Glad you enjoyed it :) I have two little boys now and another kid on its way, and if it’s another boy I know how much trouble I’ll be in!! Gotta save up as much as we can now! Haha…

All I can say is…wait until you have a couple of teenage boys to feed!! I used to buy a “family pack” of chicken breasts to feed the four of us (with some leftover) and now I buy 2 family packs for one meal and there are NO left overs. I do garden, but try to get those teenagers to be full on “rabbit” food….not gonna happen. Some days I am actually thankful that I have one kid who is lactose intolerant….keeps the dairy portion of our bill down! But then non-dairy “milks” like almond are expensive and who can deny a hungry boy a bowl of cereal. (Homemade granola – it’s yummy!) That’s one thing I do….make lots of stuff homemade and that does help.

Woah! you’re doing great with that gardening – love it!

We have two adults and one child that eats more than I do. Sometimes I spend $100 for the week, some times $40. I only shop sale items. I keep my fruits and vegetables to an average of $1.25 per pound. It Isn’t always perfect, and I don’t carry around paper tallying my every penny. It I also don’t buy $4 raspberries in December. We eat a lot of kale at $1 pp, and cauliflower at $1.25 pp.

I try to keep my meat average at $2 pp. Sometimes bone in chicken breast is .88 pp. I debone it, and with the 30% waste it is still just $1.17 pp. Then I throw all the scraps in a crock pot for hours to make stock that is better than what you get in the store. When this sale pops up I will borrow from another weeks cash and buy 100 pounds. We eat beef once or twice a week so this all balances the $2 pp.

We do cheese, butter, cream, but zero milk. It’s a sugar thing, milk is full of it. I keep cheese to $3 pp ($1.50 per block), butter at $2.50 pp, and cream to $2 per pint.

Typical dinner is one pound of meat, two pounds of vegetables. I got Italian sausages on sale for $1.25 for 17/18 ounces. Those were diced and stir fried with garden peppers, an onion, and a bag of frozen green beans. Under $3 for three pounds of food.

The garden provides our cucumbers, tomatoes, and bell peppers for the year. For those who don’t think they can do it, you really can. If you have land, or someplace to hang planters, you can have a garden. Our 4 x 4 cucumber bed produced 65 pounds of cucumbers this year. Two tomato beds are still producing, and we are almost at 100 pounds. The peppers are in a two by two bed and I have picked thirty. Four small red lettuce plants in a planter provided two months of salads before they bolted.

We are in the south, lower cost of living and great weather.

Oh my gosh, Kati, really? Tomato sauce can turn into minestrone soup? Whoa! >>>BRAIN BLOWN<<<

Taco soup, sounds ah-mah-zing!