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Hey everyone! I’m Stephinie from Gypsy Forest. I’m so honored to have been invited to share a bit about how we eat here in Tricia’s space……

I want to start by thinking about the idea of cheap eating. Something to really consider when you look at your food budget is to think about the value of what you are feeding your family. For example, coconut oil or extra virgin olive oil will always cost more than vegetable oil. While I do think budgeting and mindfulness of what we spend is important, I also think it’s good to remember that we are what we eat. If there is one area to splurge on or to not feel guilty about. It’s food. I like to think of eating well as the best health insurance there is.

That being said, I like being frugal and saving money. We do have a budget. I do my best to feed my family of six on $200 a week. This might be high or low for some of you. It averages out to about $34 per week per family member. Or roughly $30 a day for all six of us. I have big eaters. My kids eat more than my husband and I do. I’m serious, they are *always* hungry. We buy as much organic as we can. We eat vegetarian meals 4-5 times a week & meals with meat 2-3 times per week. We shop as much as we can in the bulk aisle and take advantage of our local CSA. It is by far the best deal for seasonal organic produce. In the peak of the summer my share is usually FOUR large bags of organic vegetables for an average of $31. We limit our packaged foods and make a lot of our own snacks. We eat a lot of rice+veggie+bean dishes. Our favorite snacks are carrots, peanut butter & apples, nut butter toast, almonds, muffins, bean dip & veggies, homemade crackers, and smoothies. (and as much fruit as I can afford to buy, seriously… always hungry!)

I make extra most evenings for dinner and pull the next days lunch from our meal before we sit down to eat. I have a good idea of how much we eat. By putting away lunch beforehand, I know I have lunch for at least my husband and sometimes my two younger ones & I. This saves so much hassle for packing lunches for my husband. And even if I just pull some of the veggies & beans/meat, I can be reative the next day for lunch. While my husband usually gets leftovers…… my younger daughter sometimes grumbles over this idea. I’ve learned to recreate leftover dinner by making it into a soup or stir fry or stuffing it into a burrito for lunch the next day. She hardly notices.

Speaking of lunch, I always pack snacks or lunch when we’re out and about. Popcorn, apples, carrots, muffins, nuts, trail mix & water. It becomes second nature after awhile and saves so much money. Hungry kids are grumpy kids. And that’s no fun for anyone. Bring food. I promise it’s worth the hassle (and your budget will thank you.)

If you’d like to read some more about food you can read my post about my pantry here,

visit the food budget challenge I did here, and see my recipes here.

It was so nice meeting you all. Thanks again for having me Tricia.

Eat well~

Stephinie

Tricia here:  Thank you so much Stephinie for sharing your beautiful blog with us and I can’t wait to dig into your food budget challenge post.  I will see you back here tomorrow for this weeks Pinalong.  It will probably be sickness related as I cannot seem to shake this flu bug.  See you then!

Tricia from FarmishMomma very kindly asked me to contribute a post about how to eat real food at home on a budget. I agreed . . . and then I realized I might be a terrible person to ask about this sort of thing. The truth is that budgets are real in our life – we run a small business and make poverty level income. We are strict about how we pend money in a lot of ways in our life – clothes come from the thrift store, our house is a cheap fixer-upper, we have one small old car, we don’t take fancy trips or own lots of gadgets and gizmos, our kids don’t go to costly schools or classes.

Food is, actually, what we don’t budget. My husband and I run a cafe & bakery, and a grain CSA, so it’s no surprise that food is very important to us. Food is what we are (all of us, whether we consciously think about it or not), and at the end of the day, two things are most important in our family: that we showed love to the people around us, and that the food we ate nourished us well. Yes, we occasionally eat crappy pizza or buy a bag of chips. But for the most part, food is our passion and what we love to share with others.

Even though we aren’t strict about how much we spend on food, that doesn’t mean our food expenses are outrageous.

We grow a lot of vegetables for ourselves, especially salad greens (which are very labor-intensive, and therefore expensive to buy). If we had a tiny yard and could only have a few plants, I would have berries or a fruit tree. Fruits are highly perishable, never taste as good when you by them (even from the farmer’s market), and fruit is very expensive to buy.

At the farmer’s market, I can easily get carried away and buy more than we can even use, so I bring a certain amount of cash with me, and that’s all I have to spend. At the grocery store, I don’t even walk down the aisles with packaged foods. Expensive, and mostly very unhealthy and hard for our bodies to digest – what a wicked bad combo! Usually my two small children are shopping with me, which is an extra incentive to stay far out of sight of cereal, chips, cookies, etc – much easier to just avoid that fight altogether.

Because of our cafe, I’m able to get a lot of our food in bulk, which is much more reasonable. If I didn’t own the cafe, I could do the same through our local coop – foods like grains, oil, sugar, salt, nuts, dried fruit, etc don’t spoil quickly, and if you have the space to store them, it’s much more economical to buy a 25 pound bag of them.

I’m a huge fan of meal plans (see my old post about that here), and also of leftovers. Food shouldn’t be wasted, and good home cooking is delicious re-heated. We have one night a week where we eat up all our leftovers, and that’s usually what we have for lunch, also.

I hope this was helpful! I’m happy to answer any questions, and I have lots of simple recipes available at Fields & Fire. Blessings on your weekend, everyone.

Adrie

http://www.localgrain.org/fieldsandfire

Thank you Adrie for taking time away from your super busy schedule to join me here.  Love your post on Meal Planning!