When there is no money for groceries then it's time to start taking a serious look at what is in the cupboards, freezer, and fridge. That's the week we've had here.
Most of the time we are always thinking, "there is nothing to eat", when in reality, our cupboards and such are pretty packed with food.
My husband had shopped for one meal the Sunday before. He chose to buy all the fixings for soft tacos/burritos. I commented to my daughter about how I could have shopped for a few days on what he spend for one meal, but as it turned out, we ate tacos/burrittos for 3 days on what he bought. In fact, we even threw in a night of chef salad with the taco ingredients and adding hard boiled eggs and some lunch meat cut up. (We did end up on the 3rd time just with refried beans in our tortillas and no meat with the fixings.
Another night my daughter got to looking in the freezer and she found 2 of the thin pork chops from Dollar Tree. She cooked those up and cubed them. She then added a packet of onion soup, a can of beef broth, a can of black beans, a can of pinto beans, and a can of kidney beans out of the cupboard. She also added in what was left of the onion from the taco nights and some cubed boxed commodity cheese.
It was a really good soup and 5 of us ate it for 2 nights.
One night there were 3 tortillas left. There were also 6 eggs left. I got out the Eggtastics, and cooked us each 3 eggs, splitting up the little bit of shredded cheese that was left, cutting up a package of Buddig Bull lunch meat that was still left from our camping trip, and cutting some of the onion that was left, I fixed us nice breakfast burritos. I dig in a drawer and found sauce packets from Taco Bell too.
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I was paid $25 PayPal by Swagbucks so that gave me a little grocery money. I used $5 for gas leaving me $20 to spend at the store. I opened up the ibotta app to see what I could see there.
I spent $19.25 and I bought:
My husband and I each a 2 ltr of Dr Pepper
gallon of milk
package of tortillas
dozen eggs
4 packages of Buddig Bull meats (with $1 ibotta rebate)
Sargento sliced cheese (using 55 cent coupon and 25 cent rebate from ibotta)
Martha White Muffin mix (25 cent rebate from ibotta)
ground turkey (on sale and 50 cent store coupon)
3 bananas
I think I did pretty well with $20 plus I received $1.75 into my ibotta account too.
My daughter made us some good sliders for a meal too! She used the slider buns that I had brought home left over from the quilt retreat, some of the Buddig Bull meats, and some of the cheese slices. She topped them with melted butter with garlic salt. That was an extra yummy treat for a meal!
Last night I had forgotten to take my pound of ground beef out of the freezer, but I got to looking around and I uncovered a package of sausage links from Dollar Tree. I then seen tater tots that were left over from a time when we had made tater tot casserole. I used those and made scrambled eggs for a nice breakfast for supper.
All in all we ate really well this week. I wish I had thought to take pictures of our meals throughout the week, but alas, I didn't. My lesson for this week is to eat out of the cabinets....at least if yours are like ours, and full. We will be doing this for awhile yet as we get some financial things straightened out. I know there is still at least 10 lbs of chicken in the deep freeze so it's looking like we will be having chicken several ways this week as well as using up some of the many bags of rice and beans that are stacked in the kitchen too.
Did you get tired of reading all of that? LOL I hope I did give you some "food" for thought today!!
Until next week, have yourself a Frugal week ahead!
