creative savv: Did my plan to eat down the freezer and not buy so much at the grocery store pay off?

I'm sitting here with the last 3 receipts from my WinCo shopping trips. I shop at WinCo every other week and do a fairly big stock-up to mostly last 2 weeks each time. I fill in where needed in the off weeks at our local Walmart, but don't spend much on those shopping trips.

So a little over a month ago, I spent $108.82 and bought 34 items at WinCo. Two weeks ago I spent $111.00 and again bought 31 items at WinCo. This past Friday I shopped again at WinCo and spent $83.19, buying 22 items.

Where I cut back

I harvested the beets this week, using the leaves in meals and freezing the leftovers.

Since I'm trying to reduce the excess in my freezers before we fill it again with summer produce, my main focus of cutbacks this week over prior weeks was fruits and vegetables. This last week, all I bought in produce were some bananas, a watermelon, and a bag of carrots. By buying less fresh produce, I'll be forced to use the frozen produce I already have and the garden produce now ready to harvest. My usual number of produce items (fresh and frozen) seems to be between 12 and 14 for each shopping trip. Only purchasing 3 items was a significant reduction for me.

Instead of buying a head of cabbage on my last WinCo run,
I harvested our first head of cabbage from this year's garden the other day.

I thought I would have saved more money than I did, though. My savings this week over previous ones was only about $30. In looking closer at my receipt, I can see that I bought several sort of expensive items, which bumped up my total cost. I bought 3 bags of organic flour that I use for bread and any baked goods that I eat (this flour contains only wheat, no enzymes, barley malt or malt extract which I can't tolerate, $6.63 each) and 2 whole chickens of the more expensive Just Bare brand ($8.98 each). Although I'm trying to use up ingredients that we have on hand, particularly in the fridge and freezer, I'm also starting to stock-up for the fall, this week buying extra flour and chicken.

using garden greens in salads instead of buying fresh or frozen green vegetables

So, taking the purchase of those stock-up items into account, I do think that curtailing my produce purchases paid off.

Using more garden produce the last week reminded me of how folks in England prepared meals during WW2. The government in England urged it citizens to grow a garden wherever they could find space and to plan meals around these homegrown vegetables. Heavy homegrown vegetable consumption would not only fill bellies without taxing the national supply of foods for sale, but the use of some vegetables could offset the need to use some purchased and highly rationed foods. For example, home grown carrots found their way into cakes, cookies, and oatmeal as a sweetener to spare precious (and imported) sugar.

The only fruit I bought this week was a watermelon and some bananas (for smoothies).
We've been using frozen blackberries and garden cherries, strawberries, and raspberries
to heavily supplement our purchased fruit.

While I haven't been baking with carrots to save sugar this last week, I have been filling more of our plates each meal with homegrown produce and less with purchased foods. This not only saves us some money, but we are eating healthier. An example, the sweet and spicy pumpkin seeds that I've been experimenting with -- I could snack on cookies which contain sugar, flour, butter, egg, maybe chocolate, and other ingredients, at a cost of about $3 for a small 35-count batch. Or I can make the pumpkin seeds using less sugar, less fat, some spices and the free pumpkin seeds (collected from our garden pumpkins) for a cost of about 20 to 30 cents a 16-snack batch (each snack about 1-ounce per various nutrition guides). The pumpkin seeds are still a sweet treat, but they also come with protein, fiber, zinc, iron, copper, and antioxidants. For dessert tonight, we had homegrown raspberries. The main plate of our dinner had a large green salad along with a beef and veggie stir fry plus rice. Lunch included fresh cherries and homegrown cabbage, this produce taking up about 3/4 of my plate.

And here's today's progress report on our large freezer.