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.