Spa Week Continues with Healthy Eating on a Tight Budget

Taking good care of oneself has a lot of components: getting enough sleep, eating healthfully, exercising, good skin care, filling one's mind with uplifting music and reading, prayer, and so on.

During this week, which I have designated as Spa Week, I am focusing on eating well. Those of you who are regular readers know that in this area, as in all the areas of my life, I work from a tight budget. A lot of people are fond of using the government's qualifications on how much money should be spent to feed ourselves. Even on the thrifty plan, I find that if I am observant and careful, I can do pretty well on a lot less money. If you are curious about these figures, check out USDA Food Plans.

Here are some of my real life examples and by the way, I have to eat gluten and dairy-free, which can be a bit of a hit to the food budget. I make it a habit to be as flexible as possible in what I eat and drink to get the best available deals. This means that sometimes I am drinking almond milk and sometimes I am drinking coconut milk. It all depends on what I can get at the lowest price. If almond milk has a $1.00 off coupon and that is the best deal going, that is what I will have that week.

About a year ago, my local grocery store was clearing out some Bob's Red Mill gluten-free products, which normally run about $5.00 per bag, down to $1.00 per bag. I purchased several bags of creamy rice and creamy buckwheat and popped them into my freezer. Note, that I paid 20% of the regular cost and even that is much less than a gluten filled hot cereal. The creamy rice costs me 5 cents a serving before I add fruit to it and the creamy buckwheat costs 8 cents a serving!

I bought these a year ago and
put them in the freezer. 

My favorite way to eat creamy
rice is by adding strawberries
and bananas with a sprinkle
of stevia to sweeten it. 

The fruit I add to my breakfast is usually purchased on sale or when it is marked down to move it out of the store quickly. Again, I am flexible on what I eat so I get the most out of the money I have budgeted for groceries. A plus to this philosophy is that I also have great variety.

My bargain purchase of almond
milk plus protein shake mix and
fruit make for a filling, nutritious breakfast. 

Another philosophy I employ is to accept whatever people want to give me. In this case, I was given five packages of protein shake mix by my father-in-law. He had been sent them by a cousin and he was not at all interested in using them. I was thrilled because these are gluten and dairy free and I am always looking for ways to get low-calorie protein into my diet. Once people know that you are a person who is happy to receive items, you will be blessed with a lot of different things coming your way. I have been given meats of all types, all kinds of produce, lots of dry beans, furniture, clothing, even a car or two!

Another example of eating healthfully on a budget was finding a Kale Vegetable soup mix marked down at the grocery store. I would normally make my food at home from scratch but on this day I was having a busy day and so I was thrilled to find this soup kit for $4.00! Another plus on this was that I got two days worth of meals out of it so it was pretty cost efficient.

I wouldn't normally buy a
kit but this was healthy and
fairly inexpensive. 

All this healthy eating doesn't mean that there aren't any treats to enjoy. I recently discovered the joys of using frozen bananas to make "ice cream".
No sugar, no dairy, no guilt in this treat! Just slice fairly ripe bananas and pop into the freezer. Once they are frozen solid, just pop into your food processor and add a bit of whatever milk you like using for a plain version of banana "ice cream". I made a chocolate version for me and my youngest son by adding some cocoa powder to the mixture. You can add all sorts of tasty things to this for variety's sake. This is a good use of those really inexpensive markdown bananas we all see at the grocery store from time to time.




And there you have it, healthy eats on a budget! Just the kind of food that is called for during Spa Week!

Super Saver Saturday- Get Cooking!

Just washed organically grown okra ready to be sliced for tonight's dinner. I could eat okra everyday I love it so much!

Hello Everyone! What's for dinner tonight? ; )

One of the biggest expenses in a household is money spent on food. Check out the USDA food budget info at http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/Publications/FoodPlans/2012/CostofFoodJan2012.pdf. They have four plans listed: thrifty, low-cost, moderate, and liberal. According to their thrifty plan, I should spend $162.60 to feed three adult men ages 19-50 and one 50 year-old woman. Occasionally, my 27 year-old daughter and her nearly 1 year-old son are here eating also.

I don't think I even come close to spending that much weekly, unless we include pet foods, cleaners, and toiletries (and I use coupons and sales on those!). Lest you are now worried about us, let me assure you that we eat at least three times a day and we eat well. I cook the majority of our meals at home and it is extremely rare for us to eat out. Being able to cook and shopping for bargains has been a huge help to keeping our costs under control!

Let me share some of what I do and hopefully shed a little light on what others can do, too.

On Thursdays, my husband brings home a variety of groceries that he finds on markdown at the grocery store. I am never sure exactly what he will have when he gets home. Talk about life being like a box of chocolates.

This week he purchased two packages of already prepared vegetable kabobs that had been marked to $3.25 per package, about a 50% reduction from the regular price. They had mushrooms, red onions, yellow squash, zucchini, green peppers, and red peppers. I did not immediately pop these on the grill for the evening meal. Instead, I took stock of other items we had and decided to take the kabobs apart to use in the following meals: red and green peppers, and mushrooms were reserved for eating fresh in salads and with hummus for lunch. The zucchini, yellow squash, and onions went into two different dinner dishes; Mediterranean Stew, and Ratatouille. To these dishes, I added our homegrown Japanese eggplant and okra. Both of these meals are served over brown rice, which I made from scratch on my stove. A 2-pound bag of brown rice at my local grocery store was $1.18.

Japanese eggplant grown organically from our garden. These ones are headed into Mediterranean Stew.

So, the cost to produce or enhance three meals to feed 2 women and 3 men was $7.68 AND there were leftovers for lunches. Take that USDA thrifty meal plan! Also, we are consuming a lot of vegetables in these dishes and everywhere where we turn we hear that we need to eat more vegetables.

I didn't begin my adult life with a Ratatouille recipe in my back pocket. But, thankfully, I had a grandmother who was very practical and had given me a Betty Crocker cookbook when I turned 13. The edition I received had wonderful illustrations that showed the most basic of cooking skills, such as scrambling an egg.

My poor cookbook is falling apart so I had to find a stock photo to show you what I think is the best cookbook ever. I know that my grandmother would be very pleased to know that I have used it and loved it so much over the years. 

If you don't know how to cook., there are resources everywhere to help you learn: YouTube, the Food Channel, libraries, blogs, 4-H, The Cooperative Extension Service, your mom or grandma...

Don't waste another minute or another dollar at the fast food places, learn to cook as soon as possible!

Garden Update

My husband and I garden in central Texas. When other parts of the country are just getting into the swing of gardening, Texas is hot, hot, hot and gardening slows in July. The weeds in the garden are gigantic, the temperatures are over 100 degrees, and the mosquitoes are on the prowl for their victims.

This cantaloupe weighed over 3 pounds! 

We are harvesting a lot of items right now-corn, cantaloupes (well, we are not harvesting them so much as collecting them because they are taking themselves off the vines and we just pick them up and take them into the house!), tomatoes, peppers, spaghetti squash, okra, Chinese long beans, and onions. We  recently harvested about half a wheelbarrow of red and yellow onions. Some are larger than softballs! Yes, everything really is bigger in Texas!

In our area, we plant onions in November to get the largest onions possible. 

Just as it is the hottest and we only want to be lounging inside with a cool drink, we need to start working and planning for our fall garden. In our area we are fortunate that we can garden just about the whole year around.

Our goal is to be able to produce all of the fruit and vegetables we want to eat. This year is the best we have done so far towards that goal. Last year, we added fruits to our garden. We planted grapes, dwarf pomegranates, blackberries, strawberries, raspberries, two pear trees, and a fig tree. Our five blackberry canes produced a pint or more of berries every day for nearly three weeks. We are definitely going to expand the amount of blackberries we are growing!

There are few things I find more satisfying than creating a meal whose ingredients mainly came from our garden. I am looking forward to many more home grown meals and new recipes in the future and I will be sharing them right here with all of you!

Just washed okra waiting to be tossed in cornmeal and fried for dinner.