In January we attempted to do meal planning for the entire month and complete a pantry cleanout and eat through items in our freezer. Whew. It was a lot to keep track of and I am pretty proud of our progress. I was planning on doing a super low spend month for January too but then Omicron surged right as school was starting and we ended up doing a large grocery run at the beginning of the month to avoid the store as long as possible. It ended up working out for us and we were able to avoid the store for the most part for a couple of weeks and did only minimal shopping the rest of the month.

January and February tend to be the months in the year when we naturally run out of things in our pantry such as rice, beans, eggs and many other staples. We have historically had low spending months at the first part of the year in an attempt to catch up with holiday/birthday spending and since we have several large yearly bills that need to be paid the first couple of months of the year. This means we run out of staples and need to rebuy them around the beginning of February. This really hit us hard in 2020 when we were out of many staples and unable to find them at stores so this year I decided to stock up on some of the basics we were low on the first weekend of January. We did eat through all of the fresh vegetables, eggs and many items with our pantry clean out and that was amazing.

We were able to eat down our small deep freezer enough to defrost and clean it really well before moving it out of the garage and into our downstairs storage room. Some of the items in it were a huge surprise to me including Otter Pops and a couple of gallons of blueberries we picked in 2017 which were still looking beautiful. We clearly had not been paying attention to what was in there or rotating it at all. I ended up throwing out half the Otter Pops because they were leaking once I thawed them out and we are definitely eating through the blueberries. I have made three cobblers out of blueberries and other fruit so far and my daughter has been eating oatmeal with blueberries a couple of mornings a week which is one of her favorites. This time around we are making a list of what is in there and keeping track better. So far we have a turkey, a pork loin, chicken bones for stock and most of the bread I bought on my trip to the Franz Outlet. The freezer isn’t even half full yet so we definitely have room to spare.

Our spending from January 10th through February 28th or so is the largest chunk of our budget for the entire year. We have to be very careful about our spending from March to June of the year in order to have enough saved by the end of December to cover everything which can be tricky.

During this period we cover:

1. Car insurance for the first half of the year.
2. Medical deductibles need to be met again and we always get some sort of illness in February.
3. Tuition deposit for our kids’ school which has crept up the past couple of years.
4. All of summer camp for two kids for the entire summer. This is super expensive.
5. Two family members have birthdays and we throw at least one party.
6. After school sports and activities registration for the first quarter of the year.
7. Pre-Covid we also had Valentine’s day dinner out and booked a trip or two in advance but that is not happening now.

Needless to say, it is a large chunk all at once, especially coming off of a high spend month like December. We have had this pattern for a few years though and I am getting better at predicting what we need. Last year we only had camp for eight weeks in the summer and it was way less expensive. This year I am keeping the kids home for 2-3 weeks as well. Camp can be a lot of stimulation and the kids did well being home and getting some down time prior to school starting in the fall. I am keeping them home the first week of the summer, a week in July and the last week before school starts. This will save us about $2500 in camp costs this summer which seems high but camp prices have increased this year. $400 per kid per week times two kids for three weeks is $2400 plus tax and that doesn’t include after care at an extra$100-150 a week per kid. Child care is expensive to say the least.

For our January spending I focused on our groceries. We did get meals from the school a couple of the weeks so the kids had some variety in their meals and I felt like we did a decent job of not going to the store but we did end up spending just over $1000.00 on food for January which is pretty high. We used to average around $600 a month for four of us but last year this crept up to $1000 due to price increases. We have a lot of dietary restrictions and a picky eater so some things we can’t substitute for cheaper items. I also found that we were buying way to many snacks and barely cooking. We definitely fell into the working parent trap of buying convenience food to save on time. My goal this year is to work on this and reduce our spending with meal planning.

Our spending was mostly from the shopping trip I took the first weekend of January where we spent nearly $500 on basics and stock up items. This type of trip we only do a couple of times a year so this was pretty unusual for us. We also found some excellent deals at my favorite grocery outlet store on meat, gluten-free crackers, cereal, and tea which we of course bought extras of since they run out quickly. I also bought some gluten-free flour in bulk and stocked up on some items we were almost out of from Amazon like the gluten-free ramen I love. I only buy ramen a few times a year and it goes out of stock very frequently so if they have it in stock you kind of have to jump on it. I don’t anticipate buying more flour or ramen for several months, maybe even a year for the flour. We are baking more though so maybe we will need more flour near the end of 2022.

Being gluten-free and nut free is pretty expensive and finding shelf stable food can be difficult. We like to keep a couple of weeks of easy to make meals on hand for emergencies and the ramen is an easy thing to cook with or without dressing it up. Everyone should have a month’s worth of food on hand for emergencies, especially in Washington where earthquakes can happen. We did not need to run to the store during the snow in December and it was so nice to be able to not stress about running out of food. The important part of keeping enough for an emergency is to make sure it is items you will actually eat. We keep things we eat regularly and rotate through them as we go. If we aren’t eating an item I try to donate it before it expires at a local free pantry or through our Buy Nothing group.

Overall I am pretty disappointed in our January grocery spending. We bought too much at the beginning of the month and took too many smaller trips towards the end of the month and this added up pretty quickly. I was hoping to spend under $800 for the month with our stocking up and we were way over. For February we are so far at just under $500 which is ok for half way through the month. I did a larger trip at the start of the month but only spent about $250 on groceries at that trip. I should probably mention that that is just for food. I keep track of cleaning supplies, paper products and coffee separately and honestly we don’t spend that much on other items. My goal for February is to stay under $500 but I am really hoping to stay under $600.

My spending goal for March will be low but I will talk about that in our next post. For now, how are you keeping your grocery spending down? Do you have enough food for a couple of weeks in an emergency? A month?

Meal Planning: January 2022 Week 4

Uber Frugal Month January 2018 Wrap Up!

Meal planning this week was mostly about eating leftovers and using fresh produce that needed to be eaten. We did our last major grocery run on 1/02/22 so after a couple of weeks some of our produce was looking like it would go bad. I am also remembering why I am not so good at meal planning. We are very last minute with our meals most days and never know how much of something will get eaten the first night. Our kids tend to eat a lot some weeks and then not very much the next and it is hit or miss whether or not our particular eater will try something we make. All of this makes it hard to plan out meals but we are working on it and hopefully with practice we will get better at it.

We cooked way too much food the first couple of weeks of January so there were tons of leftovers to use up this week including this broccoli cheese casserole from last weekend. Although this casserole was very tasty, my daughter preferred other leftovers and didn’t eat much of it. It was also super not good for you with tons of cheese and butter so we probably won’t be making it again anytime soon. We are trying to eat healthier and unfortunately gluten-free noodles don’t freeze very well so we had to eat it all this week. This did however use up some of the ham and broccoli that which was great.

Can you see a theme here? I ate a lot of eggs and pears for breakfast last week. The pears were part of the produce that needed to be eaten before it went bad and I am trying to keep up with my protein in the morning. Eggs are one of the quickest ways to get protein in first thing in the morning. Over easy eggs are my favorite but sometimes I like to eat scrambled eggs with a little bit of mozzarella mixed in. One of the things I have been trying to do is eat something fermented or pickled at a meal or two a day. This week it has been pickles and Spanish queen olives. Usually I would have had kimchi as well but we are out and it takes a while to make more. The baby bell cheeses also need to be eaten up since the kids lost interest in those after eating about 2/3 of them. Why am I not surprised?

So I must confess on Friday I broke down and went to the Franz Bread Outlet near me and went a little bit overboard on bread. I went on the way home from picking up lunch kits from our local school. In case anyone didn’t know, The FDA has approved free lunches and breakfasts for all kids age 1-18 in the U.S so if you are experiencing food insecurity and do not know about this program I would encourage you to look up the different school districts in your area and see how they are providing them. We go to a neighboring district because the pickup times work better for us. Some schools will only provide a days worth of meals and others will provide meals for 5-7 days at a time. We only get them occasionally when the kids are home since the kits include lunches that kids can make themselves which is super helpful for those weeks when the kids are home and the adults are working. The variety they provide has also helped our particular eater find new thing they like so I love that as well. Please see the below links for more information:

Free Lunches for Everyone

USDA Free Lunches

I stopped at Franz because I wasn’t feeling so hot and I realized I didn’t have any gluten-free bread that I could toast. Have you ever been to a bread factory just before lunch when they have super fresh bread 4/$5.00 with a free loaf for every $10 you spend? I did and I went a little bit overboard. I was just going to get gluten-free bread for me and bagels for the kids but they had so much fresh bread I went a little crazy. Keep in mind that I can’t eat any of it since I am gluten-free. All of it was $1.25 each. Such a steal! I got a variety of bread, rolls, English muffins, bagels and one single pack of donuts for the kids. 8 items of gluten filled joy for $10 and then a loaf of gluten-free bread and a pack of gluten-free bagels for me for another $11.00 plus the lady gave us three free items off of the free rack and a pack of animal cookies for my daughter. It was a crazy amount of bread for only $22! I put most of it into the freezer, gave some to my oldest daughter and we opened up the bagels to make pizza bagels for lunch. We won’t need to buy bread for a very long time!

I was feeling very run down last week with lots of work stress and just general stress from everything going on in the world right now. One of my go-to comfort meals is some gluten-free ramen with leftover vegetables, fresh tomatoes and seaweed. This week I ate some steamed broccoli, tomatoes, grated carrot, seaweed and I added an egg while the noodles were cooking. Usually I add some kimchi to this as well but we need to make more. I love the saltiness of the ramen in the middle of the day. I have a hard time getting enough salt but lately I have been working on it and I have found that a salty lunch really works well for this. This is a pretty big bowl of soup to and it keeps me full until dinner time which helps with the afternoon snack cravings.

On Saturday we were invited over to my mother-in-laws for lunch and she made us so much yummy food! My favorite was this tofu soup which was super simple but flavorful. She sent some home with us so we also had it for dinner as well. We are super spoiled because she sends us food all the time (even during the pandemic she would randomly drop it off) and all of it is delicious. My kids love her homemade Pho best of all. They eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner every time she cooks it! We had some hesitations about going over there since Omicron is spreading fast but she lives alone and everyone is vaccinated so we decided to go. Our kids are tested for Covid at least once a week and they have been negative the whole time. My husband and I have been mostly isolating with the occasional quick trip to the store so our risk was low. It was kind of strange because the kids had a blast just getting out of the house and playing with different toys for once. They are old enough now that we were able to let them play in the front yard while the grownups talked in the kitchen too which is so amazing.

The pantry cleanout item I am the most proud of this week was the gluten-free crumb cake I made on Friday. I have pulled this box out of the pantry many times over the past four months or so and then put it back so it wasn’t cluttering the counter. I have no idea why I never made it but now that I have I can say it was pretty good! Next time I will swirl the crumb topping in more but otherwise we loved eating it. I am pretty proud that I finally used up an item I had been trying to use up for months. Phew.

Another item we needed to eat up was some fruit I bought for fruit leather and the grapes my daughter insisted she would eat. Newsflash, she did not eat them all as we had hoped. On Saturday I cooked up the pears, blackberries and a couple of apples on the stove until they were tender. I blended them up and put them in the dehydrator with some washed grapes and now we have fruit leather! My son loves fruit leather and this is an easy way to make it without all of the plastic packaging. I am going to get a recipe up on the blog for fruit leather soon! The grapes are still drying as I write this since they take a lot longer to dry but hopefully the kids will eat them. I know better than to buy grapes at Costco since we never eat them but I was hopeful as always…

I should probably give an update on the items I used up this week from my goal last week. For one, the dish soap ended up not cleaning anything to save it’s life so we ended up throwing it out. I am sure it was too old to work any more. We ate up the craisins, ate and made fruit leather out of the pears, made the crumb cake, ate some peanuts, and some of the One bars so overall I would say we did a great job. My focus was on fresh produce and leftovers for the second week of January so overall we did pretty well.

Goal items used up this week:

1. Fresh produce: pears, blackberries, broccoli (one meal left), rainbow carrots (we ate tons of these)
2. Snack items: lentil crackers, veggie straws, peanuts – regular, One bars, fruit cups
3. Meal type items: None
4. Dried Fruit: dried cranberries
5. Junk: Crumb cake mix, Halloween candy my son eats a piece or two for dessert every night
6. Fridge/freezer items: fancy chocolate – still lots left, spinach bites, ham, cheesy broccoli bake, tomato sauce

I filled in our meal plan for the rest of the week last night. I have not started on this week’s since I was cleaning this morning instead of cooking. I need to look through the pantry and fridge and see where we are at for the week which I probably won’t get to until tomorrow honestly. My husband is making some sausage tonight or maybe tomorrow so that will also affect what we eat for the first part of the week. I may do a mid-week post on how things are going but I have a feeling this will be another weird week. Things I know we need to eat up are listed below.

Items to use up January week 3:

1. Fresh produce: cabbage, broccoli (one meal left), rainbow carrots, potatoes, tomatoes
2. Snack items: peanuts – regular, One bars, fruit cups
3. Meal type items: oatmeal (not gf), pancake mix
4. Dried Fruit: strawberries, raspberries, apple chips
5. Junk: Halloween candy – still
6. Fridge/freezer items: fancy chocolate, sausage, steak, Pho, mashed potatoes, Baked Alaska, cookie dough

Looking at this list I realized we have cookie dough in the freezer along with most of a Baked Alaska that I don’t remember when we started. We should probably eat that this week. The cookie dough will probably be fine for next week but the Baked Alaska really needs to be eaten. I know I have soup in the freezer that we should work through but one of the issues I am having is that other people are not as on board with eating up older items as I am and I end up eating it for every meal. Does anyone else have that issue? As soon as I make room something else fills it’s spot. I am hoping that by focusing on planning out our meals this month we will get better at using things up though!

How is your meal planning going this month?

Recipe links from the blog:

Gluten and Dairy Free Chocolate Chip Cookies

Dried Banana Chips

Easy Dairy-Free Grandma’s Fruit Salad

The last few weeks have been rough on everyone’s gardens in the Seattle area. There has been no rain and we had a massive heat wave a bit ago with temperatures well over 100 degrees which is super unusual for this area. I watered like crazy during the heat wave, some plants got water three times a day and others twice. Still, several of my plants were damaged and my vegetable output this year will be much smaller than previous years. For instance, I planted about a dozen cabbages and only got small one bug eaten one head of my spring crop. I will be planting more for fall but it was still pretty heartbreaking to see all of my plants either decimated by slugs/caterpillars or burnt from the sun.

Some of the plants that did not make it through the last few weeks were my squash plants. As you can see they have been decimated by slugs despite my best efforts to deter them. I put new soil here, fertilized and mulched but my plants are doing poorly in general. Last year this area had potatoes and they did ok. You can see that there are a couple of potato plants coming up from some of the potatoes left in the soil. I have planted both zucchini and spaghetti squash here in years past and they flourished but I realized this year when I was watching the light patterns that this area no longer receives the amount of light it did when we moved in five years ago. The trees surrounding it have grown significantly since then and I have lost one of the few full sun areas I previously had in my garden. I am not sure what I am going to do for next year in this area. For now, I planted some peas and installed some branches for trellising but at the moment not much seems to be growing. I will probably plant a cover crop here for fall and mulch extensively. It may be time to cut down the tree that provides shade to part of my garden but I am reluctant to take such an extreme measure. I may just cut it back significantly this year and plant more shade tolerant plants in this spot next year.

Speaking of potato plants, one of my strategies this year has been to plant potatoes all over in my regular garden beds and hope I get something out of it. We had a bunch from the harvest last year and some that started growing in our pantry and I basically just planted them wherever I had a bare patch. I have not been hilling them at all but I may add straw or mulch this weekend to some areas such as the one above to see if I get a higher yield. Last year I spent tons of time, money and energy carefully hilling my potatoes and it really didn’t increase my yield very much. These are in an area I have trouble growing things in front of our large bush. There isn’t a lot of sun and the large bush traps most of the water but these are doing well. I have been watering them on hot days with the hose and it has been enough. They are also crowding out the creeping Jenny which we can’t get rid of. I am not a fan of it and it is spreading all over my yard. It traps moisture and is a slug breeding ground and I am pulling as much of it out as I can.

A few of our potato plants did not do well in the heat wave so I dug them up and recovered as many spuds as I could. I ended up digging up about four plants and got double the yield shown above. I am guessing it was around two or three pounds worth. We steamed some of them with our single cabbage and they were delicious! I will probably either roast or steam the others for dinner in the next few days. My middle daughter and I love them steamed with butter and salt. She was very excited for the potatoes! I also planted a few more I found sprouted in our garage, probably victims of the heat wave as well and pulled the ones I could find near the zucchini patch. I have a few mid-growth cycle right now so we will have some more potatoes to harvest in about a month or so and then another month out from that. We really don’t eat a ton of potatoes but I do like to have them fresh when I can. I saved some of the sprouted ones which I will plant in two week intervals so we have a steady supply of potatoes for the next few months. I am not good at storing them (clearly since they all sprout) so having a steady stream of plants to dig up is better for our family.

One plant I had to baby through the heat wave was our pumpkins. They loved the heat but needed watering two to three times a day otherwise they wilted like crazy. Since it isn’t good to get the leaves wet during the heat of the day, during lunch I very carefully watered them with the hose on a super low setting under the leaves. I roasted in the noon sun but it saved my pumpkin plants. I did not see any bees for about a week and a half during and after the heat wave and the pumpkin started flowering in earnest once everything cooled a bit. I had to hand pollinate for about a week and we now have two pumpkins growing. Usually you don’t want more than one per vine if you want large ones but we have had such bad luck this year with pests I am probably going to pollinate one more per vine just to guarantee we get something in the fall. To hand pollinate I took a paint brush and transferred pollen from the male flowers to the female ones. The flowers on my variety of pumpkins only lasted one day so I had to go out there first thing in the morning to pollinate before anyone else had taken all of the pollen. It seemed like there was very little pollen this year. Usually I have enough to pollinate several flowers but we haven’t grown this variety before so I don’t know if it is the variety or the heat.

One of the giant varieties of vegetables we are trying this year is these Mammoth Red Mangel Beets. These are traditionally used for animal feed since they get so large but I thought it would be fun to grow them. I am not a huge fan of beets but have discovered that I love eating the greens. I will definitely grow beets again next year if only for the greens. This particular variety forms the beet super slowly and has a 100 day growing period. I was really happy to see the beginnings of a beet forming on one of my plants. I am hoping to harvest one or two by the end of summer just to see how they taste. The rest I will leave until late September or so to see how large they get. Any guesses?

Another plant that did well in the heat was our cucumbers. I planted these in a super shady spot that get some afternoon sun in the summer when the days are longer. I purposefully put the garden bed here in the hopes of extending some of my shade loving crops into the summer and so far it is working. My cucumbers are thriving here and I have a few small fruits on the vines. We eat a lot of cucumbers so I am hoping in a month or so there will be a bunch more and both plants will be well on their way up the trellis. The greens I planted in this bed did bolt during the heat wave but I am going to wait until the end of July and try again. I also have giant Kohlrabi in this bed and it is my first time growing that as well. I am not really sure how they are doing. A couple were eaten by slugs and one had an aphid infestation but they haven’t really grown much the past few weeks. I am going to have to do some Googling and see if there is anything else I need to do for them besides wait. I am not seeing any bulbs forming under the soil but I may need to add more dirt around the bases again.  I mounded dirt up around both my beets and kohlrabi when I planted them but some of it has washed away during watering.

Our apple tree did really well in the heat. I thought for sure we would lose some leaves or they would be burnt but I just watered it when the sun wasn’t on it and not even that much and it did fine. This area is where the water settles from the rest of the yard and I typically don’t need to water it as much. The apple tree got a lot of runoff from the sprinkler and the pool water and I really only watered it once or twice during the heat wave. We did get way fewer apples this year but that is actually a good thing because last year we had way too many and it attracted pests. I do need to go through and thin a bunch but I am still recovering from my surgery last month and limited in how much gardening I can do. Maybe I will be able to get to it next week. The few apples that we do have are larger and much healthier looking than last year. We don’t put nets over our tree but I might try it next year after the flowers have been pollinated to prevent insects from getting in there.

The weeds have gotten out of control in my side yards, strawberry patch and backyard. My goal the next few weeks is to spend maybe 30 minutes a day working on clearing them out. I can’t do much more than that at the moment but hopefully it will help with my recovery. I worked on the the vegetable bed last week and this week but there is so much to do in my yard I probably won’t catch up until fall. I haven’t done much trimming back of the many bushes that grow faster than the speed of light and the ones I did trim have grown about three feet since I trimmed them last March and need trimming again. I did trim the Smoke Bush pictured above after I took this picture. It had grown about five feet out into the “gravel area” that is now choked with weeds. I do want to take this bush out eventually. It grows super fast and weedy and if I remember correctly they are considered a weedy species here. I also have a rather large Butterfly bush I need to remove that is on the Noxious Weed list. I was waiting for it to bloom since the bees are struggling so much this year and they love that bush. I want to replace these non-native species with native ones over time.

One bush I forgot to water but should have is our Red Huckleberry bush. I always water it during the hot parts of summer but this year I forgot for some reason. My son picked a bunch of berries off of it earlier this week and I guess they were good but they look super pale to me and I think they still need a couple more weeks before they ripen. The squirrels have been eating the berries though and usually that is our litmus test to see if they are ripe. I will probably water this one and keep watering it over the next few weeks since we don’t seem to be getting any rain this summer. This bush is older and well established so I am not super worried about it but if I can avoid stressing it by watering it a bit I will.

My goals the next few weeks are to keep our plants hydrated, weed like there’s no tomorrow and start getting beds ready for fall planting.

How did your plants do in the Seattle Heatwave?