Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Spend $ to Save $ and TIME

This principle holds true in many ares of our budget.

I run two co-ops so that members (and myself) can buy in bulk and reap the savings that comes from higher volume purchasing.I buy natural/organic food in bulk from United Natural Foods. I have learned to spend 50% of my budget on my monthly co-op order. One month I may buy 50#'s of oats, the next month splurge on a case of cereal - but over the long haul we save big bucks. Our produce co-op allows us to buy produce by cases and again - we reap the savings.

I have a local friend who is a caterer/personal chef. She buys a few things from the restauarnt supplier and offers them to us at cheap prices. SO.....here you go..... I buy my chicken this way....

You can buy this boneless, skinless HUGE, whole chicken breast in 10# increments of $1.49 a lb. This is my 40 lbs.


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What do you do with all that chicken? My family can easily handle 10lbs for dinner. BUT this time I didn't have freezer room for 4 10 lb cubes of frozen chicken. I STILL haven't gotten back to full mega cooking....HOWEVER....after THAWING all this chicken, I hauled out the stock pot and nesco roaster.
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I now have THIS in my freezer....ready for Chicken Pot Pie, Chicken Divan, Chicken Enchiladas, Chicken Salads, .....this saves me a lot of TIME to have the meat ready to use.
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For more of my WFMW posts click here (there ain't many yet). To view hundreds of this week's tips from others go here.

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4 comments:

Unknown said...

As soon as our house sells and we move, I plan on getting back to this.
I like to have chicken cooked up in the freezer for quick meals.
Laura

Stephanie said...

Okay. I just read where you said you sent me an email and would send another...I feel awful! I know you are busy...

I am guessing that your emails are for some reason going into my spam folder...although I have received them from you before. I have NO idea why this would be happenening, but that is the only explanation!

Kathy in WA said...

I love the way you manage your family's healthy (and affordable) eating. It's truly amazing to me and must take a lot of time and energy (even if you are good at it). Wish I could get myself to do the co-op aspect of things. I think it would help our family.

Okay, mainly I wish I could find someone else who would do the work and I could just join in for the good deals. Ha!

Cynthia said...

Since I haven't been blogging you won't know that we hauled off our big best of a deep freeze... I'm pretty sure we saved about $12 becasue of that last month on our electric bill. Anyway... we're saving up for a larger upright freezer that will be more energy efficient than the free upright hand me down we have right now which is too small... so I'm not doing much cooking ahead like I used to, but I hope to again by fall.