Weekly Recap 10/14-10/20

by Beth - Budget Bytes
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The title of this post should be, “Weekly Recap and the Case of the Missing Bananas”

Because I can’t find my bananas.

Weekly Recap 10-14 - BudgetBytes.com

I remember picking up the bananas, weighing the bananas, adding the price to my tally, and then… later at home, there were no bananas. No bananas on the receipt, either. I can only conclude that I left the bananas right there on the scale in the produce department. I’m that crazy lady wandering around the grocery store picking things up and setting them down in random places.

Ugh.

Other than that, this week went really well! Luckily, I had the last few tangerines and some frozen fruit from before the September Challenge, so I didn’t go without fruit completely this week. Crazier things have happened, I suppose. …Like that time my entire grocery cart full of items disappeared. That really happened, but it’s a story for a different time. Let’s get back to business.

What I Bought

Weekly Groceries 1 10-14

Weekly Groceries 2 10-14

I had a few expensive purchases this week, like ground turkey, arugula, and mozzarella cheese. Those ate up most of my budget, so the overall number of items this week was low. Luckily I scored with sales on avocado ($1 each), and red and orange bell peppers ($0.88 each). The only staples I had to restock on were flour, eggs, and milk.

I decided to do the extra work and cook my beans from dry for my chili instead of buying three cans because I didn’t have much wiggle room in my budget ($1.65 for dry versus three cans at $1.19 each). I used my slow cooker to cook the beans the day before, so it wasn’t much work, it just required planning ahead.

The turkey came in a 19oz. package, so I used half for my chili and froze the second half. That will be a nice money saver in a future week when my budget is running tight, or I want to splurge on something a little more pricey (nuts? frozen fruit?).

Here is what my grocery list and receipts looked like… (no bananas!)

Grocery List 10-14Grocery Receipt 10-14

The grocery store was out of green onion (!!), so I got cilantro to top my chili instead. I ran out of room in my budget to replenish my frozen broccoli, so that just had to wait until the following week. That was just so I had supplies on hand to make Bowties and Broccoli (my favorite emergency meal), so it didn’t affect my menu for the week. Everything else on the list went as planned! I love it when that all works out nicely.

What I Ate

Black Bean Chili - BudgetBytes.com

My main meal this week was this super easy Weeknight Black Bean Chili. I topped it with either diced avocado or dollops of sour cream, and some cilantro. I actually didn’t make it through all the servings this week, but that’s okay because it freezes great! And that’s more variety for later.

Sweet Potato Cornbread - BudgetBytes.com

I made this amazing Sweet Potato Cornbread to go with the chili, and sometimes I also ate it for breakfast with eggs… because YUM!

Breakfast 10-14

Seriously the best breakfast ever. I added a little maple syrup to the cornbread at breakfast. OMG I’m drooling just typing it out…

Pasta Salad with Sausage and Arugula - BudgetBytes.com

For a little more vegetabley-ness, I made this cold Pasta Salad with Sausage and Arugula. My other main reason for making this was to use up a couple of links of sausage that I found in the freezer. Can’t let that good stuff go to waste! This made a HUGE batch, so I actually couldn’t get through all of it this week, and a couple servings went into the trash at the end of the week. :/ Unfortunately this one doesn’t freeze well because of the fresh vegetables.

Dilly Vegetable Dip - BudgetBytes.com

And lastly, I made use of left over carrots, celery, and dill from last week’s Matzo Ball Soup to make a delicious Dilly Vegetable Dip with crudités. These crunchy fresh vegetables were an awesome snack throughout the week and now I want to keep them on hand more often. I was also just super psyched to have been able to use the sour cream in THREE different dishes this week (chili topper, cornbread, and vegetable dip). Not a drop of that tub went to waste.

Smoothie Packs

I also ate one or two smoothies using frozen fruit that I had tucked in the back of the freezer from a couple months ago (not the fruit pictured above, but that’s a good visual representation). I’m sure I would have been craving fruit HARD had I not been lucky enough to have that stash in the freezer. I’m almost out of my big bag of frozen berries that I got at Target for $10 and I want to buy more. I need to figure out how to work that into one of my weeks, despite it being 1/3 of my usual budget.

I ate out twice again this week: date night on Friday and brunch with friends. Two “eat outs” per week is one more than I’d like, but I’m still figuring out how to manage dating and social time without it involving food, especially in such a food-centric city like New Orleans!

Summary

I’m very happy with how this week turned out. I felt well fed and my menu had plenty of vegetables and protein. I did feel bad throwing away a chunk of that pasta salad, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s still probably far less than the average household (we’re always our harshest critics!).

I’ve also noticed how this $30/week limit has broken me of my dairy addiction. I’m addicted to cheese and addicted to yogurt. Yogurt probably isn’t a terrible thing to be addicted to, but it IS expensive and I used to eat it every day. This week did have a decent amount of dairy with the sour cream, cheese, and milk (that goes in my coffee), but it’s still a major reduction in my cheese consumption. Now that it’s a luxury, I realize just how much I was eating before. Yikes!

I’m still learning and discovering new things every week! That’s a win!

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  1. Wow, you put sour cream, cheese and milk in your coffee? Lol, you see what I did there…

  2. I can’t thank you enough for this amazing blog!!! I find SOOOO many easy but delicious meals that my hubby and I love and that saves us money. Please, never stop! lol.

  3. Totally unrelated, but I noticed you freeze small portions of things often. I love to do this for easy and varied lunches and I just discovered that it works for slices of leftover pizza! Blew my mind. Straight from freezer to oven they weren’t quite like fresh, but still great. And it saved them from my trash can.

    1. You can always “refresh” leftover pizza by adding some extra toppings–a little lightly sauteed pepper, mushroom, onion, minced garlic, a couple of sliced olives, a crumble of leftover bacon from breakfast, a bit of crumbled feta or a tad of Parmesan are just a few ideas. Left over broccoli tastes good on pizza, too, so let your imagination soar.

  4. Dude you rule so hard! I have no idea how I even found your blog but I’ve been a reader for a few years now. I’ve never had one of your recipes not turn out well. I really appreciate your approach to creating recipes that are delicious but still nutritious. You seem to be mindful of what you put into your food without freaking out over it, and I think you set a good example of balance. Some of the other food blogs I read are too militant about the nutrition aspect, and that kinda takes the fun out of it.

    I also LOVE the weekly recaps and the SNAP/weekly spending challenge months. Have you thought about adding a section for those? Like a section where one can go to see all of your cheap cheap recipes and the weekly recaps? That would be cool to be able to access those on the same page (like the sections you have for vegetarian, or pasta, or rice, etc). I try to stick to a $25-$30 budget each week, so I personally reference those posts a lot.

    Anyway….I really just came here to tell you that you’re awesome. Thanks for all the great content week after week!!

    1. Awww, thank you! :D I have a category for the SNAP challenge posts and will probably create one for the weekly roundups, but for now they’re just under the “Updates” category. :)

  5. I have been sort of amazed at what things cost for you sometimes. 2.49 for a half gallon of milk?? I never pay more than 2.79 for a full gallon and if I time it right I can sometimes get two half gallons for .49 each. I drink a lot of milk, so I am not usually worried by the sell/use by date

  6. At the moment, we’re on a full protein-and-veggies-only diet to finally lose those extra pounds from last xmas before this xmas (don’t ask …), but I cannot wait to slowly add some fibres back to our meals so I can try everything you made AND save money!

  7. I’ve been using your recipes for a month now, and they’re delicious–I had fallen into a serious dinner rut and couldn’t get out. Thanks for a great blog. I love saving money and making stuff my kids will actually eat :)

  8. You are seriously such an inspiration! Thanks so much for continuing to share these posts!!

  9. I’m going to echo the above commentor talking about making your own yogurt. I was facing the cost of yogurt I was eating for breakfast myself recently when I discovered that yogurt is actually fairly easy to make at home, which makes it very cheap! (I was spoiling myself with Greek yogurt as well, and I started wanting full fat, which I couldn’t even buy in bulk at CostCo since they only sell nonfat Greek yogurt.) You can turn a gallon or half gallon of milk into an equivalent amount of plain yogurt (or a smaller amount of greek yogurt). There’s a lot of how-tos on the net, but this is how I’ve been doing it.

    You will need:

    * Milk, it can be homogenized and pasteurized but NOT ultra pasteurized. A gallon or half gallon, any less and I think the labor vs how much you get would be annoying.
    * Starter — this can be a smaller plain yogurt cup from your grocery that is labelled as containing live cultures, or alternatively some yogurt from some you previously made (just save a few tablespoons)
    * If you want to strain your yogurt to make it thicker, you’ll need some cheese cloth or muslin
    * A cooking thermometer
    * I use a large slow cooker crock to do my setting, but anything that will keep the milk close 110* for hours will do.

    The process:

    * Before I start, I turn on the crock pot to low and set the oven to warm. This sets the stage for when I want to incubate.
    * Bring the milk to 180 degrees in a pot on the stove on lower heat. The lower heat will help reduce the amount of milk that ends up coating the bottom and getting stirred up into clumps.
    * After the milk hits 180 degrees, use a sink full of ice water to bring the temperature of the milk almost down to 110 degrees.
    * take the warm crock pot part from the slow cooker and pour the milk from the pot into it through a wire mesh. The mesh will catch any clumps made from cooking the milk.
    * Take some of your starter yogurt and stir it into a measuring cup with some of your 110 milk until it dissolves. Then, stir that cup of milk into the slow cooker full of milk.
    * Turn off the oven heat, wrap the slow cooker in a towel, and put it into your warm oven overnight or for around eight hours. In the morning when you take it out, it should be cultured yogurt!

    Bonus instructions: if you want greek yogurt’s thickness, use something to tie your cheesecloth/muslin over a large bowl. Pour the yogurt into there and let it drain for several hours or until you like the thickness. I’ve been able to wash the dirty cheesecloth in a washing machine on delicate and it hasn’t been degrading very fast and that’s easier than washing it by hand. I’ve been able to get at least 64 ounces of thick Greek style yogurt out of a gallon of milk. You’ll also end up with whey, which theoretically people use for cooking in various ways, but I haven’t found something I like doing with it quite yet.

    There are fancy yogurt makers out there but I like the above method because besides making a lot of cheap yogurt, it’s only using materials and appliances that already have a use in a budget-minded kitchen, instead of adding yet another single use item to clutter up the place.

    Costwise: I can make yogurt using a gallon of milk from CostCo that cost around $3, so assuming I get 64 ounces (I might get even more to be honest), that’s around 25 cents for 5.3 ounces (the normal serving size of single yogurt cups), which leaves plenty of budgetary room to add in some jam or something for flavor and still have a very cheap and filling source of protein. (If you need to use a plain yogurt cup for starter, then it would be closer to 33 to 37 cents a serving for the first round, and your costs go down afterwards .) And 64 ounces can pretty much be 2 weeks worth of yogurt.

    You’re paying around $2.50 for half a gallon of milk, so I’ll estimate $4 for a full gallon and add $1 for your starter. That gives you a cost of about $2.50 a week for yogurt every day for breakfast, which feels very doable on your goal budget!

  10. I feel you on the food waste. Sometimes it’s so hard to eat everything before it goes bad when you’re just a single person. They need to sell fresh herbs in tiny packets so I don’t have to buy way too much for just me!

    I didn’t realize you lived in New Orleans. Do you know Joy the Baker? :P

    1. I haven’t met her but I do know that she’s here in the same city. :) I’m sure we’ll run into each other at some point!