Posts Tagged gardening

Cari’s spending: Getting close to admitting we need to up the budget (and a bonus garden post/grumble)

My first attempt at fried green tomatoes. We ate them with plum chutney. So good!

My first attempt at fried green tomatoes. We ate them with plum chutney. So good!

We’re either on budget or over this week, depending on whether or not I decide to finally go ahead and tack on that Fetal Food Allowance that so many of you have generously insisted we qualify for. It does make sense: I’m eating more and craving/needing more expensive foods (obscene quantities of fruit, more moderate amounts of orange juice, and the more-than-occasional bar of dark chocolate with blueberries) because I’m pregnant. And that certainly won’t let up once the baby arrives. As I recall it from Kiddo #1’s babyhood, during those first six months of exclusive breastfeeding I was even hungrier than during his pregnancy. I ate more in those early nursing months than during the pregnancy (and lost all the baby weight while eating that much. Exclusive breastfeeding, mamas. It’s good on about 50 different levels).

But I’m stubborn, and highly competitive, and I’m still hoping to find a way to stick to the original $125 a week budget now that our family is growing. It’s possible. I know it is. If there hadn’t been a pumpkin-milkshake-and-harvest-burger Burgerville incident over the weekend, we would have come very close to the budget this week. That means it’s totally possible. I’ve only been baking about half the bread we eat in the past few weeks, so if I can get back to baking all our bread, and ration the chocolate bars to one every week and a half…

Yeah. Maybe.

So…the numbers:

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Cari’s spending: under budget, with bananas

So this week’s damage: $112.57 for groceries. Looking back over the receipts, we have apparently been consuming massive quantities of fresh-ground organic peanut butter, bananas, pears, and orange juice. Clearly the fetus has been making up the shopping lists lately. We also bought broccoli twice because I was craving it and we aren’t growing any in the garden.

Broccoli, man. Total garden space hog for very little payoff. We grew it our first season and never again.

(Wait…what’s that you say? You saw me and my family at an ice cream shop on Saturday evening? And yet you see no accounting for that here in the budget post? Well, fine. Ice cream was eaten, and enjoyed by all. But I don’t have the receipt, because what kind of kill-joy saves the ice cream receipt? We took my mom out for ice cream. Let’s call it an entertainment expense. No way it was enough to push us over budget, anyway.)



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It’s surplus week on $50 a Week

Emily’s got a freezer full of pig parts. Me? Fall garden cleanup this weekend resulted in this:

The big'uns

The big'uns

The little'uns

The little'uns

I haven’t weighed them yet, but hefting the bags I’m estimating we’re looking at about twenty pounds of green tomatoes. Pickle them? Fry them? Sort small batches into paper bags and hope they ripen? What the hell to do with this many green tomatoes?

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(Really damn good) dinner for three, plus lunch for one = $9.20

dinner

Are you sitting down? Get this. I did some math. As I was rolling out the dough for the tortillas yesterday evening, I got to thinking about Tama’s post that originally inspired me to make my own tortillas. She’d figured out that 9 tortillas cost her 40 cents. That’s 40 cents for all of them, not each. So I got to wondering how much our whole meal would add up to. Since not all the ingredients had been purchased in the last week or so, and so no receipts handy, I pulled the prices off the New Seasons website, and then did some rough guess (fuzzy?) math based on the amounts used in this meal. (We do all our non-farmer’s-market shopping at New Seasons. Yes, it’s kinda spendy there. No, I’m not going to start shopping elsewhere. But that’s a post for another day.)

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