Food...

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So here I am. I have a husband, three kids and a dog who all have to eat.

I am trying to spend as little as possible but while saving money is a big deal, time is also a big deal.

I see the awesome deals every week at all of the stores but my reality is that I just cannot run around to get the best prices. In my town I have a Walmart, 2 Dave's Marketplace, 2 Stop and Shops, a CVS and 2 Rite Aids. My beloved Target is 20 minutes away (an honestly, the closest one is terrible compared to the one we used to live near) and my closest Whole Foods is 30 minutes away (insert super sad face here). Online shopping for clothing and random household stuff has definitely been my savior, especially Christmas shopping.

Each week I shop at Stop and Shop (despise it but they have the best sales). I go to Dave's Marketplace when they are having a great sale and Walmart once every few weeks when I need food and the other stores aren't having any great sales. Target is a luxury stop that I only do once every couple of months and BJ's (a warehouse store) is somewhere I go every four or five months because it is so inconvenient to go to.

Rite Aid and CVS are super close to me but I have only been shopping at CVS as I just cannot get out of the house enough to chase drugstore deals at two stores. Even CVS runs are only every few weeks.

Even with cutting coupons I am still spending $100 a week on groceries and household stuff (paper towels, toilet paper, toiletries, etc). I suppose that is really good for where I live but I still feel like a failure sometimes. I honestly go the the supermarket and have a list but always add other things as I am walking through the store. It's never junk food, just stuff that I realize we need because the original list I made is tiny.

The worst part is that lately I have found myself making choices based on price instead of nutrition. How terrible is that? Now, I don't buy chips and junk food but on regular foods I'll take the cheaper option instead of the more expensive healthier option. It's like I am using the fact that I have three kids and no time to excuse the fact that I am buying less healthy stuff.

You know what? I am done with this. We have debt to pay off, rent to pay on our townhouse and a big car payment on our SUV but I am sick of making judgement call on our food. I am sick of buying chicken breast from the grocery store that I cook and don't end up eating because it tastes like crap. I am sick of buying stuff because it is cheaper than something else. From now on nutrition is king. Screw the supermarket meat- it is terrible. I will only be buying meat from Whole Foods- not because I am a snob but because it tastes better (way, way better) and the animals are raised humanely. This means that I will choose food bases on the nutrition factor over the price factor. My kids love certain fruits so those fruits will be bought, even if they cost more.

I am not a snobby food person. I am just a mom who wants to feed her family as healthy as possible. If that means my grocery spending goes up, then so be it. It is my job to teach my kids how to eat healthy so if I have to put off paying off debt longer than so be it.

If I'm going to blow my grocery budget every week (I originally wanted to just spend $75 a week for a family of 5) then I might as well buy the good stuff!

An Open Letter to Stop and Shop...

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Dear Stop and Shop,

I am writing this because I have had it with your terrible produce. Everything I buy from you is gross! The strawberries are moldy, the potatoes are rotten (my most recent batch had mold growing on them) and the expensive avocados I bought are full of gray, rotten spots.

I really thought that when you came out with your new guarantee of double your money back if you're not satisfied that you would upgrade the quality of your produce but you didn't. It still sucks and I have had it with buying it. I shouldn't have to truck my butt back to the store to get a refund for crappy produce- I should be able to buy a darn bag of potatoes without having to throw at least half away.

Due to your lack of desire to provide your customers with high quality produce, I will not be buying it from you anymore. Now I will go out of my way to purchase higher quality (and more expensive) produce from Whole Foods (Shaws, Target and BJ's suck too) or from the farmer's market. This means that I will be spending more of my time and using way more gas but at least I'll know that I won't be feeding my family moldy, rotten junk.

So, there you have it Stop and Shop- because of your inability to sell decent produce I will no longer be buying it from you. You should be ashamed of the crap that you try to pass off as produce.

Signed,

One Disgruntled Mom

Stocking Up on Meat at Whole Foods

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In an effort to feed my family higher quality food I have been buying all natural meat, mostly from Whole foods.

Has this been expensive? Yes, yes it has but I don't care because the meat isn't pumped up with weird stuff and it just simply tastes way better than the stuff that the grocery stores sell.

To attempt to keep the costs down I have been keeping an eye on Whole Foods' sales every week to see what I can stock up on.

Whole Foods runs their sales from Wednesdays to Tuesdays with the new ads coming out on Tuesday evenings.

This week, in my neck of the woods (good old Massachusetts) the following meat is on sale:

Split Chicken Breast $2.99 a pound (normally $4.99)

Boneless Center Cut Pork Chops $4.99 a pound (normally $7.99)

Beef Bottom Round Roast $4.99 a pound (normally $6.99)

I may make a trip on Friday to pick up some pork chops and a roast. I bought some pork chops last week and they were so tender and yummy but they will taste even better at $4.99 a pound instead of $7.99 a pound. The split chicken breast is great too; I used some tonight to make a teriyaki chicken/broccoli/noodle stir fry.

Pink Slime or Pulverized Cow Anus?

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For the past few weeks I have been slowly moving towards only buying my family all natural meat. I was not doing this necessarily for humane reasons but mostly because it just tastes better.

My husband didn't really care either way what kind of meat I was buying, though he does agree the natural stuff tastes better, but after seeing a story on the news about the infamous pink slime he has forbidden me from buying regular ground beef.

Now, I wasn't going to be buying it anyways but it is nice to have him on board with us eating more natural whole foods and if seeing some pink goo that is made up of the crap left on the slaughterhouse floor is what it took to do that then hip-hip-hooray!

What does switching to buying all natural and grass fed meat mean? Well, first and foremost it means that I will be spending more on meat which to me is a moot point because as long as it is healthier and tastes better then oh well. Second of all it means that I will be shopping at the happiest place on earth, Whole Foods, a lot more which means I'll have to plan my shopping better as Whole Foods is not very close to my house. When I can't get to Whole Foods I will supplement with Stop and Shop's Nature's Promise line of meats as they are all natural, taste very good and do not contain pink slime.

I am not an alarmist by nature and as I said, I was switching us to better meat options before this pink slime being in 70% of the ground beef story came to light. The slime is obviously not going to kill anyone who eats it because the Lord knows that I would be dead by now if it did, but honestly as a mom my benchmark for what I feed my family cannot be "if it was approved by the FDA then it must be good". I don't feed my family the $1 a package hot dogs- they are safe to eat but definitely questionable in the ingredient department. I don't feed my family Hamburger Helper- it is safe to eat but the nutrition is total crap and even I as a novice cook can throw some beef and noodles in a pan to make a homemade version. Plus, I don't like yucky stuff in my food. I am still a picky four year old child at heart and knowing that something I am eating was once used in dog food before a system was devised to make it edible for humans makes me gag. I buy my dog very expensive dog food so I even doubt the stuff he eats has pulverized cow anus in it (but if it does then I won't judge him for liking pulverized cow anus, it's just not my thing).

So please, join me in my journey to feed my family better while somehow trying to stick to my $100 a week budget (this includes groceries, household cleaners, toiletries, diapers, pet food). Notice I said trying- I expect to fail miserably for a bit while I figure this whole thing out called whole foods on a budget. And yes, you will see me buying things that are not whole foods- I have three kids, am lazy by nature and have a husband who enjoys certain foods so all whole foods all of the time is just not going to happen in this house. You can also stay tuned on the chance that I may just say screw it and just start feeding my kids spray cheese out of the can.

Storing Meat and Why Whole Foods is Awesome

To me, being frugal is not just about saving money but it is also about saving time. I have three little monsters to deal with all day which means I try to go to the store as little as possible. One way I avoid the stores is by stocking up on meat. We eat meat at pretty much each meal as we are not the beans and rice hippie vegan type of family so having it on hand is a must.

This is why I stock up- we always have something to eat for dinner and I don't have to drag the kids out to the store for a last minute ingredient. The most important thing about stocking up is being able to store the meat properly. I know others just wrap it up in some plastic wrap and aluminum foil but I use my awesome Food Saver which we've had for over six years and is still going strong. I am very picky about food quality so I like to vacuum pack my food to eliminate freezer burn and any hint of ice crystals. The food also lasts way longer in the freezer when vacuum packed and in my opinion, tastes better. The bags can be pricey but I usually wait to buy them when Kohl's has a 30% off coupon. It is well worth the price of the bags though because like I said, I won't eat meat from the freezer unless it's vacuum packed.

This morning when the baby was sleeping and my other two kids were beating the crap out of each other I packaged up chicken breasts and ground beef that my husband bought on Sunday. He got 6 pounds of boneless skinless chicken breast from Whole Foods which was on sale for $2.99 a pound (and wow, is their chicken breast so much better tasting than the stuff from the grocery store plus I barely had to trim any fat off of it whereas the chicken breast I buy at the regular grocery store has tons of nastiness on it I have to trim) and he got about 7 pounds of 90% ground beef from BJ's for $2.89 a pound (regular price-if you buy the huge tubes it is $2.69 a pound).

I put two chicken breasts in each Food Saver bag which ended up being enough for five meals (we ate two chicken breast for dinner last night). As for the ground beef, I put aside one and a half pounds to make meatloaf for dinner tonight and then portioned out the rest in 10 ounce servings for future dinners (I use a scale to do this).

Here is the packaged up chicken. I made sure to lay it flat in the bags so that it would defrost quickly in cold water.

That is how I save time and money. I buy meat when it is on sale and then I freeze it so that I won't have to drag myself and the lovely children to the store more than I have to.

And just a side note about Whole Foods- the nearest store is about twenty minutes from my house. My husband made a trip there especially for the chicken breast but when he got there they were all out of it. The wonderful people who work there told him that because they were out of the value packs of chicken that he could get the more expensive chicken breast from the meat counter for the same price. What awesome customer service! Stop and Shop and Shaws would have given a rain check and told him to go screw (rain checks are great but not when you need the food that day and not when you don't feel like having to truck your butt out of the house again to buy it, especially when the particular store is out of your way). This is just another reason that I love Whole Foods and really wish that they were closer to me so that I could shop there more often. Plus, their meat and produce is far superior to what I can get at the two crap-holes I mentioned before,