

The great big shrub is new

That leafy shrub is new 

There will be more bulbs planted in that corner as soon as I get up the energy (kneeling bent over like that for a long time gives me braxton hicks contractions.  Lame!)

We had to beautify the play set too :)

Yay for a pretty path!  Corey measured wrong in his head and we need two more bricks, but we love the way it looks!  We were worried Savannah would be sad because she LOVED playing with the gravel that used to be there, but when she saw it she said, "Oh wow! Lots of beautiful rocks! I will walk on them!"  We were pleasantly surprised :)

So, that's our yard!  It's still a work in progress, but we're pretty excited about it :).  We definitely want to put more flowers in, but we'll see what our budget allows this year...  Oh, and Corey rocks for working his tail off doing most of this stuff (I planted the flowers...), our neighbors rock for letting us use their pointed shovel (we really need one) and giving us their extra mulch, and Bruce rocks for letting us use his tiller and truck.

My Garden

Today I planted my garden (well,  a few pots and some flowers).  Behold the evidence...

Flowers

Cherry Tomato

More Flowers

Strawberry

There are two of them.

I tried planting onions in water and it worked, but was moldy, so now I'm trying dirt.  Two of those pots are still empty, three have seeds.