Category Archives: Frugal Living

Ok, friends, I ran out of time yesterday, and I am so excited to hear how many of you are really excited to try this out!  So, I think some more details are in order. If this bores you to death you can skip it all. 🙂 But several of you asked questions so here’s more particulars:

• What do I buy organic? Here’s the key: You don’t have to buy everything organic. I used the Dirty Dozen and the Clean Fifteen.  (A dozen foods that are a must-organic-buy and fifteen foods that you continue buying conventional.)  I used this as my guide.  So helpful!  So, I switched to organic apples, nectarines, peaches, potatoes, beets, leeks, carrots, meat, milk, eggs, coffee, chocolate.  After reading a bunch and asking around to some of my food experts :), I did not switch to organic grains or dried beans.  Perhaps eventually, but it seemed like much less of a priority. So I just stuck to only whole-wheat, oats, brown rice, etc. Nothing white.   The key is this: It doesn’t make sense to buy organic processed food. If a food is processed (think goldfish crackers), then none of the original pesticides (or nutrition!) are left so it really doesn’t matter.  I also stuck with Tillamook cheese. It’s not organic, but it comes from local farmers.  Plus, I love supporting them.
• GMOs: One of my personal goals was to avoid Genetically-modified food.  More than 90% of soy and corn is genetically modified. So, I basically sought to eliminate soy and corn altogether (FYI: Food Should Taste Good tortilla chips are made with non-GMO corn).  This is a huge challenge. Soy and Corn are in probably 90% of all foods in the grocery store.  Two options for corn: Buying fresh from local farmers, or buying organic.
• Azure: Update on Azure Standard. It is open to the public, you just have to order something like $400 at a time, so if several of you partnered together you could do it.  Check out their website (create an account, then you will be able to see prices).  Great deals on local, organic produce.
• A Greater Cause: For me, the point of all of this is the ability to put our food dollars to good use.  This includes, of course, creating healthy meals for my family. But this also includes supporting local farmers, and “voting” with each dollar I spend.  What has struck me the most about all this is how our food industry has taken the feet right out from under developing nations.  And, if we really were able to hack our budgets down to the bare minimum, how much more financial freedom we would have to help those who have nothing, much less snacks and convenience food.  I know this isn’t for everyone, but I think it’s exciting to see that it’s not just about using our non-food dollars for good, we can use all those dollars for good.
• Remember, Honoring your husband is a biblical mandate, buying organic food is not. I just want to make this really clear:  I am doing this experiment, and this switch, with my husband’s enthusiastic blessing. He loves it. He is all for it, and loves the changes we’ve made. He watched Food, Inc. and the Future of Food with me.  But if your husband is not for this, your biblical responsibility is to honor your husband’s wishes.  So, please hear my heart in this–no one is judging your grocery cart. 🙂  If you can make these changes, awesome. If not, joyfully bless your husband with the foods he loves.  (And suggest that your next datenight is snuggling on the couch watching a food documentary. 🙂  Anyway, first things first: honor your man’s wishes. I have found most husband’s love 1) home-cooked meals, and 2) frugal, joyful wives. Prove that both are possible!

Thanks for following along on this fun little challenge. Remember that Jesus’ mandate was, “Go and make disciples…” not “Go and preach about organic food.” 🙂 Love God, love people, and let’s seek to make every dollar count for doing good in our world.  Bless you!

Well, today’s the day! We finish the one-month Food Stamp Challenge (click to read the challenge): seeing if it’s possible for our family to live on the budget of food stamps while  eating organic, local, seasonal, whole foods.

So, our official total, for one month (drumroll please!) was $186. Yes.  I know, I was astonished.  Our goal was $275, so I was very pleased. This included meat, produce, dairy, etc.  Now, let’s be very frank about more than just the dollar total.  It was eye-opening and challenging.

Hands down the biggest eye-opener for me was that whole, local, organic food is not what is most expensive.  Convenience is expensive. Snacks are expensive.  And oh, do I love my convenience and my snacks. 🙂  That’s truly where the cost is in making the switch–it costs time and it costs my craving.  We didn’t buy anything pre-made and had only whole grains. So that meant baking all bread from scratch, cooking rice, soaking dried beans, chopping vegetables, roasting whole chickens, making stock.  I found that I needed to devote most of one day (which isn’t a whole day because I was still playing and taking care of kids) to cooking for the week.  As long as I was good about planning ahead, it wasn’t really that bad. The tricky part is if I didn’t plan ahead it meant really being in a pickle come lunchtime.  But then again, that was a great motivator to get diligent about planning ahead!

When I was busy I’d often resort to peanut butter sandwiches and apple slices for the kids.  But I figured with organic peanut butter, organic apples, and homemade 100% whole wheat bread even that wasn’t bad, right?  The other tricky part is that Dutch really wasn’t into to many of my healthy creations. He has yet to find quinoa and garbanzo beans very appetizing.  Pancakes are still #1 on his favorite list.  But again, making them from scratch with whole wheat flour, organic whole milk, organic eggs, and sneaking in carrot puree, they are actually a pretty decent meal.

What I missed most, hands-down, was convenience and snacks.  We don’t have an air-popper, so popcorn was out. I couldn’t bring myself to pay the price for whole-wheat tortillas, so quesadillas were out (but toasted cheese is good!).  We didn’t buy crackers or chips or breakfast cereal, but relied on old-fashioned oatmeal and fruit or toast.  For sweets and treats I made homemade whole-wheat banana bread with real butter (yum!), and even made a few batches of cookies using ground oatmeal instead of flour (which tastes better than whole wheat, to me) and mixing in garbanzo bean puree (which is what gluten-free recipes use) and shredded zucchini.  I know, sounds gross but they were delicious.  There was no way I was going without my cookies!

So I realize this might not be realistic for a lot of families. But my goal was just to see the difference it would make, basically, if we traded convenience and snacks for wholeness and health.

And, just in case you think my children were starving, this was a fun tidbit.  Some of you know that in August at Heidi’s checkup she was supposedly in the red-zone for being underweight.  So I had to visit a nutritionist at the end of the month.  Well, they weighed her at the appointment and she’d gained two whole pounds in one month, getting her up out of the red-zone!  So yeah, apparently this worked to pork up my girl. 🙂

But yes, in the interest of full-disclosure, I will admit that this week, when we were out of a lot of things and Dutch kept asking, “Can I have..?  Can I have…?” and having me answer that no we didn’t have any of that, he responded, “Mommy, what can I ever eat??”  Ooh, poor boy.  But then we discovered that he loves omelets  with cheese so he was happy.  He even discovered that he loves salmon and loves eating chicken straight off the bone.

:: Helpful hints: Ok, so how does any of this help you.  I’m certainly not an expert after only a month, but here are a few helpful things from the past month.

• Snacks and convenience are what break the bank. If you really are serious about low-budget and high-health, it seems that this is the key to success. I know this isn’t realistic for everyone. For for my mom, who has some physical limitations, it doesn’t make sense for her to go to all the work of roasting whole chickens and making stock when she can afford to buy organic chicken breasts and stock. But IF budget is the name of your game, this is how to go about it.
• Similarly, just remember the less they do the less you pay. Meaning, if beans are in a can, you’re paying for the work they did to put them there. If they’re in a bag or in bulk, you’ll save lots.  This is most clear with veggies.  Whole organic carrots  are under $1/lb. at every grocery store. But baby peeled organic carrots can be $3-$4/lb.  You do the peeling, you save the money. Same goes for oatmeal, homemade bread (which is so easy with a breadmachine), etc. etc. I think you get the picture.  Health is not expensive, convenience is.

Personal deals: If you live in the NW, here’s what I found:

• Safeway has whole organic chickens for $2.99/lb, and if you keep your eye out you can get ones that are near their freshness date and they’ll be 30% off. Then, if you can take advantage of that $10 off $50 coupon from Safeway, you’ll be getting that chicken for about $1.67/lb, which is a great deal.
• I was able to buy produce through a friend at Azure Standard. I don’t think that’s open to the public, but definitely worth investigating other online food sources. I got all organic, local produce delivered to a private drop-point in Tigard, for amazing prices (all produce around $1/lb.). Safeway and Fred
• Oops have to cut this short, we don’t have internet at home right now so I’m writing this at the Honda dealership while our car’s getting maintenance.  Time to go!  More later, perhaps, but that’s the gist of the challenge. I think we will continue!!

Hi frugal friends, here’s what I’m learning in the Food Stamp Challenge.  It’s a little different than I thought.  What I’m finding is this: It actually doesn’t cost that much to go organic/local/seasonal, it just takes a lot more time and requires a return to simplicity.

::Cost. It’s actually been cheaper than I thought to make the switch to organic, local, seasonal. As I mentioned last week, finding a great deal on meat, stocking up, and using the freezer means the cost is pretty comparable to regular.  Organic whole foods aren’t that much more expensive, but organic convenience foods are very expensive.  Organic snacks, popcorn, canned food, etc. is very expensive. Thankfully, we don’t need those items anyway.

Part of the challenge is to live on whole, real food.  So, I actually bought a lot fewer items, but just lots more of them. Tons of oats, whole wheat flour, brown rice, dried beans, and whole wheat pastas.   I read the labels on every item I usually buy and was amazed at the fact that almost every packaged/bottled food contains either a soy or corn derivative (GMO) or artificial ingredients.  Hmm… So, I will admit that I just plain couldn’t buy a lot of stuff.   Salad dressing, regular chocolate, microwave popcorn–those were the ones I just had to take a deep breath and walk away from. 🙂  But instead we can make our own salad dressing, air-pop our own popcorn (and drizzle real butter on it!), and I even found all-natural organic dark chocolate at Trader Joe’s with no soy lecithin. It’s heavenly and worth the $1 extra.

:: Time. So, the real cost in this whole deal is time.  It does take a lot more time to do the organic/whole food thing on a budget. I spent pretty much the whole day yesterday stuffing and roasting a whole organic chicken, making quinoa and homemade bread, and making fresh fish stock and chicken stock from scratch.  It was definitely worth it as my freezer is full of nutritious, delicious stock, I have huge pot of homemade organic chicken-noodle soup, and Jeff about died over how good everything tasted.  I actually enjoyed spending all day cooking because it felt renewing and therapeutic after a busy few ministry days. I loved just standing over that huge pot of stock and inhaling the steam and skimming off the fat–I was alone with my thoughts and actually had time to just be. So, I loved it. But, I can understand that not everyone is a stay-at-home mom, and for some a day of cooking is not realistic.  (And even for me that’s often not realistic.)

::Seasonal. So, one of my big commitments was to eat seasonally and locally.  This is easy in the summer, not so easy in the winter, for obvious reasons.  Oregonians don’t do a lot of gardening in December.  So, if we really stick to it, our winter produce will mostly include squash, yams, onions, potatoes, carrots.  I’m actually fine with that, but it is a bit of a shock to think of going all winter without salad. I was talking to my dad and he was saying how when he was young that’s just the way it was–you went to the grocery store to find out if something was in season yet. “Nope, probably be another month,” they’d say. Then you’d try back again later.  We’re so used to convenience that we don’t even know there are seasons anymore.  So, it’s certainly not a moral issue, but I’m just aiming to shop in season as much as possible.  This means apples and pears all fall, lots of yams and onion soup in the winter, plenty of asparagus all spring, and all the berries and fruit we can stuff in our tummies all summer long.  Maybe the reason God gives us less food in the winter is because he knows all we want to do is curl up and snuggle under a quilt.  Then He gives us more fuel in the summer when we’re out running around.  Who knows, I’m just sharing our journey.

Overall, it’s been really fun so far.  A good friend actually set up a spreadsheet for us and we split up all the stores around town and documented the best price on whole/healthy/organic foods.  It’s been fun to work together and learn from each other’s shopping habits.

Bottom line? Eating whole/local/organic simply means a little more cost, a lot more time, and lot less variety.  Somehow for us it seems freeing–it feels good to need less stuff in our kitchen, and it’s fun to see how many things I can make from a few simple ingredients.  But I can definitely understand how it would be tough to make the switch if kids were already used to certain items, or if time didn’t permit an occasional day in the kitchen.

High/Low: My favorite part: fresh organic nectarines and dark organic chocolate. Amazing.  Least favorite part: sticking my hand inside that chicken to stuff it full of rosemary. It made it delicious but I’m not a fan of the stuffing part!

Please continue to share any frugal/fresh/local/organic tips.  I’m the newbie and there are a lot of experts out there so pass along the wisdom!

Ok, so wasn’t going to technically start the Food Stamp Challenge (eating all whole, organic, healthy seasonal food on $275 or less) until the 15th, but I was excited to get going, and also remembered that we’re going on vacation Oct. 8th, so in order to make the month a full-month (without cheating!), I’d better start now, on the 9th.

I feel like in just one week I’ve discovered so much I almost feel like the whole challenge thing could be summed up right now.  Bottom line? It’s totally possible to eat local, health, whole, organic food on a budget.  The key?  A couple things:

::  Wait, jump on a deal, stock up, and eat what you score.   I’m realizing that I’m going to have to be a lot more flexible with my meal-planning habit if we want to eat fresh, local, organic food.  Why? Because we’re just going to eat what we find while hunting and gathering.

• Hunting: Ok, call me crazy but I’m starting to think of grocery shopping more like hunting and gathering (I told you, you’re calling me crazy!).  In other words, if there’s no beef on sale–then you don’t eat beef. If chicken’s on sale, buy it up! I think I mentioned I found whole organic chickens at Safeway, and with a 30% discount and a coupon they ended up being $1.69/lb!  So I bought 3 and froze them.  That amazing sale at Whole Foods has local, organic, grass-fed beef for $3.99/lb so I bought 10 lbs and froze them.  Then I found fresh-caught wild Alaskan salmon, which is basically edible gold, for only $5.99/lb. at Fred Meyer so I bought 9 lbs.  To make it easy and convenient I cut up the salmon into approx 4 oz. portions and put two portions into sandwich bags (we just share with the kids, the don’t eat whole salmon portions).  So we now have 15 salmon dinners all ready to go in the freezer!  I also got fresh-caught wild cod for only $3.99 lb. and did the same thing. So, after I buy more chickens that will be enough meat for us for the year.  Yes, the year.  That’ll give us lots of chicken, beef once a month (which is all we eat it now), and fish twice a month.  All for about $20/month for meat for a family of four. Not bad!  Especially considering ONE steak at a restaurant (not even organic) can cost $20.
• Gathering: The same goes for produce.  When gathering, you only eat what you can find in your own climate.  So I’m really going to make an effort to eat seasonally and locally.  And, only what’s on sale.  So, I found organic grapes for $1.49/lb at Fred Meyer–we’ve eaten loads of them all week. I had no idea a grape could be so amazing.  They are SOO good.  They also have organic, NW grown peaches and nectarines on sale for $.98/lb.  I buy them in bunches and then ripen them in big paper bags with overripe bananas in them.  Throughout the week I’ve probably bought about 25 lbs.  They ripen really gradually so they’ll probably feed us for the whole month. Whatever we don’t eat I’ll freeze.  We have fresh carrots, zucchini, and cucumber from the garden. So other than that organic fruit I haven’t bought produce.  Total spent? About $35.

::Freeze!

• Right before Dutch was born we bought at $40 freezer off Craigslist so that I could cook ahead and be prepared.  That thing is the oldest, ugliest freezer I’ve ever seen but it works!  And I’ve got it stuffed.  Freezers are the KEY to buying local, fresh, seasonal food.  Right now mine is packed with that Alaskan salmon, cod, chicken, beef, about 125 lbs. of cored and sliced apples, a ton of way overripe organic bananas that our church’s food ministry sent home with us (I used them for banana bread today–yum!), several gallon ziplock bags of blackberries that we picked (for free!) last weekend, dozens and dozens of sandwich baggies each filled with 1 cup of shredded zucchini to mix-in with everything I cook (zucchini is the easiest vegetable to sneak in ever), and… well, and two containers of Breyer’s ice cream, because even all-natural eating has to have some tasty treats.   All that to say, don’t underestimate the power of the freezer!

:: Simplify.

• Ok, here is the thing I keep finding over and over and over. What costs us so much in our food budgets is our love for choices. We love to have ten breakfast cereals and ten kinds of snacks and we just love love love our choices, but choices are very expensive!  Eating oatmeal every morning, even organic oatmeal, is very cheap.  Eating homemade whole-wheat bread, even with organic flour, with fresh organic peaches and two organic scrambled eggs (that’s what the kids and I have been eating for lunches) is very cheap.  Even eating a fresh, wild-caught Alaskan salmon dinner ($1.50/serving) with yams ($.50/serving) and organic brown rice ($.25/serving) is very cheap.  That’s a dinner of edible gold for $2.25/serving.  You could even sneak in some organic dark chocolate from Trader Joe’s like I did tonight ($.50/serving) and still be under $3!  That’s cheaper, in fact that’s half the price of a combo meal at McDonald’s.  So all that to say that the fewer ingredients and choices and fancy snacks we need the cheaper things will be. I’m finding my grocery list getting shorter and shorter, because I’m just buying more of few items. Tons of oats, tons of whole-wheat flour, tons of brown rice.  Plenty of organic milk, eggs, real butter, cheese.  Toss in loads of whatever local produce is on sale, and there’s the month!  Real food, real health, really good deals.

I’ll share what else I find.  More than anything I’m so excited to share with you some golden nuggets from the book of James!  Stay tuned. And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to snack on some fresh organic grapes.

I recently watched Food, Inc. Wow.  More on that later (lots more), but suffice it to say I’m making a few changes to my standard of frugality. This includes an experiment. Yes, eating fresh, local food is more expensive. But, I wonder if we cut out all the “empty” foods we buy, if we could manage to include lots of organic, local food, meat from local farmers, etc.  So this month I’m conducting this experiment. We usually spend $200/month on groceries, and while I know that will be busted, I’m curious by just how much.

My first three “frugal” fresh purchases?

1. Grass-Fed Organic Beef on sale for $3.99/lb. today only at Whole Foods.

2. Fresh-caught wild Alaskan Salmon on sale for $6.99/lb. this wknd only at Thriftway.

3. A few free-range chickens ($2.85/lb.) grown locally in Mulino from the family-run Deo Volente Farm.

So my question is, is it possible to eat fresh, local, organic food without breaking the bank? I honestly don’t know the answer, but it’ll be fun to find out.

*Your turn: Please share your frugal tips for supporting local farmers, buying organic and seasonal?  I know some of you out there are experts, so please share the wisdom!

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