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Archive for April, 2008

Well, we did it! We stayed within budget and then some this month! We had budgeted $800 for groceries and restaurant meals for the month for our family of four and came in at $775. We were helped along by a $50 gift card to a restaurant chain that we got from our rewards credit card. Other than that we did not go out to eat at all, except one trip to DQ for ice cream after the kiddos went to sleep (and who can give up that??!!).

The $775 we spent was way less than we usually spend. I know that we could still potentially save even more money, judging by what I see other people reporting on other financial blogs, but we do tend to frequent a more upscale grocery store which we know charges higher prices. Our reasons for going to that grocery store are threefold: 1) There are never any lines at the check-out counters so we save valuable time, 2) We often see people we know there and feel it is worth the social and networking opportunity, and 3) Great produce from local farms.

Our budget looks great when we look at it on Mint. The numbers on the right show our average spending on those categories for the past 3 months (since that’s how long I’ve been a member of Mint) and the numbers on the left are our totals for this month. There is a $55 grocery bill that isn’t reflected in this yet since it is still pending in our checking account (we just spent that $ last night). Here’s to hoping we can keep ourselves at this level of spending for the rest of the year!

About a year ago I started searching for a website or book that would give me tasty and quick recipes to make for a whole week along with a shopping list for the ingredients. I thought that it would be great to just photocopy or print a shopping list and not have to think about meal planning or list-making. What a tall order this seemingly simple want turned out to be! I will share my results with you here. Please let me know if there are any services or cookbooks that I have missed out on!

DinnerPlanner - This is a great website that you should definitely check out.  They even have a free week’s worth of menus (and the shopping list) to try out. The service costs $15 for 3 months worth of recipes delivered to your email. I paid for it and made most of the meals during my 3 months. Things we liked: not planning meals, not planning the shopping list, pretty good recipes most of the time plus a few standouts. Things we didn’t like: the recipes take 30 minutes to 1 hour to make.

SavingDinner- This website is more professionally done than DinnerPlanner’s and has a lot more menu-types to choose from (like heart-healthy, frugal, lunch, kid-friendly, etc.). The service generally costs $10 for 3 months of recipes and shopping lists. I only tested the sample menu, about a year ago, so I can’t vouch for the rest of the menus and recipes. The reason we chose the other service was that the recipes took over an hour to make and we didn’t necessarily even like them better. The sample menu has changed since then so perhaps you would get a different result.

The Weeknight Survival Cookbook: How to Make Healthy Meals in 10 Minutes - My sister gave us this book when we were so busy with our work and our little ones that we were barely able to get ourselves fed. I have to say that it is a really good book overall. First off, the meals seriously only take 10 minutes, which is absolutely wonderful for busy people like us! (The Sunday meals take longer though.) Second, it reuses food in order to minimize your cooking. Like this: it has you make 2x the potatoes that you need one night and the left-overs go into the potato-broccoli soup the next night. You get 3 months of recipes and shopping lists. We have gone through most of the weeks. What we liked: super fast and easy meals, no planning needed, nutritious and balanced, spent a lot less money on food because these are cheap meals. What we didn’t like: the food is decent but not great.

We had a couple of left over chicken-thighs from the other night’s blackened chicken so this is what I did with them for lunch today:

Chicken Roll-ups:

• Sliced off the meat from the bones
• Arranged the meat pieces in the middle of a tortilla
• Sliced some cheddar cheese and put on top of the meat
• Added a few dollops of steak sauce (I used Bulls Eye)
• Rolled up the tortillas with a fold at each end to keep the good stuff inside
• Microwaved for a minute

I cut one in half for the kids and they loved theirs. Mine was a whole one and if I weren’t trying to cut calories I would have had two! I served them with a side of baby carrots. Delicious and easy.

A fairly new service called RevolutionMoneyExchange is offering $25 to anyone who signs up before May 8, 2008.  It is aiming to be a competitor to ebay and does much the same sort of thing.  You can use it to send money for free to other people and collect money for free from other people.  So imagine using it to collect money from your office-mates for Administrative Assistant day or pooling money from siblings for a Mother’s Day present (coming up on May 11!).  It is free to join.  I did so yesterday and have the $25 in my account already.

There are a lot of other places that have written about this service that you might want to check out as well. 
Money Saving Mom
MyMoneyBlog
USA Today
One thing you would want to do if you join is to choose to Opt Out by sending in a signed opt-out form from their privacy statement once you join.  This prevents you from getting snail-mail junk mail.  You do have to give them your SSN but that is because they hold all the money in a bank and bank accounts have to have an SSN tied to them (they don’t do a credit check).  Happy free money!

Today’s front cover of The New York Times has a story about how Americans are spending less on a lot of consumer goods. It mostly focuses on food cost-cutting in the typical household. Now, I do think the media has a big role in scaring people into spending less even if they have enough money to buy the food they’ve always eaten, but it is an interesting article none-the-less. Especially the part about people continuing to spend money on consumer electronics like TVs even while they are buying 85 cent bottles of generic-brand A1 steak sauce instead of the name brand. (”But if I spend $2,000 on a flat-panel TV I will save money because I won’t be going out to the movie theater!”)

Last night’s dinner was delicious, easy, and cheap. In all, it cost somewhere between $10-$15 and made 4 helpings. We bar-b-qued the chicken on our super-cheap charcoal grill that we bought on sale last fall ($50 at Home Depot). Thankfully we finally had a nice day with which to use it!

• Blackened Chicken: 4 chicken thighs covered in a sauce made of tomato paste, red wine vinegar, and orange juice. Grilled for about 25 minutes, turning 4 times.
• Home Fries: Two baking potatoes cut into 1/2 inch strips, mixed with 1 tablespoon of olive oil, a tablespoon of fresh chives from the AeroGarden, and a teaspoon of salt. Baked for 20 minutes, turning once at 400 degrees. Browned a bit under broiler for the last 2 minutes (watch closely!).
• Vegetables: One bag of frozen mixed vegetables heated in microwave

Here’s a great idea that I ran across recently: save money by creating a pantry in your home. Many small and medium sized kitchens do not have a pantry but you can build one yourself with metal shelving (try Home Depot - much cheaper than what is essentially the same thing at Williams Sonoma). Even if it is in the basement, where you’ll have to make trips up and down the stairs to get to it, it is still worth it. Here are the reasons why:

• With all that storage space you can really buy in bulk; Buying in bulk = money saved
• Fewer trips to the grocery store because you will usually have enough ingredients to whip up a good dinner, lunch, or breakfast; fewer trips = less gas, fewer impulse buys
• No need to run to the store and stock up before a big storm, you are already stocked!
• Easier to keep track of needed items; when something runs out, write it down on a designated white board or chalk board on the pantry door or hanging from the shelves; fewer “emergency” trips to the store to get an item for a recipe that you forgot to get

Are there any other benefits of having a pantry that I haven’t thought of?

Does candy count in your food budget? I broke down this evening and bought a couple of huge bags of candy and one smaller bag. Total cost: $6.50.  The other day I was at the grocery store wondering why the bags of beans were so expensive at $2-$3 per bag.  Now here I go and buy $3 bags of candy!  Save money on beans, buy more candy I guess.  My husband says candy definitely counts as food and I guess I agree.  So our new food budget tally for the month is…$667.00.

Okay, so I have this thing called an AeroGarden Pro 100 with Gourmet Herb Seed Kit. I got it as a Christmas present and it has been producing a great quantity of herbs, including basil, for the last 10 weeks or so. Let’s just say we have been enjoying a lot of pesto pasta lately! It looks as if we will be doing so again tonight since I forgot to take the chicken out of the freezer last night that I thought we would make tonight. So pesto it is. Good thing we love pesto pasta. The crop of basil this week was exceptionally large:

A few weeks ago I had to give some to my neighbor because we just had too much and wouldn’t have eaten it all. The great thing about the herbs that come from the AeroGarden is that you don’t have to wash them off before using them. With the mint, for example, I simply snip off a leaf or two and put it right into a glass of water for a refreshing drink. To change things up a bit tonight, I’ll try putting some tomato into the pesto (that probably makes it not technically pesto anymore, right?) since I have half a can of tomatoes left over after last night’s bean dish.

Inspired by the recent Slate article on buying beans during a recession, I bought a few bags of them during our last trip to the store.  Although I was very confused as to why our bags were priced at $2-$3 per bag while the article quoted $0.69 bags, I bought them anyway.  The recipe I am using tonight - Red Beans and Rice - is from The New Basics Cookbookand takes about 3.5 hours in total cook-time, though the prep-time is minimal.  It is nice to have a home-office so that I can start these kinds of meals ahead of time.  I would guess that a crock-pot would do the trick if you were gone all day.