It’s so fun for me to read how other moms manage their households and to hear what they do to make ends meet. Today, Connie shares some of her tricks to “eat from the pantry” all year long.
Being a stay at home mom with seven children means I have to be frugal in every area of spending. The most “daily” way of being frugal is menu planning. The first way that I accomplish frugal menu planning is to have a freezer. If you have one, you will be able to stock up on bargains, and when I say stock up, I mean STOCK UP.
My husband likes to do the grocery shopping and if he runs across a special, like the time he found packages of hot dogs on sale 3 for $1, he will buy as many as are available. (I was giddy for days over the fact that each hot dog was 4 cents!)
At any given time, our stocking up means we may have 20 packages of hot dogs in our freezer, along with 15 pounds of ground beef, 10 whole chickens, 12 loaves of bread, and anything else we have picked up for a fabulous price, like pizza sauce for 2 cents a can.
This allows me to plan a weekly menu by shopping in my own kitchen. I use what is available, that we have picked up at rock bottom prices, and plan around that.
One night last week for dinner, I took some breakfast sausages ($1 for 10 links) out of the freezer, canned biscuits we had found on sale and some free eggs my sister had given me, and we had a nice “country breakfast” dinner that fed our entire family of nine for around $3 TOTAL! That works out to roughly 33 cents per person!
There are times, like for my husband’s birthday or when we are expecting company, that I will plan a run to the store so I can serve a special meal, like chicken parmesan and fettucini alfredo. But you can bet it won’t be 33 cents per person!
Stocking up on bargains and shopping in your own kitchen is far and away the most frugal way to go about feeding a family.
– Connie who blogs daily at Smockity Frocks, is a homeschooling mom of seven rowdy children, wife of one hunky golf pro, maker of aprons, wiper of noses, and writer of stories.
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Brilliant! I don’t have a family of nine to feed (only 2 of us!), but I enjoy stocking up. One thing we have is a meat order that provides us with our meat for 6 months and then in 6 months we get the next load. We pay monthly for it and it reduces me impulse buying meat, etc. And they planned the portions/types of meats around what we eat/want. It’s helped a lot!!
Oh if you could see my freezer….and pantry… and closet! I love that you hubby does the shopping!!
I love having food in my freezers – all 3 of them! Like you, I can feed our family of ten for $3 or under per dinner. It is encouraging to read of others who are able to eat well for so little!
Wow! Sounds like you were able to take advantage of some great deals and then enjoy them on your own schedule! Very cool! And I’m impressed that you can fit all that in there, as well.
This was sooo fun to read!! I have 9 siblings myself, but we grew up on a farm where we raised our own meat and vegetables and drank the milk from the dairy cows. It’s so neat to see how large families swing it with grocery shopping at the store
AND it’s great to see that it doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg!! (I don’t mean to imply that we didn’t go grocery shopping at all, we did 
)
I do the same thing! Since I have a stockpile of meat, flour, sugar, etc. all I typically have to purchase for groceries each week is dairy and produce and then I spend the remainder of my weekly budget stocking up! It’s especially fun when I find meat that’s marked down….I build up the freezer stockpile for very little!!
We have 5 children, and I shop in the same way. My freezer is full of turkeys (I bought 9 last November), chicken breasts, boneless pork roasts, some chuck roasts and a couple of hams.
When potatoes were on sale before Thanksgiving, I bought 360 pounds.
We have lots of meals for $3 for the family!
@The Prudent Homemaker,
I’d like to know what you did with so many potatoes. I’ve been blanching and freezing vegetables in large quantities when I get them at rock bottom prices. I’m sure you had a better way to preserve 260 pounds of potatoes!
@cristina thornburg photography,
Oops, make that 360 pounds! Wow!
@cristina thornburg photography,
We’re eating them! You can can them if you have a pressure canner, and I might can some this month.
We can easily eat 5 pounds for breakfast, as homemade hash browns (run through the kitchen aid grinder) or as diced potatoes. We’ll have a baked potato “bar” one night a week (though our normal toppings are butter and salt, but I sometimes add shelf-stable bacon bits, sour cream, and chives from our garden.
I’m working on a page on my site showing all the ways we’re eating them, but we’ve been eating them faster than I can get photos for all of them!
The page is still under construction, but you can see it here:
http://theprudenthomemaker.com/Potatoes.aspx
The ways we are eating them are listed but the photos are not all in yet.
I’m learning to stock up….I went tonight with a handful of coupons and sale papers and had a reciept of 249.82 but only paid 150.00. I still can’t believe I did it….or if I can do it again. Now I need to learn how to organize my stuff to make better use of space..
Having a well stocked pantry and freezer feels really good too:) Not only will you have gotten great deals, you also don’t have to worry about the weekly shopping trip if something comes up and your not able to go, you know you’ll still have dinner:)
Thanks for the encouragement to be more thrifty with our pantry. As I was reading I thought of a question (which doesn’t apply to me now but has in the past). Do you have any suggestions for moving (long distance) and keeping perishable food from spoiling without just getting rid of it/giving it away beforehand?
@Lindsey,
I have only moved 5-6 hrs. away, and we loaded up our perishables in an ice chest to take with us.
I have been the recipient of lots of good food from friends who have moved across the country or even over seas, though. They couldn’t take it with them, and blessed us with it! You might be able to find a family who needs and would appreciate your perishables.
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