Budgeting and stocking my pantry

Right now, mid-autumn, finds some of the lowest prices of the year on many basic grocery items, including potatoes, fresh squash, canned vegetables, canned pineapple, cream cheese, butter, turkey, ham, fresh celery, canned pumpkin, nuts and other holiday baking items, and coffee. This is the time of year that I do the largest of my stocking up, to feed us well, through several months, and avoid some of the high produce prices of mid to late winter.

canned vegetables, potatoes and celery
When I find a stellar deal, I think in terms of months, not weeks, to gauge how much I want to buy. WinCo has had canned vegetables on sale for 33 cents per can for the last couple of weeks. I calculated how many cans we'd likely go through between now and early March, and bought 8 cases, and may pick up 1 or 2 more cases (12 cans per case). It sounds like a lot, but we will go through all of this, and probably faster than anticipate.

I also noticed that canned pumpkin and canned yams, in the larger 29-oz cans, were a good price at WinCo when I stopped in last week. I picked up a few cans with the remaining cash I had with me. I will be stopping in this coming Friday, to stock up further on those. And in looking at this week's ad for Fred Meyer, potatoes in 10-lb bags are advertised for 88 cents/bag (limit 2). Fresh potatoes will keep in my pantry and fridge, through January. I will be buying about 80 lbs. this year.

By purchasing so many of our vegetables in cans, this year, I have freed up space in my freezer for a particular, non-canned vegetable -- celery. I will be buying several (maybe 8-10, depending on price) bunches of celery, to chop and freeze, to use in soups and casseroles, throughout winter.

loss-leader meat purchases
Turkeys and hams are also a good buy between now and Christmas. I will buy 1 whole turkey for Thanksgiving, and a second for the freezer., to roast in late winter. I have 1 ham remaining from last year, still in the freezer. I will use that over the holidays, and buy 1 or 2 more for the freezer. (I can usually find ham at the same sale price just before Easter, as I can at Christmas, therefore no need to really stock up on ham.)

I've been watching the retail price for whole turkeys by reading the weekly USDA retail report on turkey supply and price. If you follow that link, there are prices for the different regions of the US. All but the PNW and Alaska have a retail price available for whole turkey this week. The low end of prices on whole turkeys is 37 to 69 cents per pound. There's also this, from the USDA "Livestock, Dairy and Poultry Outlook", October 18, 2016, "Price forecasts were reduced across broilers, turkeys, and eggs for 2016 and reduced for broilers and eggs for 2017." This is in an article talking about export production and price. But this information, combined with the weekly price report, does suggest that local retail prices on whole turkeys could be lower this year, over last year's pre-Thanksgiving deals.

baking supplies
I have already bought about 15 pounds of nuts, about a dozen packages of chocolate chips, a couple of bags of coconut, and enough powdered sugar to get through the year's baking needs.

ability to afford these stock-up months
How does one afford to do all of this stocking up? In part, I have set aside grocery money in the past few months, just for this purpose. In the late summer and early fall months, I deliberately spend less than my monthly budgeted amount of $190, in order to save extra for the months of November and December.

But also -- many of these items are a bargain, compared to comparable foods we might eat. Such as canned vegetables (33 cents/15 oz) compared to some of the fresh/frozen vegetables (often 79 cents/lb and up). During a big stock-up month, like right now, we shift our eating patterns to focus on these less expensive versions of foods.

A couple of my "rules" for sparing cash in the budget, this month:

• This is not the time of year to be buying out-of-season strawberries, or expensive cuts of meat.
• We eat from some of our stock-up items, as a way to curb spending right now.
• Menus rely heavily on the less expensive foods, like beans and whole grains, and eggs when bought as loss-leaders.
• Limit splurges, and convenience items, as much as possible. To make humble meals more interesting, this time of year, I begin opening jars of homemade pickles, chutneys and relishes.

Those 8 cases of canned vegetables are not just for mid-winter. Our meals are using those right now. Canned green beans, peas and corn are good just as is, but are also versatile in what you can do with, or add to them.

Canned peas are good hot or cold. As a hot vegetable, I rinse them, then add dried mint and butter. Or, I can make a simple hot soup, with canned peas, pureed, as the base, and cubed, cooked potatoes and carrots added, plus some ham or chicken stock with bits of meat. As a cold vegetable, canned peas are nice added to macaroni and potato salads, slaws, or gelatin aspic salads.

Canned corn is great added to Tex-Mex dishes, or, made into an egg-based entree, like Corn Pudding, or, baked in cornbread. As a cold dish, canned corn is good made into a relish, adding some green or red peppers (or canned pimentos), onions, vinegar, sugar, salt and pickling spice.

I have always been fond of canned green beans just as they are. But I also like to serve them hot, with either sauteed mushrooms, or, chopped, toasted almonds, or, topped with a cracker and butter crumb topping. As well, canned green beans are good cold, in multi-bean salads, dressed in a vinaigrette.

WinCo has had acorn squash for 78 cents each -- not per pound, but each, where I live. I pick out the 4 or 5 heaviest ones. At over 3 pounds each, our cost is about 25 cents per pound -- and that's an excellent price per pound for a vegetable. We're eating acorn squash 3 to 4 meals per week. Yes, it can be redundant. But I am trying to savor this time of year, with fresh squash in abundance.

We are eating bean-based meals about half of each week, and frozen, low-cost meats like the remaining turkey from last year, chicken hindquarters, and ground beef bought for under $2/lb, for the remainder of each week.

Right now, I am holding off on buying fresh oranges and avocados. In about 1 month, the price on both of those items will begin dropping, and will be more affordable.

Instead, our fresh fruit selection is limited to a few remaining pears and apples, plus bananas, purchased either at Trader Joe's for 19 cents each, or at WinCo or Cash & Carry, from 40 to 48 cents per pound. We also have foraged blackberries, our tree plums, and rhubarb sauce in the freezer, to round out some of the fruit selection in November.

By eating less expensive meals for this entire month, we free up enough cash in the grocery budget to afford to stock up for future months. As I was looking through my purchases last Friday, I noted that about 75% of what I bought that day were purely stock-up items, foods that will last us longer than 2 weeks.

Creating lovely papers for wrapping spa gifts, using tea-staining technique

For wrapping my hand-crafted spa gifts, I had thought to buy some pretty scrapbook papers. Being the cheapskate tightwad thrifty frugal careful-with-money person that I am, I chose to "make" lovely papers using print-outs from my computer and tea.

For the overwrap, itself, I chose to use a favorite poem by Keats, Ode to a Nightingale, as the motif for my paper. In an elegant script, this makes beautiful paper. (I typed the poem on my laptop, using Zapfino font, and played around with spacing and type size until I was satisfied for use as wrap paper.)

My printer is ancient, from around 1996 (and it was a hand-me-down at that). But it works well enough to print out black and white text and images.

To transform the appearance of the printed poem to something more decorative, I tea-stained the print-outs.

To tea-stain paper:

• soak the paper in a strong black tea, 1 sheet at a time, for about 20 minutes. (I do this in a jelly roll pan, with raised edges.) I used 2 Dollar Tree bags of tea per 12 ounces of water.
• Once the paper is completely soaked, gently lift the paper out of the tea, and allow to drip bake into the pan for a minute. Carefully transfer the paper to a large baking sheet. Bake at 200 F degrees, for about 6 minutes. Peel the paper up and turn over to finish the drying, another 2 minutes in the oven at 200 F degrees.
• remove paper from baking sheet, and cool for a few minutes.

• the paper will be slightly crinkly, I prefer to use an iron on a low setting to smooth this out part way. You can also place the dried, tea-stained sheets in a book for a few days to flatten (Take care with the iron, this is paper, after all, and flammable.)
• if you have a couple of large baking sheets, you can speed up the drying process, by baking 2 or 3 papers at a time

For the labels, I wanted some contrast between the wrap papers and label papers. I selected a design from thegraphicsfairy.com ( a resource for crafters with free images available to print out). I played around  with the size and shape of that image on my laptop, until I had the proper size and proportions for my project, making a larger and smaller size.

The tea-stain on the label papers is darker than the wrap papers. There are 4 ways to get a darker stain on paper. 1) stain and dry the paper, twice, or, 2) use a tea of greater strength, so that the tea is as dark as coffee, or, 3) leave the paper in the tea for a longer period of time, or 4) use hot tea (it's reported that hot tea will result in more orange tones). I used a stronger tea, 4 Dollar Tree bags to 10 oz of water, instead of 1 or 2, stirring the tea, and pressing the bags against the pot, as it steeped, to release as much color as possible, and I allowed my sheets to soak in the tea for about an hour. The darkest sheet was made with fresh, hot tea. The other two sheets were stained with cold tea.

After pressing my papers, I set out to use them. Here is how it all comes together.

I used my sewing machine to sew envelopes from the paper, for the bath tea sachets. (I can give more detailed instructions on making envelopes in this manner tomorrow or the next day. These envelopes could be useful for packaging a variety of gifts, envelopes for tea, seeds, gift cards, for example.)

I cut wide strips of the paper to wrap around the bars of soap,  as a sleeve, and used a glue stick to seal the edges closed on the back.

To use the labels, I cut out around the design, hand-lettered my label, and affixed with glue stick.

Cost -- my sheets of decorative papers cost about 6-7 cents each, to make, all inclusive of paper, printer ink, tea and oven use. In comparison, buying scrapbook paper would cost about 25 cents (if on sale, plus tax and gas to get to a store) for equivalent sheets. My labels are even more of a bargain, at under a half-cent per decorative label, or 7-8 cents per sheet. In comparison, I could buy decorative, self-stick labels for about $3 to $6 per sheet.

A lot of time goes into creating gifts like these. To reduce the time per unit, I do all of these items in batches, assembly-line fashion. But I do enjoy the process of creating something to give to someone else.

more later this week . . .