Super Savings Saturday - Frugal shopping, garden harvest and gleaning
We have a week of food "stuff" here at our house! The garden is slowly starting to produce - we've been picking lettuce, basil and strawberries every day for a couple of weeks and today it was a handful of beans to add to that. Here's today's harvest:
We also got three strawberries that we promptly ate! We've been averaging 2-6 per day with the strawberries so we've just been eating them as they come. They're little and sweet. I'm hoping that next year we can have more as the plants mature more. I had to cut back the kale since it was getting eaten by something. Hopefully it will recover - I'd love to make some kale chips. Peppers and tomatoes should be ripe end of this week or next week, depending on the weather. I can't wait!
We also gleaned raspberries and cherries from a friend's yard today. She was starting to compete with the birds so put out a call for friends to come and pick. Here's what we brought home:
Two kinds of red raspberries, yellow raspberries and the cherries. The cherries are bitter so we'll use those for cooking and for jam rather than snacking. I'm planning on freezing most of the raspberries for use in smoothies and baking later this year. Another friend may let us pick too and I'm hoping to get at least 4 liters of raspberries, though I'd like more. I keep having a feeling that things are going to tighter than tight for a while and anything we have in the freezer and pantry will be a help. I'm going to halve and pit the cherries and freeze those for the baking. Raspberries go first though since they don't keep as long.
We also got our CSA this week, though I didn't get a photo. We received:
Two large zucchini
3 Kohlrabi
2 Purple Beets (with the previous week's beets I now have enough to make a jar or two of pickled)
Lettuce
A small head of broccoli
Dry pint raspberries
Dry pint cherries
I'm going to make and freeze zucchini bread and muffins this week and the pickled beets. If we don't eat the kohlrabi I'll blanch and freeze those as well.
Our last stop was the grocery store. Here's what we bought:
Canned Gisha Mandarin Oranges 10oz 2 @ $1 ea = $2
Crisco Vegetable Oil 48oz $2.79
1lb Bacon $2.99 with coupon
15oz Rope Sausage 2 @ 2/$5 = $5 with store coupon (for our camping trip later this summer)
Cantaloupe $2
4lb Pink Lady Apples $4.99
5lb Carrots $3.49
Sweet Cherries 2.66lb @ $3.49/lb $6.33 with 1st lb free coupon
Yellow Bananas 2.88lb @ $0.59/lb = $1.70
Cucumber $0.59
Gallon 1% Milk $3 with store coupon (the children like this better than skim)
Greek Gods Yogurt 32oz $3.79
Total Spent: $38.13
Saved (according to store receipt) $9.36 or 20%
As the garden and CSA give us more produce, I'm hoping to focus on buying meat and pantry items rather than having to buy produce. We'll still buy milk, bananas and a few other things but I'm hoping we can cut way back on produce and stock up on some things we'll need in the future.
Come back Monday to see what we're eating this week!
