Living Frugal, Not Cheap

The store sales are not looking that good this week. There seems to be a lot of frozen junk food and convenience products that I don't use, and very little "real" food on special. In addition to the fresh vegetables we need, I'm going to look for sales on fresh spinach, hot cocoa, flour, canned milk, sesame crackers, and frozen fish. I have a coupon for the fish, so if its really on sale I'll get it. Sometimes they advertise prices that are the stores regular price, and put a big sign on it and make it look like it's on sale. That's really annoying.

I'm also going to try and pick up some items that I have rain checks for. They had a sale on mayo the week before Thanksgiving and sold out immediately. And last week the hot cocoa they had for 99 cents a box was gone, too. I've been paying more attention to getting the rain checks for sale items. In the past I would have just let it go.

I went through all 3 freezers this morning and updated my inventory. I found a 2nd ham hidden behind a pile of corned beef. Yay! Keeping a list of what I have helps me plan meals, so I can alternate among chicken, pork, beef, and fish and we don't get into a rut. I realized this morning that I am about halfway through my 4 month stockpile of food -- DH has been out of work 6 weeks, and I stopped buying meat when he got notice 10 weeks ago. On the one hand, a lot of the stockpile needs to get eaten before it gets freezer burned, on the other it's a little frightening to see how much food we don't have any more.

I haven't got solid ideas for next week's menu, but I'm planning to use items I have on hand, combined with some freezer leftovers:

-- chicken quesadillas, refried beans, vegetable
-- corned beef and potato hash, vegetable
-- kielbasa, rice/potato, vegetable
-- soup of some kind

I'll come up with more ideas after I've been shopping and I see what I can find this week.