Friday with Food: Affording Good Food

Good evening! Welcome to Friday with Food!

I really hate grocery shopping! I hate it even more when I have to go on a crowded Friday night. Normally Ed goes with me, and we do our shopping either Thursday or Friday morning. Well this week, Ed was tied up during the day cutting wood, (because we are expecting some signficant weather) so we ended up going tonight! I would have gone by myself, but we had to get dog food, which we buy 50 lbs at a time. Nah, I'm not lifting that.

Since we were getting dog food and a few other non-human food things, we needed to go to Wal-mart. I could tell that Ed was just dead tired, and really didn't feel like going to two or three different stores like we normally do, so I offered to just get what we could get at Wal-mart and go home. I can go back by myself tomorrow if I needed to. So that is what we did. Yeah, Wal-mart on a Friday night. Did I mention that this is also a payday for Military and probably other federal employees? By the time we got out of there, we both felt like we had been run over by shopping carts!

When my brain clears tomorrow, I'll figure out if Isaved any money, which brings me to the actuall subject of this post. How do normal people on an average budget, afford to feed their families healthy, real, food? The short answer is just like you do everything else: Do the best you can with what you have.

We would love to eat grass fed beef, and free range chickens/eggs, but we want to eat more than once a week, so we don't do that. We do however, read labels, and opt not to buy processed food. We don't buy white flour and or refined sugar. We've leared to do without or make healthier alternatives. Sometimes, in our budget, that means we have to do without sweets or snacks.I promise, it won't kill you. I use the money that I"m not spending on hot dogs and lunchables to buy organic milk and butter. It's a trade off. The weeks that we don't have to spend as much on meat, we load up on organic veggies. When we do have a little extra in the budget, we experiment with something new. Sometimes we like it, and sometimes we don't.

If you haven't figured it out from reading this blog, I cook almost everything from scratch. If I could, I would do it all that way, and some day I hope to be able to. Yes, that takes more time, and thats hard when you are trying to hold down a full time job and/or taking care of small children, but like the old cliche says: "Where there's a will, there's a way".  Maybe you can't afford to buy all the ingredients for something you want to try. Can you buy some of them this time and some next? I do that when I want to bake something new and don't have the money to buy different types of flours, and other things too. So, I might buy 100 percent whole wheat flour this pay check, and buy walnuts the next one. Both things will keep in the freezer until you need them.

You don't have to change everything over night. Just do a little at a time. For me, little changes seem to stick better than a major overhaul. It took me about two years to decide that I was done with refined sugar. The internet is full of information that can help you get started eating healthier without breaking the bank. Many times, the healthier foods are more filling, so you won't eat as much in one sitting. This has the potential for producing leftovers, and therefore stretching your grocery budget dollar.

The idea is to keep working at it.

Have a great weekend!

See ya Monday!

Connie