Frugal Friday- Budget Breakdown

Just for kicks, I sat down one Money Monday (my invention- a time to read up on financial matters and update the books) and broke our food spending down into sub-categories to see WHAT we were spending all of our grocery money on. Our goal right now is $40 a week- this is relatively easy to hit, especially because our freezer is full of venison. Still, what an eye-opener it was to line things up on order from greatest to least.

Dairy- $16.47 (milk, cream, cheese, cottage cheese, cream cheese, sour cream)
Meat- $11.35 (chicken & fish)
Vegetables- $9.52 (frozen stir fry, carrots, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, cucumber and green pepper)
Eggs- $5.47 (2 dozen a week- I love my eggs)
Household- $4.19 (oven cleaner for Gertrude the Gas Stove & paper towels)
Fruit- $3.39 (Pineapple, lemon, lime)
Dessert- $3.38 (Cosmic Brownies that Hubs suckered me into buying, & ice cream)
Grains- $2.00 (rice)
Other- $.98 (spaghetti sauce)

Whoa! That was a whopping total of $56.75- almost 42% over budget. I decided I needed to get serious about being frugal.

1. Cuts: First I decided to not buy chicken for a couple of weeks, at least until the venison stockpile was down a bit. I also promised myself to not buy Cosmic Brownies again. This was a side effect of running out of eggs- we had to go back to the store to get some, and while we were there Hubs decided he wanted some of Little Debbie's fine cooking, and convinced me that I did too. So basically I promised myself not to run out of eggs again.

2. Replacements: Then I made a big batch of mashed beans. This cost me $1.03.

My biggest problem with this eye-opening breakdown was the dairy products. Hubs and I both really like dairy, so we buy a lot of it on a weekly basis. My new experiment is to see if I can save $$ by making my own dairy products. I'm wondering if 2 gallons of milk (about $5 from Aldi) will make us enough yogurt, sour cream, cottage cheese, cream cheese and possibly hard cheese (mozzarella) for a week. We'd still have to buy butter, but I'm implementing butter-stretching hacks already to cut down on butter usage.

The dairy is going to be a little tricky because Hubs is used to store-bought dairy and its artificially-induced creaminess. He doesn't really care about how healthy something is- if it doesn't taste "good", he doesn't like it. I'm going to try out some recipes and if they get his stamp of approval, I'll put it on the blog. Starting next Friday.

Folks, that means it's gonna be gooooood.

FF- The Cost of Appliances

Today's post was a toss-up between this and a truffle tutorial. I figure that the truly frugal thing to do with truffles is a) go on a diet, or b) have someone buy them for you. But don't worry, the tutorial is still in my Drafts folder waiting for a non-frugal Friday.

One of the questions I wanted to answer in this series was "what is the cheapest way to cook?"

This is a little infographic I put together.

 It's important to take into account how much energy we're using when cooking frugally.

If you're going to turn on the oven for an hour, why not bake a few things instead of one?

Also, financially it probably doesn't make sense to have a ton of little specialized appliances lying around. 1) You have to purchase, clean, and store the appliance. 2) According to my research, it's not any cheaper to use a specialized appliance than it is to use, say, and oven or stove. I, for one, tend to collect "cool" little appliances, so this is a lesson to myself.

Isn't it cool that a slow cooker only costs $0.03 per hour to use? And that's on the "high" setting! There are a ton of oven-converted-crockpot recipes out there to try. Instead of using $0.50 to bake some potatoes, you could use a crock pot and do it for $0.12. Or use a microwave and spend $0.01 (if you like them kinda crusty/hard).

What is your favorite cooking appliance?