Getting Ready for Easter

I've got the table mostly set. I pulled out all of the nice things that have been given or handed down to me, which normally stay tucked away in a cupboard. I still need to iron the napkins.

I've made a variety of little gifts for all of my family members. Here's how I wrapped up the egg-shaped soaps. I cut a single slot/hole from a cardboard egg tray, stuffed it with some shredded paper, placed the egg-shaped soap inside, then wrapped with clear cellophane and tied with lavender ribbon. All of the wrapping materials were scavenged from what I have: the egg tray from a 5-dozen egg box, the shredded paper from a Christmas package, the cellophane cut from a gift bag received at Christmas, and the ribbon came on packaging many years ago.

I made the chocolate bunnies and bird's nests. This year, I made both white and brown bunnies, as I purchased both white and chocolate dipping candy on clearance right after Christmas.

However, I went with all chocolate nests as I was making a whole batch at one time.

To wrap the bunnies, I had more of the Easter cellophane bags that I used last year. But to wrap the egg nests, I cut up a cellophane wrap that came on a bunch of flowers. After cutting open the cone-shaped cellophane, I wiped it off with dish soap and then rinsed in water. I allowed it to dry, then cut into squares for wrapping the nests.

The supplies for 3-oz chocolate bunnies cost me about 35 cents each, and the 1-oz chocolate and coconut nests about 15 cents each.

The molds were purchased about 15 to 20 years ago, for about $16 total. These are tin-lined copper molds that I also use as spring decor in the kitchen on the hutch where we keep our dishes. But if I factor in the cost of the molds, after 15 to 20 years of annual use, each year's cost is $1 or less. Making a minimum of 4 bunnies per year, each bunny has a mold-cost of at most 25 cents. So, even adding 25 cents to the 35 cents for chocolate, my candy bunnies cost 60 cents each, still quite a bit less than any dollar store bunny. My cost for mold-use will continue to decline with each year of use. I imagine that I will be using these same molds for special Easter treats for grandchildren, or they could be resold at a garage sale for $5 to $7 dollars each, and recoup most of my original cost.

The nest are simple to make and don't require special molds. They are made with 1 ounce of chocolate and a heaping tablespoon of coconut per nest. I melt the chocolate in the microwave, then stir in the coconut. Next, I make a bunch of nest-shaped mounds and add the jelly bean eggs. Super simple and at least half the price of similar candy nests sold in stores. Lacking the dipping chocolate, chocolate chips with a bit of Crisco shortening can be substituted.

I planted all of the tea-stained hollow eggs with violets from the front yard. As I had thought, the violets on the north side of the house were about 10 days behind the violets in the backyard. The blossoms are just beginning to open. They are now sitting in a window until Easter morning, when I'll place each at a spot of the table for individual floral decorations, using napkin rings as stands.

This morning, I'll be heading out to buy our ham. Several stores have great deals on ham this week. Tomorrow, I'll make the pie pastry. I make a 5-crust batch of pastry, then freeze in individual patties. Having the pie pastry ready to roll out simplifies pie-baking for me.

And . . . today is my birthday. What does a frugal woman do for fun on her birthday? My daughters both took today off from work and their activities, and the 3 of us are going thrift-shopping/treasure-hunting. I'll be back tomorrow!

Saving Meat Fat to Use in Cooking Later -- Would You?

It's now half way through the month, and I'm beginning to get a little concerned about some of our pantry supplies. The one 4-lb jar of peanut butter has about 1/5th of a jar left; we've gone through the vegetable oil faster this month than last; and we have 1 1/2 lbs of butter remaining (not pantry, but info indicating that we can't turn to butter to replace the vegetable oil). We'll make-do on the peanut butter, but the vegetable oil has had me worried. So, I use vegetable oil in baking breads and muffins, making granola and cookies, in stir-fries and sautes, and baking cakes. (This month has 2 birthdays.)  It looks like we have about 2 cups of vegetable oil in the jug. Vegetable oil is on my shopping list for the first of May. So, I am thinking about how to make the vegetable oil stretch.

Next weekend is Easter, and we'll have a ham. I always save ham fat for cooking use -- that should help. Tonight, I'm making meatloaf. Tell me if this is something that you would do. I'm thinking on saving the fat at the bottom of the pan from baking the meatloaf to use in cooking later this week. I've saved ham, bacon, chicken, and even turkey fat, but not ground beef fat. So, this will be new territory for me in the just-how-much-can-I-stretch-the-grocery-budget department. Besides sparing some of the vegetable oil, I'm also attracted to the idea of saving meat fat because it will keep the fat out of the landfill (and not feed the vermin there), it seems like a more responsible way to treat an animal that gave its life for my plate, and it fits my waste-not, want-not ethic. So, what do you think? Barring health reasons not to eat beef fat (and in that case, maybe shouldn't be eating beef at all), would you save fat from meatloaf to use later in cooking? BTW, I'll freeze the fat, so there's no chance of spoilage and making my family sick. A trip to the urgent care clinic would not be frugal at all!

Any input?

Making Cream of Rice Hot Breakfast Cereal From Leftover Rice

If you like Cream of Wheat hot breakfast cereal, you might also like cream of rice hot cereal. No box needed, you can make cream of rice cereal with leftover cooked rice.

I use leftover brown rice to which I have added a bit of moisture. I add a couple of tablespoons of water to 3/4 of a cup of leftover brown rice, and "steam" in the microwave for 30 seconds. I use my immersion blender (stick blender) in a tall narrow container (like a measuring cup) and puree until a cream-of-grain-cereal consistency, about 30 seconds. I reheat and flavor as desired. That's it.

Our local Walmart charges $3.48 for a 28-oz. box of Cream of Wheat that makes 24 servings, with a cost of about 15 cents per serving. It takes about 6.7 ounces of dry brown rice to make about 3  1/2 cups of cooked rice, or 1.5 ounces to make about 3/4 cup of cooked rice. I pay just under 50 cents per pound for long grain brown rice. 3/4 of a cup of cooked brown rice costs me about 5 cents for the ingredients alone.

Boxed Cream of Wheat for 15 cents per serving, or homemade cream of brown rice for 5 cents per serving. I love Cream of Wheat. So to get the same texture and consistency in my hot cereal, homemade cream of brown rice definitely works for me.

How Do Beans Stack Up to Lean Chicken for Protein and Cost?

You might find this interesting. I did this research for my own purposes, but thought I'd share.

For protein content and value, how do beans compare to lean meat, such as cooked chicken breasts?

1  1/3 cups of cooked beans contain about the same amount of protein (about 19 to 22 grams) found in 3 ounces of lean chicken, which is the portion size of chicken that I use as a standard.

1  1/3 cups of cooked beans is about the amount in 3/4 of a 15-oz can of cooked beans.

With regards to cooking dried beans at home, 1  1/3 cups of cooked beans uses .44 cup of dried beans, weighing about .22 lb (or 3 and 1/2 ounces).

In most cases, it's cheaper to cook beans from dried than to buy canned, cooked beans. (But if you're wanting to compare the cost of canned beans to lean chicken, you'll use the price of 3/4 of a can of beans.)

.22 lb of dried pinto beans costs me about 12 cents. Add about 3 cents for gas and water for cooking. So I estimate for the protein equivalent of cooked-at-home beans that is about what is contained in lean chicken, cooking pinto beans myself costs about 15 cents.

In comparison, 3 ounces of lean chicken costs me about 33 to 37 cents (when boneless, skinless chicken breasts are about $1.79 to $1.99/lb). So, cooking beans from dried will save me over half the cost of buying BSCB.

I used boneless, skinless chicken breast for my comparison as it's very lean, producing little residual fat to be factored into the equation.

When it comes to bone-in poultry, I've always roughly estimated that bones/skin comprise about 1/3 or slightly more of the weight of the chicken parts, with legs and thighs being a little bit more bone/skin-heavy than breasts. So, when I'm looking at the cost of bone-in, skin-on chicken parts, I don't quite double the price per pound to get an estimate of price per pound for the protein that we'll use. If you're looking for a more detailed analysis of the meat percentages of various chicken parts Texas Agricultural Extension Service has a very detailed report with instructions for cost comparisons, here.

Lately, my chicken purchases have been chicken leg quarters. Walmart currently has a 10-lb bag of leg quarters for about $6. If I figure the meat-only part of the leg quarter is roughly 60%, at 60 cents per pound, my protein costs about $1 per pound, or about 19 cents per 3-oz serving. Beans are still a better deal for me, but only by a few cents per serving. In addition, the leg quarters are not nearly as lean as chicken breasts, so the protein content of 3 ounces of meat-only leg quarters may not meet that of 1  1/3 cups of cooked beans.

I hope this all made sense. My head is a little off this evening. I spent the afternoon at the dentist, and my thinking may be off. Correct me if I'm wrong. Do check out the link above. It could help you determine if bone-in chicken products are a good value for you.

Returning Unopened Merchandise for a Refund

In my cleaning this week, I came across 2 bags with an item in each (purchased in February). Now it turns out that I don't need these items, after all. One product was from Michaels and the other from Target. I thought for sure that both items would be non-returnable at this point, as they were purchased 2 months ago. Well, I was wrong (this was a good time to be wrong). Per each store's websites, Michael's allows 180 days for unopened products and Target allows 90 days (with a few exceptions named on their website). Woo hoo! The total amount that I will be getting back is only about $5, but goodness -- $5 is $5. Both stores are within a block of the mall, and I have 2 birthday freebies to redeem there this coming week, so no substantial amount of gas will be used to return these products and retrieve my $5. In fact, if I want to use this outing to get my steps in, I could walk to both Target and Michael's from the mall and not expend any gas on my returns.

Before visiting each store's website, I had assumed that returns would have only a 30-day window. So glad that I checked!

In another "small-change" area, I was also cleaning out my desk drawer and came across some gift cards that I knew had partial balances left on them. I called the phone number on the card backs to get the remaining balances, and marked each card's value with a Sharpie. Four of the gift cards can be used at one restaurant chain. When combined, there's enough in the balances to pay for a nice family lunch at the end of the month, in honor of the 2 birthday people in our family. In the past, I've tended to forget that gift cards are real money. Even if the balance is very low, the money is very real. I've got my various gift cards in a stack and am making thoughtful choices in how to spend each.

In addition to plastic gift cards, I also have some egift cards. Again, I am making careful choices in how to spend each. I think it's so easy to forget about these gift cards, as there is nothing tangible as a reminder.

Anyway, I am reminding myself that all of these little bits add up.

Egg-Shaped Lavender Soap

So, since I made these for some family members, I have no one that I can show them to in person, and I think they turned out really nicely. They're egg-shaped, lavender-infused soap.

I followed directions from another website. I'll link to that site in a bit. I had some problems but was able to mitigate them, and I found I didn't need everything the site advised. I'll share all of that. But first, some background.

You all know that my budget is small right now. Easter is going to have to be pulled off with the only spending going for a ham. I have always given gifts to family members for Easter, and I don't want to stop this year. So, I am using what I have, which is not only a great thing for our budget, but it also creates less waste and gasoline usage (good for the environment). For all of these reasons, I absolutely love using what I have. I have always been motivated equally by financial savings and by wasting less. Waste just bugs me. Anyway, back to the gift.

You may or may not recall that I have done some melt-and-pour soap making in years past. A couple of years ago I posted about making bars of soap for Christmas and birthday gifts. You know how it is with crafting -- there are always leftover supplies. In thinking about gifts that I could make, I once again went to my crafting cupboard. When I came across the soap-making supplies, I was reminded of some beautiful egg-shaped soaps that I have seen in specialty shops. Oooh, I've really loved/coveted those. While I would love to have some for myself, I think I would love even more to give these to someone in my life.

With this beginning idea in mind, I set out to see how I could make my own egg-shaped soaps, using only what I have at home. And that's when I came across this post on My Repurposed Life. You have to check this out, even if you don't want to make soap. The woman's soap and packaging ideas are simply beautiful. I plan on using some of her packaging ideas for my own soaps. Anyway, I had the melt-and-pour soap base, lavender essential oil, lavender buds, blue and red soap coloring, and some plastic Easter eggs. I was all set!

Saturday afternoon, both daughters were out for a few hours, so I could work privately in the kitchen. As suggested by the website post, I used plastic Easter eggs for my molds (I made 2 molds). I drilled out a pouring hole in the non-pointed end of the egg, beginning with the smallest bit on our drill and working my way up to the largest bit we have. I ended up with a hole slightly bigger than 1/4-inch. Now that sounds tiny. However, with a very steady hand, it's possible to pour a thin stream of melted soup that has some clogging, but which is easily managed.

My first snag was I did not have a small funnel. When I tried to improvise a funnel as the post's author had, mine just clogged with the soap and made a mess. So, I went with my steady hand for pouring a thin stream. I poured from a measuring cup with my right hand while holding a bamboo skewer in my left hand to unclog the hole, as needed. Although this took some time, it all worked out. I occasionally reheated the soap in the microwave to keep it at a pouring consistency.

The other issue that I had was that every single soap-egg had some sort of air pocket that needed filling in after I removed the soap from the plastic egg. This was not too huge of a problem. I was able to spoon a little melted soap into any air pockets, flatten into place with the plastic egg, then use a paring knife to very gently trim edges, then buff with a microfiber cloth.

In addition, the plastic eggs that I used left a noticeable seam all around the soaps. For the seam, I used a very fine paring knife to trim it a bit, and then buffed with the microfiber cloth as I had with the fills.

I discovered that I didn't need any special type of duct tape, but used the duct tape that I had at home. It probably helped that the eggs that I used were the kind that tightly snapped together and were not loose. But even so, the duct tape was necessary. (I discovered that on my last egg when I got a little cocky and thought I could skip the duct tape. A mess. But I got it cleaned up, scooped up, and remelted for this last egg.) For pouring in the melted soap, I set the plastic egg-mold in a styrofoam carton that I've used for dyeing Easter eggs in past years

Something else that I think is important to the finished product -- If you look inside plastic Easter eggs, some have small protrusions inside of the egg. Others have a "Made in China" (or other country) raised marking in the egg. And still some eggs have ventilation holes. So, it was important to find eggs that were mostly smooth inside and without holes.

The eggs are not perfect, but I believe that they are beautiful for a homemade gift to a family member. This was my first experience with a 3-D mold. I'll read up and experiment some more in the future. For all other soap, I've used a shallow mold that creates a bar that has a finished side and an unfinished side. There may be some tricks to filling the entire mold without creating air pockets.

After making the little soaps, the plastic eggs went back into our collection of Easter eggs. The hole in one end won't harm the ability to be used in egg hunts in years to come.

Can you tell that I really love Easter? It's by far my favorite holiday, from the significance of the spiritual meaning of the day, to the family meal and gift-giving, it's a day that I look forward to all year. I can hardly wait to give these as gifts.

Comparing the Cost of Whole Carrots to Ready-To-Eat Baby Carrots

The price of carrots at Fred Meyer this week: whole carrots in a 5-lb bag for $3.49 or 69 cents/lb, or  cut and peeled baby carrots in a 3-lb bag also for $3.49 or $1.16/lb. Basically, if you buy the whole carrots at Fred Meyer this week, you get 2 additional pounds of carrots when compared to the baby carrots.

I buy my carrots at Smart Foodservice/Cash & Carry. When bought in 10 lb bags, whole carrots are $4.49 or 45 cents/lb. The largest bag of baby carrots at Cash & Carry is the 5-lb one, and it sells for $4.29 or 86 cents/lb. So at Cash & Carry, I pay 20 cents more to get 5 extra pounds of carrots when buying them whole/

Here's how I buy carrots -- 10 lb bags of whole carrots at Smart Food Service/Cash & Carry (a wholesaler open to the public with prices similar to club warehouses).

I enjoy the ease of baby carrots. However, the cost (at almost twice the price of whole carrots) is beyond a small budget. Granted, there is some waste when peeling and trimming the ends from whole carrots. I give a generous estimate to the waste at about 1/10th to 1/15th of the weight of a whole carrot; still not enough to justify the purchase of baby carrots for me.

So, what do I do to make whole carrots more accessible for all of our family members and without a large time investment on my part? I take about a dozen carrots at a time and peel and trim, then place them in a plastic bag in the fridge. Family members are then free to cut into sticks, chunks, slices, or eat whole. (We've all been sporting the Bugs Bunny look in recent weeks, chomping on whole carrots.) If I had small children who were not adept at using sharp knives, obviously I'd cut carrots into sticks for them.

I have to say, this is really working for me. When I see that the bag of ready-carrots is near empty, I take about 5 or so minutes to peel and trim a dozen. There are about 3 to 4 dozen carrots in a 10-lb bag. In total, I spend about 20 to 30 minutes peeling and trimming a full bag of carrots. I save about $3.70 to $3.80 per 10-lb bag of carrots when I peel and trim them myself (this includes the waste of the peels and ends). That's a savings of $3.70 to $3.80 for 30 minutes of hands-on time, or an "hourly wage" of $7.40 to $7.60.

There's an added financial bonus to making our whole carrots more user friendly -- members of our household are much more likely to grab a carrot (which is an inexpensive veggie) than some frozen peas or green beans (which are at least double the cost of carrots) for their lunches.

This concept of buying carrots in a basic and whole state, then transforming them into something more user-friendly offers substantial savings for other commonly-bought vegetables. Compare the price of whole potatoes to frozen French fries. Whole potatoes can be made into oven fries fairly easily and replace the commercially-prepared frozen French fries at a fraction of the cost. Bagged whole potatoes are currently selling for about $2 per 10-lb bag in my area. Frozen French fries sell for about $1.99/32-oz bag at Fred Meyer. Including oil, salt, and electricity for the oven, oven fries made from whole potatoes cost no more than 30 cents per pound. That's less than 1/3 the cost of the prepared potato product.

Look at the cost of bagged lettuce. An average head of Romaine lettuce weighs between 21 and 22 ounces. At Fred Meyer this week, a plain, unpackaged full head of Romaine lettuce is selling for $1.79. So, what about the waste when washing and trimming a whole head of Romaine lettuce? I would give a guess at about 1 ounce per head. (BTW, I use a good portion of the core when making salads, by slicing thin and cutting into matchsticks, as I described in this post.) So, after the loss of 1 ounce, a head of Romaine costs between $1.36 and $1.43 per pound. This week, the Kroger brand of bagged leafy Romaine lettuce is selling for $2.79 for a 10-oz bag, and the Dole brand of bagged, chopped Romaine is marked at $4.99 for a 32-oz bag. The Kroger bagged lettuce is $4.46 per pound and the Dole bagged Romaine is $2.49 per pound. The Kroger lettuce is about 3 times the cost per pound of a basic head of Romaine! While the Dole bagged Romaine, while much cheaper than the Kroger, is still almost twice the cost per pound of the basic, unprepared head of Romaine.

I do sometimes find bagged salad on markdown. However, the 10-oz bagged Kroger Romaine lettuce would need to be marked down to 85 to 89 cents to break even with the full head price, and the bagged Dole Romaine marked down to about $2.72 to $2.86 per 32-oz bag. So far, the lowest price I have ever seen short-dated Kroger 10-oz bags is 99 cents. Even after markdown, a full head of lettuce is still less expensive per pound than the bagged.

Washing a head of lettuce probably takes about 10 minutes of hands-on time. I can fill my large sink with water, peel the Romaine leaves off one at a time and add to the water, swish them all around gently, then drain well. When I wash lettuce to store in the fridge, I wrap the washed leaves in a large, but very thin, cotton dish towel, then I place the bundle in a plastic bag. Lettuce stored this way will keep in the fridge for 7 to 10 days. Pre-chopping the lettuce will shorten the storage life, so I generally leave the chopping to the last minute. It's the washing and drying that seems to take time.

There is definitely a place and time for convenience produce items. They can save money if the alternative is a restaurant or even an inexpensive take-out meal. The time-savings could be more valuable than the financial savings in some circumstances. But for my small grocery budget, I can buy more wholesome, quality foods for my family by doing the prep work myself.

Easter Table Decor: The Tea-Stained Eggshell Planted with Violets

Here's how the tea-stained eggshells look once planted. In this post from the end of March, I showed you the tea-stained hollow eggshells I was making. I used 2 ordinary tea bags in 2 cups of hot water to brew a dark stain in a 1-quart canning jar. As I used eggs, I broke the shell at the pointed end only and sort of shook the contents out. I then washed the eggshells and set to dry. When I had 2 eggshells cleaned out, I immersed them completely in the tea, for a few hours to overnight (depending on how forgetful I was). Then I'd remove the stained shells and set in an empty carton upside down to dry. In between staining eggshells (while waiting for more to stain), I kept the tea covered in the fridge. Thankfully, nobody thought to drink it. I really should label things. All my eggshells have now been stained and dried. They're just waiting for the violets.

When I was in the backyard today, I noticed that the violets were beginning to bloom. I have violets in the front yard, as well, which are in a shady spot. I'm hoping the front yard violets won't bloom for another 10 days or so. The backyard violets always beat the front yard violets in bloom time. Anyway, this is exactly how I imagined the eggs. (Now that hardly ever happens -- something turning out how I imagine.)

I carefully dug up this tiny plant, then placed it into the hollow shell, poking in a bit of soil with my little finger, as needed. After planting, I dribbled in a little water. I'll watch how this one does and then plant up the 6 that I need for our Easter table, one at each place setting. I think they'll look pretty in a rustic sort of way.

Cheap and Cheerful Suppers This Past Week (or What We Eat for $125 a Month)

Friday
seafood casserole (made with frozen cod fillets that had been camped out in my freezer for far too long, frozen peas, pasta, cream of mushroom soup, some lemon juice and herbs, all topped with cheddar cheese and garden chives)
spring green salad (made with garden watercress, baby sorrel, and baby chard, dressed with a citrus vinaigrette and topped with chopped, roasted almonds)
scratch blueberry coffee cake, using frozen blueberries bought at Dollar Tree a while ago

Saturday
refried beans and oven-baked corn tortilla chips
coleslaw
leftover blueberry cake

Sunday
chicken (from 2 leg quarters) in gravy over baked potatoes, topped with plain yogurt
steamed carrots
Oatmeal Scotchie Bars

Monday
bean burger patties, topped with mozzarella cheese
brown rice topped with marinara sauce
sauteed cabbage, onions, garlic, tomato sauce
French bread with soybean spread
Oatmeal Scotchie Bars

Tuesday
pizza sandwiches
cole slaw
cookies
(plus a plain hotdog for my husband, to boost calories in his dinner)

Wednesday
baked beans with hot dogs (no buns)
fresh-baked bread and butter
kale and onions
carrot snack cake (using this recipe and substituting 1 cup of grated carrot and a handful of raisins for the pureed pumpkin in the pumpkin-spice version, and using a combination of cinnamon, ginger, and cloves in place of the allspice)

Thursday
tomato soup (made with canned tomato paste following the directions found in the comments in this post)
toasted cheese sandwiches
parfaits made with canned cherry pie filling (Dollar Tree) and homemade vanilla yogurt

Friday
hamburgers in buns
oven-roasted potato wedges
oven-roasted onions
steamed carrots
rice pudding, using the leftover brown rice from Monday's dinner


As you can see, we're still using items that we've had for a while while incorporating some of the cheaply-purchased "new" ingredients. I'm trying to serve two to three bean-based dinners, as beans are such an inexpensive source of protein and are good for cholesterol numbers. And you may have noticed, we served carrots and cabbage 3 times each this week. You gotta love those cheap veggies!

Breakfast every day has been overnight, crock-pot steel cut oats. I make a batch once every 3 days and we eat the leftovers, reheated on the other days. There is also bread for toast, plus yogurt, eggs, and some untraditional breakfast foods that household members find (my daughter had ramen this morning for breakfast). Lunches are leftovers, sandwiches using bean spread, peanut butter, and occasionally egg salad, yogurt, bananas, raisins, juice, cole slaw, carrot sticks, microwaved potatoes with cheese, and quickly made concoctions such as soup. Snacks are primarily any of the breakfast or lunch foods, plus popcorn made on the stove, cocoa (with a homemade mix), cinnamon toast, or sometimes nuts.

I am back to baking bread. I have calculated that when I bake 5 loaves at a time, each loaf costs about 50 cents (including electricity). The least expensive commercial bread I can buy is 80 cents (with my Senior discount one day per month). Last month, we went through 8 loaves of bread. At a savings of 30 cents per loaf, we're saving $2.40 each month by baking our own. My homemade loaves are denser but weigh about what the cheap loaves of bread do. The bonus -- on bread-baking day, the kitchen is a bit warmer than usual, very welcome right now as we've turned our thermostat way down for spring.

That's our humble week of meals. What's been on your menu lately?

Learning Something New

This is something that I've been doing in the evenings as I'm relaxing. I'm not spending a lot of time on it, but I can see some progress already. I'm teaching myself Spencerian Script. I'm hoping that when I add a greeting to the inside of a blank or homemade card, my penmanship will be elegant enough to make even a humble, hand-crafted card look special.

Right now, I'm working on 2 specific phrases: Happy Birthday and Happy Easter, both very apropos for the season. The beauty in this script is really in the capital letters, so I am focusing on those for now. Anyway, this is one of the many skills that you can teach yourself for absolutely free (or the cost of a tablet of paper and a pen), using the internet. I know that there are lots and lots of DIY home improvement resources online, too. There are so many things that I have discovered how to fix using the web. Later this spring, I'll be replacing the gasket for our refrigerator door. Yep, saw instructions for that online, too. But, I think I'm enjoying learning the script more than home improvement stuff. It's just more fun to me.

What fun, free skills have you taught yourself using the internet?

Some Things Just Don't Go as Planned . . . but They Can Often Be Salvaged

So, I set 2 eggs to boil this morning, then went about my daily routine. At one point, I thought I smelled a faint burning odor. I just figured someone had burnt their toast earlier and thought nothing further of it. I hopped into the shower, still not thinking anything of the odor. It was when I got out and began to dry off that I suddenly remembered the eggs in a pot of water left to come to a boil. Grabbing my robe, I ran down the hall to the kitchen. I quickly dumped some water from the tea kettle into the dry pan, then put the whole thing under cold, running water. After getting myself dressed, I came out to the kitchen to see if any parts of the eggs could be salvaged.

after peeling, the burnt side of an egg

It turns out that, yes, you can burn the daylights out of about half of an egg and still have something edible left.

after peeling, the not-so-burnt side of an egg

After peeling the eggs, and discarding any portions that looked obviously burnt, I chopped what remained and made egg salad. I lost about half of one egg and about 2/3 of the other.

what was left after peeling both eggs & removing any burnt parts

So I was able to salvage more than the equivalent of 1 whole egg.

And do you know what? It tastes good. I think the ranch-style dressing that I used to turn it into egg salad has a lot to do with that.

Fortunately, the pot is fine, maybe a little scorched but otherwise okay. It's an old, heavy-bottomed pot that we generally use for making popcorn on the stove, so I'm not sure if the scorching is from this egg-mishap or from making popcorn all of these years.

So, I've scraped burnt toast, scraped the bottoms of burnt cookies, peeled off the top of burnt casseroles, used the top 2/3 of a pot of rice that burned to the bottom of pot, and now a new one -- peeled off burnt parts on boiled eggs. You would think that I don't know how to cook! But I do know how to salvage, which, as a skill, is important for avoiding wastefulness.

Has anybody else, here, ever boiled a pot of eggs dry?
I bet that my folly made a few of you smile, and that is worth a million dollars!

Quick Depletion of the April Grocery Budget

It's only the 2nd of April and I've already spent $106.50 of my $126.87 for the month. That must sound awful, right? However, I've done most of my shopping for the month. I've been to WinCo for the bulk bin items and some bananas, Cash & Carry for some institution-sized packaged foods (including cheese!), and now this morning I took advantage of the Senior Discount Day at our Kroger affiliate (Fred Meyer) buying milk, butter, orange juice, peanut butter, hot dogs, and instant coffee. Interestingly, the instant decaf coffee is cheaper at Walmart and the instant regular coffee is less expensive at Fred Meyer. I'll make a stop at Walmart later in the month, picking up more bananas while I'm getting my other items.

We did get one big jar of peanut butter for the month. So, I don't think anyone suffered too badly, here, with not having peanut butter for 4 weeks. I am still making the bean spreads, though, mostly because the spreads give us more variety, and variety defies feelings of deprivation. The other item that my family was very happy about was the purchase of not 1 but 2 pounds of butter. I had 1 pound leftover from the last month, so now we have almost 3 whole pounds of butter. There was the risk that I would just be getting one more pound. However, I had figured that if I found milk on markdown, there would be a little extra money in the budget. Fortune was with me at Fred Meyer today. I found half-gallons of 1% milk on markdown for 89 cents each. I saved 37 cents a gallon over what I was prepared to pay at the regular price. The marked down milk combined with finding pinto beans for $1 less than I'd planned for a 25-lb bag left me with enough extra money for that second pound of butter.

I now have $20.37 remaining in the grocery budget for April. This should cover a 10-lb bag of chicken leg quarters, 5 dozen eggs, a jar of instant decaf, a canister of shortening for making pie crusts, and a couple of bunches of bananas, all from Walmart. I plan on putting off the Walmart trip as long as I can to see if maybe we don't need one or more of these items, and I can maybe put the extra money toward more eggs (if I find a great sale).

After shopping at each store, I went through my lists again and refigured the amounts of the desired items. This kept me accountable, allowed me to rethink my budget allotments, and I think will help me come as close to the budgeted amount as possible without going over. It can be a bit like a game for me. I keep the lists in Word documents and save with each new adjustment. I personally find it interesting to see how my lists morph over the course of the month. And just in case you're concerned that we're not getting enough to eat, I'm keeping a log of our dinner meals, again. I'll post that later this week. (But thank you for being concerned. I know your thoughts come from your hearts.) We are eating well! The first month was challenging, but I can see that food variety is improving.

I hope your week is going well!

How I Compare the Price Per Serving for Fresh, Dried, and Juiced Fruits

I mentioned comparing the price per serving for fresh fruit and juice last week in the comments. I had previously developed my own calculations to help me assess whether or not using juice or dried fruit would be as cost-effective per serving as some of the fresh fruit that's within my price range. So, here are my thoughts and how I've determined what will work for my small budget. This may only be entertainment for most of you. However, I've received a few emails and read a couple of comments which suggest that I am not the only one trying to make a small grocery budget work. Therefore, some of my own thoughts may help those of you who fall into this same group.

I've set a current price per pound for what I'm willing to spend on fresh fruit at about 50 cents. This low price per pound limits our choices to bananas and maybe apples or oranges. It's not enough to have the price per pound limit, but I also need to get as many servings per pound to meet a price per serving target.

So, with small bananas, there are about 3 bananas (or servings) per pound. At 42 cents/lb (what I pay at Walmart and WinCo), then each banana costs about 13 cents each. A small banana has about 90 calories.

With medium oranges averaging 4.6 ounces each, there are about 3.5 medium oranges per pound. At 50 cents/lb, each orange would cost 14 cents and contain about 62 calories.

With medium apples, there are about 3 per pound. At 50 cents per pound, each medium apple costs 16 cents, and contains about 80 calories.

Using this information, for my family's budget, I've determined that a single serving of fruit should contain between 65 and 90 calories and should cost between 13 and 17 cents.so my calorie range for a serving of fruit is about 65 to 90 calories, and my price range per serving is about 13 to 17 cents each.

This is pretty straight forward. If I find medium apples or oranges priced at or below 50 cents per pound, then my cost per serving lines up with my budget goals.

So, what about dried fruit or 100% fruit juice?

The least expensive purchased dried fruit in my area is raisins. When comparing raisins, I can't do a straight across comparison, as the water content of raisins has mostly been removed. So, I decided to base my calculations on calorie content, looking for a serving of raisins that provides about 90 calories. (That would be about 3 tablespoons.) I went with the high end of my calorie range as grapes/raisins are naturally high in sugar, and anything smaller than 3 tablespoons would be unrealistic as a serving.

16 ounces of raisins contains about 1360 calories. There are about 15  90-calorie portions of raisins in a pound. So, if raisins are priced between $1.95 and $2.55 per pound, then each 90-calorie portion falls between my price per serving range of 13 and 17 cents. In my area, my cheapest price for raisins is at Cash & Carry, with a 4-lb bag of raisins for $9.37, or $2.34 per pound, or not quite 16 cents per serving.

The other form of fruit that we're using is 100% fruit juice made from frozen concentrate. The US government uses 6 ounces of juice as a portion size. With orange juice made from concentrate, there are 82 calories in a 6-oz serving of orange juice when made according to the package directions, falling within my calorie range for a serving of fruit. One 12-oz can of orange juice concentrate makes 8 82-calorie portions. So a 12-oz can  of concentrate would have to cost between $1.04 and $1.36 to fall within my own guidelines for price. However, the 16-oz can of concentrate is often less expensive per ounce than the 12-oz can. Using my Senior Discount at Fred Meyer, I can buy the 16-oz cans of orange juice concentrate for $1.61 each (which is the equivalent of $1.20 for a 12-oz can). I get 10.66 fruit servings from the 16-oz can of concentrate, so my price per serving is about 15 cents, which is within my range.

The price per serving for 100% apple juice is also based on a 6-oz portion of juice, made up according to package direction. A 12-oz can of the frozen concentrate has about 700 calories. One 12-oz can makes about 48 ounces of fluid. In a 48-oz pitcher, there are 8  6-ounce portions of apple juice, each having 87 calories. I bought a 12-oz can of concentrate at WinCo for 99 cents, so each  87-calorie serving costs 12 cents, which is actually below my price range.

So, this is what we've found that will work within our small budget for the current few months: fresh fruit priced below 50 cents/lb and between 13 and 17 cents per piece, raisins when priced between $1.95 and $2.55 per pound, and 100% frozen fruit juice concentrate when priced between 99 cents and $1.36 for the 12-oz can, or $1.81 for the 16-oz can.

I'm not policing portion sizes or even how many servings of fruit a person consumes in a day. I figure that our bodies will consume however many calories and portions of fruit that they require.

My price per pound on fruit will have to change when melon season begins. Melons contain more water than apples or bananas, so I will use calorie content when considering the cost per serving. Our garden produces almost all of the fruit that we consume in summer, providing rhubarb (technically a vegetable but we eat it as a fruit), strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, huckleberries, cranberries, apples, plums, pears, cherries, grapes, figs, and crabapples. I also buy peaches and nectarines in summer, which I know won't fall below 50 cents per pound, but hopefully our budget will allow a higher price per pound for fresh fruit, then.

I hope that this has all made sense. Basically, calories seemed like the best way to determine a price per serving of fruit that could cover fresh, juiced, and dried fruit.

The Importance of Taking Advantage of Special Deals when the Grocery Budget is Small

A lot of grocery stores are adding service features to attract busy customers. One of the more recent additions to my local Fred Meyer (a Kroger affiliate) is a pick-up service. The customer places their order online, choosing the items, registering a form of payment, loading any e-coupons, and selecting a pick-up time window. Normally, there is a service fee for this shopping option. At Fred Meyer, it's $4.95 per shopping pick-up. When the time window opens, the customer shows up in the parking lot of the store, parking in a special section of stalls, follows the instructions to phone in their arrival, then waits until the attendant brings the groceries to their car. The customer gets a moment to review the order and prices charged (ensuring that e-coupons were applied) and hand-delivers any paper coupons to the attendant. If all is well, the groceries are loaded into the car and the customer drives off.

For an introductory period, Fred Meyer is waiving the $4.95 service fee for a customer's first 3 pick-ups, and offering exclusive grocery coupons for Pick-up orders only. I had seen these coupons in the digital coupon list on Fred Meyer's site, but mostly ignored them, as I like to browse the store for the non-advertised markdowns. However, this month, I stumbled across a coupon that I couldn't pass up. It was for 4-lbs of sugar at 99 cents each, limit of 5. This is half the price that I had planned on paying using the Senior Discount, and the volume of sugar sounds like enough to stretch through 3 months of scratch cooking and baking for my household. I thought about how I could arrange my errands so that this would not be out of the way or use additional gas for the car. It sounded like it would be doable. So, I proceeded with the online order. You need to understand that I don't like trying new things, especially when any sort of technology might be involved. But I did this anyway. Unless I come across another great coupon, this may be the least expensive sugar that I buy any time in the near future.

There were several other good-sounding e-coupons on Fred Meyer's website that I could have used in this Pick-up order. Just nothing else that fit my needs for this moment. To give you an ida of what else FM is offering in these exclusive Pick-up order coupons, boneless, skinless chicken breasts @ $1.49/lb (limit 5 packages, each package about 5 lbs), 24 oz packages of individual string cheese @ $3.99 -- that's $2.66/lb for individually-wrapped string cheese (limit 5), and 32 oz. bags of frozen potato products, like tater tots, and shoestring fries, @ 99 cents (limit 5). For my budget, if there had been more room for meat purchases this month, I would have jumped on the chicken breasts. The other items just wouldn't be in my small budget. However, the sugar is a staple, something that is on my list, and at a price that won't be easily found soon. If it hadn't been for this deal, I would have bought 2 4-lb bags and had to work to make them stretch.

Another special deal that I came across involved answering a customer feedback survey. I had purchased 2 $5 gift cards to Dairy Queen, for my daughters' birthday, so they can go out for a treat together sometime this summer. On the receipt for the gift card purchase was a survey request, which would result in a coupon for a free ice cream bar upon completion. I answered the survey and now have a coupon to use for a free item in the next few weeks. At the same time that I picked up the DQ gift cards, I also bought 2 $5 gift cards to McDonalds, again so my daughters could go out together sometime for a treat. With this gift card purchase, I received not one survey request, but three survey requests on the various receipts. I answered these surveys and received coupon codes for 3 sandwich deals (buy 1 get 1 free). On such a tight budget, I'm not sure that we'll use the McDonald's coupons (since you have to spend to get the freebie), but the DQ coupon is valuable for a free treat for someone who needs a pick-me-up. This is an ice cream bar that would otherwise not be affordable.

These special deals are usually limited. When I saw the Fred Meyer Pick-up coupon, I knew that this was an introductory come-on to attract customer attention. For the time being, I am making every dollar count. In order to fulfill as many of my shopping list items as possible, I need to go a little bit out of my way to snag the deals. I'm probably not the ideal customer for Fred Meyer. I use the Senior Discount Day to buy only the items that are least expensive using the discount, compared to shopping any other place. I don't fill my cart with the rest of the items (at a higher price) from my overall shopping list. I won't be a loyal Pick-up service shopper once the special deals and introductory free service expires. Instead, I'll keep looking out for the next avenue toward deals, as I make my grocery budget stretch as much as possible.

How about you? Do your grocery stores offer pick-up service, and do they also have exclusive coupons for Pick-up customers, only?

Easter Table Decor Craft

Enough talk about grocery shopping.
I wanted to show you what I'm making for our Easter luncheon table. There will be one of these at each place of the table. This is a hollow, ordinary chicken egg, with an opening broken at the pointed end of the egg, then tea-stained with a strong tea solution using 2 plain tea bags and 2 cups of water. I immersed each entire hollow egg in the tea and left to sit for a couple of hours, doing 2 eggs at a time. The "stand" is one of my parents' napkin rings. (Egg cups would also work well as "stands" for the egg planters.) Just before Easter, I will fill the eggs with tiny plants, most likely violets, as they grow wild in our yard, and it looks like they will about be in bloom in time for Easter. Alternatively, I will find other small blossoms on stems in the yard and use the egg as a vase. 

I got the idea from this Michael's ad (see the eggs with bulb flowers). I immediately realized that I could do something like this using just what I have at home. The eggshells would have been composted, anyway. The tea bags were freebies from a hotel stay a while ago. The napkin rings were something I already owned. And the plants or blooms will be scavenged from my yard.



After Easter is over, the napkin rings will be returned to storage, the plants can be returned to the garden, and the eggshells can still be composted. I'll let you see how they turn out later in April.

Just so you know, I was able to shake the contents of the egg out of the shell, as the opening was so large. And I didn't need to poke a hole in the other end, as I did when blowing out eggs. This is definitely much less time-intensive of a spring craft than the painted and speckled eggs.

Grocery Plans for April

The month of March is wrapping up and my family did really well on our budget. We still have a couple of months before the income reduction takes place, but we do want to see what is possible for us, in order to judge if this is doable or if we need greater income. Here's a really good sign -- we had a super-low credit card bill this month, perhaps the lowest that it's been in a couple of years.

The Groceries

One of the issues with working with basic ingredients is the need to regularly prepare foods from scratch. With this idea in mind, I've spent some time each day preparing individual food items for ease of use, such as peeling and trimming a dozen carrots at a time, shredding a head of cabbage and making a bottle of cole slaw dressing, toasting some raw almonds for snacking, and making scratch pudding and putting into small jars for homemade snack-pack pudding cups. I estimate that I spend 1 hour per day (in addition to regular meal prep) making these easy to grab foods that are appreciated by myself and my family. So, for 7 extra hours per week, or 31 extra hours this month, I've been able to strip away about $125.00 from our grocery budget. $4.03 is not a great hourly wage, but I've been able to do these little kitchen jobs anytime that it works out for me.

Besides the money savings, I feel that we are eating more real foods and less processed junk. It seems "cleaner," more like how we're supposed to eat. I think this is a fantastic bonus!

While I sit here and make out next month's shopping list, I have $1.87 leftover from March's grocery budget to roll over to April's. I don't feel the need to go out and buy anything else in these last couple of days with that $1.87. So, going into April, I have $126.87 for food items. In making out my list, again I had to whittle it away a bit to fit the budget. I primarily made my choices based on nutrition for the dollar spent, allowing for a couple of non-nutritive items, too, such as coffee and sugar.

This past month, my two big stock-up items were a 25-lb bag of yellow onions and 21 pounds of ground beef. I still have a lot of both of those items in stock. My two big stock-up items for April will be a 25-lb sack of dried pinto beans and a 50-lb sack of all-purpose flour. Both of those items are in amounts which should last our family several months, providing an inexpensive protein source and a basic baking ingredient for our meals and snacks. Pinto beans tend to be the least expensive dried bean in my area, with versatility to use them in several different preparations.

In addition to the beans and flour, I'll also be buying smaller amounts of dried white beans (for sandwich spread), butter, orange juice, apple juice, raisins, bananas, carrots, potatoes, frozen spinach, chicken leg quarters, hot dogs, whole wheat flour, canned tomato paste, shredded cheese, sugar, coffee, and enough milk and eggs to last the month. (One of my promises to our family at the beginning of this month was that there would always be plenty of eggs, milk, and bread. I kept that promise, ensuring family members that there would always be something from which to make a meal or snack.) I'll be shopping at Walmart, WinCo, Fred Meyer (Senior Discount Day on April 2 -- just have to be 55+ -- no special card, just tell the cashier you're over 55), and Smart Foods/Cash & Carry.

Easter is in April, but I do have a budgeted amount to spend for this holiday that is separate from the grocery budget. I've reduced this budget considerably from last year, but there is still enough to cover the cost of a ham and next years' Easter egg hunt candy. (You may recall that I buy the next year's Easter candy on clearance after the holiday and store until the following year.) So, at least there is no need to use the grocery budget for the Easter ham. We also have 2 birthdays in this month. We have a couple of gifts cards for a restaurant in our area. I offered these to our daughters for their birthday celebration, but they turned us down, wanting burgers and fries at home instead. So, we'll have a dual birthday lunch celebration in a restaurant using those gift cards. (Lunch is often less expensive than dinner, hence the lunch celebration.)

We're doing really, really well, and I'm about as surprised as anyone else! I'm still not sure if this is sustainable. Although, if there had to be an optimal time to begin this, it is now in early spring. I've begun planting the vegetable garden. I planted snow peas last week and have just this week started cool season greens from seeds, indoors. Our early spring garden has lots of watercress, sorrel, chives, kale, garlic chives, and Swiss chard to provide variety to the narrow range of veggies that I'm purchasing. Plus, our rhubarb is now up and should be ready to harvest in mid-April. And, I still have some canned and frozen vegetables in store. We're taking this just one month at a time. Life is good.

Saved $20 by Borrowing From the Garden Again

Last spring, I bought a spring color bowl (a pot that was pre-planted with spring bulbs and primroses) from the garden center, to place on a table just outside the bedroom window. It brought me a lot of joy in the early spring weeks.

I had planned on  buying another one for this year. I thought again, then decided to raid my garden. I "borrowed" some daffodils, tulips, grape hyacinths, hyacinth, and some primroses from my yard and put together my own color bowl, using a pot and soil that I already had. When my flowers are done blooming, I plan on returning the bulbs and plants to the garden and finding something else to put in these pots.

Anyway, the other day, it took me about 30 minutes to dig and pot, and it will take another 15 minutes to put all of the plants back. So, forty-five minutes of work for $20 in savings -- that's a pretty good deal. Since I had really planned on buying a color bowl this spring, this is a real savings (as opposed to a theoretical savings).

6 Things to Do to Dig Out of Feelings of Deprivation and Self-Pity

Financial set-backs tend to stir up the pity pot for me. So, this go-round, I'm being as proactive as I can. Here's the list that I'm following in order to ditch those feelings of deprivation.

• make an abundance of good foods using your least expensive and abundantly-supplied ingredients, such as bar cookies, breads, yogurt, pudding, flavored popcorn, or granola. I find that if we have a lot of foods available to snack on or make quick meals with, we all tend to forget that our budget is much smaller.

• use the good stuff -- sit in the living room that is usually reserved for guests, have dinner in the formal dining room, use the good china or silver, use those towels that you save for visiting guests, light candles. Our family tends to save the "good stuff" for guests only. Honoring our guests with those nicer belongings is a hospitable thing to do, but sometimes, we need to honor our own family and indulge in using those belongings which are set aside for special occasions. Using a really soft and stain-free towel can put a smile on my face and make me feel pampered.

• this one is helpful when I am wanting "new" stuff -- refresh or refurbish some worn household or personal items, such as bleaching plastic cutting boards and white dish towels, ironing a few favorite shirts, dusting and tidying surfaces in your home, re-dyeing faded clothing, polishing leather shoes, scouring the outsides of pots and pans. We hear this a lot -- we live in a throw away society. We seem to have lost the tolerance for lived-in looking belongings. When something begins to look dingy, instead of restoring the item to its former appearance, it gets tossed into the giveaway pile and replaced with a new version. Not only is this wasteful, but it seems to change the way that I view my possessions. If a blouse looks limp, I no longer choose it to wear. If my dish towels are stained, I don't want them on display when guests are in the house. I have a faded black shirt sitting in the pile of clothing to be dyed soon. It no longer looks nice, so I've avoided wearing it this past year. It used to be a favorite shirt. Once it's re-dyed, I'm hoping it will come back into my clothing rotation. While I shouldn't base my self-esteem on the condition of my belongings, keeping my possessions in good order does make me feel better about myself.

• take advantage of freebies, such as concerts in the park, or books, dvds, and magazines from the library, or free days at museums, or free giveaways at local fast food chains. There are a lot of freebies out there. How can someone possibly feel deprived while eating a free ice cream cone?!

• set yourself up for some serious relaxation, such as a bath with essential oils, candles, and/or music, or lounge in the sun, or have a lie down with music in the background, or spend time in prayerful meditation. For me, de-stressing helps me find my way back to my purpose in this life, which in turn helps me to minimize the significance of a financial set-back.

• this one is probably the most important (but often overlooked) thing to do when self-pity kicks in -- get outside of yourself and do something for someone who could use a little TLC. Volunteering is a great way to find those who could use your kindness and friendly smile. Seeing that someone else is also struggling can put our own situations into proper perspective and give us a sense of belonging to a larger pool of people. 

Is there anything you would add to my list of proactive steps?

Edible Flowers for the Pots and Baskets this Summer

I had planned on buying some flowering annual starts for some pots and hanging baskets that I have in the yard. I have now rethought that idea and am now planning to plant edible flowers from seeds in those containers. As it is now the 3rd week of March, and I haven't started any seeds indoors, I went looking for quick-to-grow flowers. Nasturtiums came up on the list.

I know from past experience that they do grow well in my yard and we enjoy them added to cooking. The flowers, petals, and seed pods are all edible. They can be added to egg dishes, salads, used in place of lettuce on sandwiches, or sauteed with other veggies. The leaves and petals are peppery in taste.

According to WebMD, nasturtiums contain Vitamin C and may help fight bacteria, viruses, fungi, and tumors. As with all foods, they may pose health complications for some people. WebMD specifically cautions against ingestion of nasturtiums for those with kidney disease.

Nasturtiums are easy to grow, requiring with minimal care. Some say they thrive on neglect. For about $2, I can buy a packet of 20 to 25 seeds, enough that I hope will fill about 5 baskets or small pots with nasturtium plants. These should save money over buying flowering annual starts and provide some edibles for our meals. One question -- should I take the seeds out of the gardening budget or the food budget?

Anyone else grow edible flowers?

Comparing the Cost of Egg Salad to Peanut Butter

While peanut butter is a less expensive alternative to luncheon meat for a sandwich filling, there may be even cheaper options. I knew this going into March. When I began making up my grocery list, I became aware that I would have to cut a few items. So, I began brainstorming alternatives for many items on my list. At about $1.40/ 16 ounces for the cheapest peanut butter available, this was one of those items. I have mentioned that we've been using homemade bean spread this month. When using canned beans, bean spread is quick and easy to make and costs about 65 to 75 cents per pint.

Another alternative to peanut butter is egg salad. I think most of us know that egg salad is a frugal sandwich filling. Are you interested in knowing just how frugal it may or may not be? Of course, your cost per pint will be different from mine, as the prices for ingredients vary by region. However, you can use my calculations for your own comparison of peanut butter to egg salad.

I'll use large eggs in this calculation, because this is the size that is often advertised on sale this time of year, and the size which is mentioned in most egg salad recipes. The USDA has sized eggs according to weight, with a large egg weighing in at about 2 ounces. Within a carton of eggs, each weighs slightly less or more than 2 ounces, but a carton of a dozen large eggs must weigh at least 24 ounces, not including the packaging. FYI, the egg weight also includes the shell. Each large egg contains about 3.25 tablespoons of edible content, or 1.625 liquid ounces, or 50 grams boiled and peeled* (about 1.76 ounces). If you use 7 large eggs to make a batch of egg salad, the egg content of the batch would weigh about 12.32 ounces. The ingredients that are added to the chopped, boiled eggs will bring the weight of a batch of egg salad up to just over 17 ounces.

I buy mayonnaise in 1-gallon containers at Cash & Carry, an institutional supply chain that also sells to the public. I pay about $1.79 per quart. A quick Walmart search for my area says that a 30-oz jar of Great Value mayonnaise sells for $2.48. In a large batch of egg salad that uses about 7 or 8 eggs, most recipes call for 4 ounces (about 1/2 cup) of mayonnaise. My Cash & Carry price for the mayo, then, is about 22 cents. The same amount of the Walmart mayo would be about 33 cents. Many recipes also call for pickle relish, prepared mustard, chopped green olives, and/or pimento. The average amount of these ingredients in a 7 or 8 egg batch of egg salad is about 3/4 to 1 ounce (1  1/2 to 2 tablespoons). The cost of these ingredients is variable. If you go with a thrifty version and use Walmart Great Value pickle relish (24-oz jar for $1.98) as your added ingredient, the cost is between 6 and 8 cents for 3/4 to 1 ounce of relish. (I make my own each summer with my vegetable garden rejects, so I estimate my cost for relish is about 2 cents.) It may be obvious that adding chopped green olives or pimentos will increase the final cost in comparison to using sweet pickle relish. (At Walmart, pimentos are 31 cents/ounce and green olives are about 20 cents/ounce.)

The 7 boiled eggs, once peeled, weigh about 12.32 ounces, the mayonnaise weighs about 4 ounces, and the extra ingredients weigh about 3/4 to 1 ounce, bringing the batch of egg salad up to 17.32 ounces.

I recently bought a 5 dozen box of large eggs at Walmart for $4.75. The cost for 7 of those eggs was 55 cents. If I add Cash & Carry mayonnaise, my cost per batch rises to 77 cents. However, this month I was out of mayonnaise. So I substituted homemade, plain yogurt blended with a bit of mustard, vegetable oil, salt, and curry powder. I estimate that my homemade blend for this batch of egg salad was about 13 cents. I also added about 2 tablespoons of homemade relish, at a cost of about 2 cents. My cost for a batch of egg salad was about 70 cents. (If I had mayonnaise, my cost per batch would still only be about 79 cents.) So, 65 to 73 cents for 16 ounces of egg salad, compared to $1.40 for 16 ounces of peanut butter. Egg salad was nearly half the cost of peanut butter, making peanut butter an easy target for the axe from my shopping list.

For someone without access to an institutional supply store and without homemade pickle relish or yogurt, instead shopping at Walmart for all of the ingredients, the cost for 16 ounces of egg salad would be about 87 to 89 cents.

The cheapest peanut butter at Walmart this week is the 64-oz jar of Great Value Creamy Peanut Butter, at $6.44, or $1.59 for 16 ounces (452.5 g). So, about 95 cents for egg salad compared with $1.59 for peanut butter. The egg salad is still less expensive by weight than peanut butter.

So, that's a pound for pound comparison. There is also the consideration of how much egg salad is used per sandwich compared to peanut butter. I don't use the serving size of 2 tablespoons but use about 2  1/2 tablespoons (40 g/ 1.41 oz) of peanut butter per sandwich. With egg salad, I use roughly 2 ounces of egg salad per sandwich (the amount of about 3/4 of a boiled egg combined with extra ingredients). So for me, the filling for a peanut butter sandwich costs about 12 cents, whereas the filling for an egg salad sandwich costs about 8 - 9 cents. If I bought all of the ingredients for egg salad at Walmart, my cost per sandwich would rise to 10 - 11 cents each. Skipping the peanut butter and making egg salad was still the less expensive option, but only by a small amount per serving.

Going into my calculations, I thought for certain that egg salad would be a huge savings over peanut butter. And it is, if measured by weight for each, but not so much when considering my usage. Because we tend to use so much more egg salad per sandwich than peanut butter, the savings (even when figuring in my homemade ingredients) were small. However, our family does use bean spread in comparable amounts to peanut butter. So bean spread at 65 to 75 cents per 16 ounces is about half the actual, per sandwich cost of peanut butter. Considering that a batch of egg salad takes me about 15 minutes of hands-on time, but a batch of beans spread takes about 5 minutes of hands-on time, I'll be sticking to bean spread for the most part, adding in egg salad every now and then for variety. When preparing so many foods for my family from scratch, I am all about saving time as well as money.

We will buy peanut butter again, when the budget allows for it, as it is a food that we enjoy. Enjoying what we eat is important, too!

By the way, if you're looking for a couple of good bean spread recipes, the cookbook Laurel's Kitchen has a few.

Here is a modified hummus recipe. You can skip the sesame seeds, but they do add a nice flavor to the spread.

And here is a modified recipe from Laurel's Kitchen for her Zippy Soybean Spread. I use cooked soybeans in a version similar to this recipe, but I omit the vinegar. I use garlic powder in place of fresh, and omit the green pepper and celery when I don't have it, but this is a good use for celery leaves that you might not otherwise use. I use vegetable oil in place of olive oil, and I use more than 1 tablespoon, probably closer to 3 or 4 tablespoons. I add salt to taste.

And here is my own loose recipe for black bean sandwich spread. Four ingredients: cooked black beans, salsa, oil, and salt.


Over to you -- is egg salad significantly cheaper for you than peanut butter, given the prices for ingredients which are local to you?



information on egg sizing and liquid usable weight of large eggs is from thekitchn.com
*weight of peeled, boiled egg from Joy of Baking

Spring Blooms From the Garden

Crocus blooms don't make very good cut flowers. However, if you dig carefully (keeping the bulb and most of the root structure in tact), you can "borrow" a few crocus bulbs from your garden to enjoy indoors for a week. I dug these crocus on Monday. They are now bringing cheer to the kitchen eating area.

In my rainy climate, most of early spring can pass by with nary a clear day to get outside to enjoy garden blooms. Bringing some of the blooms indoors ensures that I will indeed get that chance to marvel at their beauty. I dig a couple of crocus, grape hyacinths, and primroses, then place in pots of soil for indoor loveliness in the weeks leading up to Easter. I keep them watered like any other houseplant. When the blooms have faded, I return the plants to the garden, adding a bit of bulb food to the hole in the soil as I replant. I water them in good, then rely on our abundant rainfall in March and April to take care of the rest.

I also brought some cherry tree branches into the house. I pruned the fruit trees this afternoon and thought how lovely some stalks of cherry blossoms will be in a few days. So, I brought some of the thinner branches indoors for vases.

How the Month's Grocery Budget is Going

Here’s where we stand with the grocery budget for the month —

It’s a little past mid-month, and I’ve about depleted my allotted $125 for March. I went to Walmart the first weekend of the month, spending $29.81 for the items that I had determined would be least expensive in that store, including 5 dozen eggs, 10 lbs of chicken hindquarters, 2 heads of cabbage, some garlic powder, vegetable oil, and bananas. On March 5th, I shopped the Senior Discount Day at Fred Meyer, following the same game plan as Walmart, spending $57.01 and buying canned green beans, canned dried beans, canned tomatoes, 1 package of chocolate chips*, bread, frozen orange juice concentrate, butter, milk, and ground beef, with the ground beef as my stock-up item. On the 14th, I went to Safeway and bought 8 heads of green cabbage, spending $8.78. This last week, I went to Walmart to buy the Oreo-style cookies, a package of frozen French fries, and another bunch of bananas, spending $5.64. Finally, Monday morning, I was driving right by Cash & Carry, so I decided to stop and finish my grocery list for the month. I bought 10 lbs of carrots, 25 lbs of onions (my 2nd stock-up item for the month), 10 lbs of potatoes, 32 oz container of frozen apple juice concentrate, and a bunch of very green bananas (to get us through the last week of the month, I hope). I have now spent $123.13.

I am well-stocked on all of the food groups. I may not have lots of some particular foods, such as butter and flour, but I do have a large container of oil and enough other grains to get through the month. I did decide to buy loaves of bread instead of baking bread this month. I didn't have enough in the budget to buy the two 50-lb sacks of flour that I normally buy, getting the best price per pound and resulting in homemade loaves of bread that cost about 50 cents/loaf. Instead, I bought the cheapest bread that Fred Meyer sells, at 80 cents/ loaf. Next month, I'll have the money to buy the 2 kinds of flour that I use in bread. A similar situation with buying the canned dried beans. The canned beans were 45 cents each. I've been using them to quickly make a container of sandwich spread once or twice per week to substitute for the peanut butter that was out of my price range. The cost of bean spread using canned beans and other ingredients is about 75 cents per pound, while peanut butter was $1.40 per pound in a 64-oz container. Next month, I will buy a large sack of dried beans to cook for meals and make sandwich spreads.

On a very low budget, I find that I have to pick and choose which foods to buy in large quantities, and which to wait for another month or opportunity. The goal is to buy two or three basic items per month at a super low price and in quantities large enough to last for 3 or 4 months. By doing this every month, after a few months I should have enough of the basics that I can splurge occasionally on non-basic ingredients. It will all work out, and truly, we are being well-fed.

I still have $1.87 of March's grocery money left. Should we need a bit more fresh fruit, I will pick up one more bunch of bananas for 42 cents per pound at Walmart.

In the total food budget (including eating out), we have been exceptionally good. We haven't so much as bought a single burger out. My daughters had coupons for free birthday frozen yogurt and invited me to come, but I declined and sent them off together to enjoy their birthday treat. If I had gone, my frozen yogurt would have cost about $5. In addition, I had to go to the mall on a couple of occasions this month (birthday gift shopping and walking/exercise), every single time I brought my thermos of coffee and some sort of snack in my purse. On another occasion, I had a 3-hour wait in the city for one daughter. Not only did I find free, street parking, but I brought a book and my laptop for entertainment and a thermos of tea and my lunch plus snacks, avoiding the purchase of any food or drink while I waited. Also, our Sunday lunches have reverted to eating home-prepared, quick foods. We add interest by eating on the deck, on the grass, or at the mall. When we have warm, sunny Sundays, we plan on cooking hotdogs over the fire ring or taking sandwiches to the beach for our after-church lunches. Our original goal was to preserve a family time each week, where we all share a relaxing meal together. Eating out after church helped get that going. Now, I think we are continuing but without the restaurant expense.


*the chocolate chips sound like a money-waster on such a tight budget. However, I am using them to make homemade candies for our family several times this month. If you figure a regular chocolate bar weighs 1.55 ounces, then one 12-oz bag of chocolate chips would yield 7.74 candy bar's worth of chocolate. The 12-oz bag of chocolate chips cost just under $2. 7.74 candy bars would cost about $6.11, based on a price of 79 cents per bar at Dollar Tree. Maybe this sounds like rationalizing the purchase of a non-essential item. For us, having some treats sprinkled throughout the month may prevent some of the discouragement that can set in when you constantly feel deprived.