This used to be 25 lbs of galas, but we've been snacking them pretty hard all week. It's still a lot of apples.

Over budget.

Spent this week: $165.46
Spent in the past 24 hours: $0

Same old song. We would have been okay, if not for the Thai food.

We spent $110.46 on groceries. That includes $10 worth of ice cream and $6 worth of orange juice. (Pregnancy tax.) We spent $28 at the farm stand of our favorite no-spray u-pick. Their u-pick is over for the season, but they’ve got great deals right now on stuff that’s already picked. That is, 25% anything you buy by the case. We go through gala apples like water around here, and apples keep well on our nice, cold (unheated, uninsulated) sun porch. We got 25 lbs of beautiful organic (minus the pricey certificate) gala apples for $18. That $18 puts us outside of our budget, but we won’t have to buy apples for a few weeks and I’m also going to make and can a few batches of apple butter, which will extend our quickly dwindling toast spread stash. (Must also finish making jam from the rest of the frozen blueberries, and get started on the marionberries.) Bonus: the sunporch now smells very strongly of cold apples. The other $10 was spent on Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, some kind of hot pepper that Billy will eat alone because I don’t care for them, and some gorgeous bartlett pears. We’ve still got half the broccoli and cauliflower, and those peppers, so that $10 goes toward feeding us next week, too… So there was some spending this week that will translate to lower costs in the coming weeks. All that is fine.

The problem is, as always, the takeout thing. Some days you’re either too busy or too tired to cook, or you just really, really, really want someone else to do the cooking. Or nothing will satisfy you but something very specific that would be a huge pain in the ass to try to make yourself. Friday was one of those evenings. I was tired as hell and just couldn’t be arsed to cook. Thai food it was. It did give us each leftovers enough for lunch the next day, but still. $27 for takeout that night? Yeah. We need to be careful with that. Be sure that as this pregnancy continues and once the baby is here and we’re ALL as tired as I am now that we don’t resort to takeout more than once every other week or so. It just adds up too fast.

So, nothing new here to report. I’ll show you the apple butter after it’s made.

Oh! That reminds me! We also got a big pumpkin for 33 cents at the farm stand. All pumpkins were three-for-a-dollar no matter the size. It’s big enough to give us some soup and more risotto AND some pumpkin butter. Mmmm…pumpkin butter. Canning pumpkin butter is kind of controversial, because pumpkin is a low-acid vegetable. Low-acid foods don’t preserve as safely. I’m thinking just a small batch of pumpkin butter to store in the freezer…

Heh. With all my free time, that is. I’ve got all these Little Suzie Homemaker plans, but I’ve also got a kid, freelance work, and a novel in revisions that’s begging for my attention. Oh yeah…and that husband guy. It’s enough to make you want to order in some Thai food, you know?

This $50 a Week thing has been great for our family budget, but it’s definitely added a good deal of pressure for me. Our definition of eating well is fresh, local, and organic. To be able to continue eating that way while keeping to the budget has meant that I need to produce as much of our food as possible, be that by growing it, baking it, or canning it. That’s a full-time job. But I’ve already got three jobs: Mom, novelist, freelance editor. Add farmer and baker to that and I’m fucking tired. And the berries aren’t even canned yet.

Yeah. Maybe we’ll have Thai again tonight.