This is Day 7 of a month long food stamp challenge. If this is your first visit, please check out this link to see all of the posts and get a better understanding of what is going on.
We survived Week 1! We survived Week 1! There are so many things going through my head, but I’m going to save this post for the usual specifics and write about some other things separately. Suffice it to say that what started out as a challenge that was intended to help people has helped John & me more than we could have imagined – and the month is only 7 days old.
PURCHASES
Big shopping day, but we had a few tricks up our sleeves this time around. As you can see from the photo we got quite a bit in our shopping trip at Walmart, where we went because they will price match and accept competitor’s coupons.
A few notes on the shopping list:
- By ad matching a competitor & using a coupon, the Sierra Mist 2 Liters cost $.21 each.
- Found a coupon at Recyclebank for $2 off 2 Earthbound Farms organic produce items. The bags of carrots were priced at $.94 each, so the store actually paid us $.06 per bag.
- Finding the beef brisket was an accident. It was a huge piece of beef that was reduced to $1.90 per pound, which is the lowest cost anywhere in the area for beef of any sort. 73/27 ground beef in a chub pack runs as high as $3.49 in the area. Look below for details on what we did with all that beef.
| ITEM | SIZE | PRICE | UNIT | PRICE/ UNIT |
| tuna steaks | (2) 10.5 oz packs | 3.87 (R) | 5.25 oz serving | .97 |
| wheat flour | 3.53 | cup | ||
| quick oats | 42 oz. canister | 2.70 | 2 oz serving | .14 |
| sandwich cheese | 1.29 | slice | ||
| shredded cheese | 2.53 | cup | ||
| shredded cheese | 2.53 | cup | ||
| organic carrots | (4) 1 lb bags | +.24 (C) | oz | free |
| sour cream | 16 oz | 1.72 | oz | |
| ground turkey | 3 lbs | 4.72 (R) | pounds | |
| garlic | 1 bulb | .41 | ||
| cabbage | 3.72 lbs | 1.18 (P) | ||
| red peppers | 2 | 2.18 (P) | each | |
| 2% milk | gallon | 3.26 (P) | ||
| V8 Juice | 46 oz can | .94 (C) | oz | |
| Sierra Mist Soda | (2) 2 Liter bottles | .42 (C,P) | oz | |
| yellow rice | packet | .24 (C) | ||
| cream of chicken | (2) cans | 1.74 (C) | can | |
| cream of mushrm | (2) cans | 1.74 (C) | can | |
| beef brisket | 14.64 lbs | 30.31 (R) | ||
| C: Coupon | P: Price Match | R: Reduced | D: Damaged |
RECEIPTS
THE BIG BEEF BREAKDOWN
For starters, this is what 14.64 pounds of beef brisket looks like sitting on a cutting board in our kitchen. Holy crap that’s a lot of meat!
We spent quite a bit of time tonight breaking it down into the cuts that we wanted. In the event that you find a large cut like this at a great price, your store’s meat market will usually cut it into whatever you ask for. Since we happen to have a grinder and we’re kinda masochistic, we did it all ourselves.
When it came to the ground beef, we did something a little different. We also found ground turkey at the store discounted
At the end of the day, that brisket had become:
- (10) sausage patties
- (16) Italian meatballs
- 14 oz loose sausage
- 6 lbs of ground beef/ground turkey (50/50)
- 1.5 lbs brisket
- 1.5 lbs stew meat
- 1 lb fajita meat
- 2.25 lb roast
- 1.5 lb roast
- .75 lb beef fat
MEALS
BREAKFAST: $1.08
rice griddlecakes [source]
coffee
sugar
creamer
BREAKFAST NOTE: Leftover rice was used in this meal.
LUNCH: $0.97
2 peanut butter & jelly sandwiches
2 egg salad sandwiches
LUNCH NOTE: 9 eggs were used to make the egg salad, and the cost for all of them was assumed in this meal.
DINNER: $2.68
teriyaki marinated tuna
yellow rice with diced pepper
DINNER NOTES: A simple dinner done start to finish in 20 minutes while we were doing other things. The frozen and pre-marinated tuna steaks were reduced by the store because they were being discontinued.
DAILY TOTAL: 4.73 (+$3.45 for the day, +30.13 for the week)
Total Spent to Date: $138.07
Total Remaining: $141.11
QUESTION OF THE DAY:
Do you know how to cut up a whole chicken?
It’s bedtime here, but look for some big announcements coming very soon. We have a lot to talk about!
{ 29 comments… read them below or add one }
ah, yes i do, but i must admit i hate doing it! two of my girls went vegetarian by watching me do so, because it’s so gross…and the one still is, 15 years later! the other one only lasted about a year… although at the present time she has been nearly meatless once again for the past few months…but more of a health thing.
i rarely buy chicken nowadays anyway, cuz there’s just too much fat and hormones in it! sometimes i’ll get one for the barbeque, but for poultry i’ve pretty much switched over to turkey for the past several years.
It didn’t use to be quite so hard to cut one up when they weren’t about 50% fat like nowadays.
I am quite impressed with your carrot-buying prowess!!!
I have cut a chicken up but I could be better at it. It’s not something I do often.
I am also impressed with the free carrots. Great job!
I was glad to see beef come in the house. I enjoyed playing butcher for a couple of hours and the fact we have soooooo many meals from that cut, I am even more pleased. I used to work at a restaurant where I would cut up from 40 to 60 chickens per day. Was not my favorite job, but I learned and still can cut a single chicken up into 8 edible pieces (legs, thighs, wings, split breast). Maybe we can talk Michael into making a video of cutting up our next bird. If you want to see that, just reply to this post and tell him…
Awesome shopping skills.
For the question of the day……..I’ve gutted and cut a whole chicken…had to youtube it first. LOL…….I’m definitely not a pro…but I can do my best :0)
Did the checker at WalMart automatically know about their coupon policy (match) and to pay YOU for the Mist? I’ve seen the girls at ours look confused over a simple coupon. Just curious.
CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR FIRST WEEK!!! Love what you did with the meat!!!!
No, I do NOT know how to cut up a bird. :D I second the video!!
The checker was on the ball 100% and it was a flawless transaction. The only time she stopped me was when I tried to use 2 coupons (1 Publix & 1 Manufacturer) on the V8, which would have made it a money maker as well. The Mist wasn’t free, I had to price match it to $.69 and use a $1 off 2 coupon.
Interesting note, I just a minute ago realized that at Walmart when you price match they actually show the price of the item as that price instead of showing what you saved. This kinda sucks because it is near impossible now to figure out just now rockstar we were yesterday.
I love how you *really* break this down price-wise. This is better than The Crazy Coupon Lady — plus you’re cuter, so there’s that.
I’m completely captivated as you guys have done great in this first week — but only 141.11 left for the next three weeks? Yikes.
(I also keep comparing the two of you to the five of us that have to be fed here. Then I remember that we’d obviously get more because we have five people…but still.)
Absolutely true that we’ve gone through half of our budget for the month, but we are also very well set on food. I asked John last night if we could make it an entire week if we couldn’t spend any money at all until the middle of the month and I think if we absolutely had to we could make it happen. We have lots of meat, lots of veg, I think we’re on par for making a splash this month. I’m less concerned with what has been spent to date as I am with what has been consumed to date, and that number is incredible at the end of week 1.
I’m excited for you to get to the rest of your posts — one of the reasons is because I honestly couldn’t pull this off. It’s not that I don’t use coupons or look for sales (I try hard to buy everything on sale), but I think your food choices are more creative than mine.
This isn’t surprising. While I’m not a “bad” cook necessarily, I’m just not a savvy cook as food preparation has never been my thing. (Now, *growing* the food people cook is an entirely different story).
Anyway, I have already taken something extremely important away from this challenge that perhaps I should save as a blog post.
Yes, I do know how to cut up a whole chicken, but I like to boil it, pick it,and put the meat away in bags for use in other things. Then I boil the broth down to a gel and put it into the broth jar in the fridge for cooking and making soups.
I also like to buy those huge packs of chicken legs when they have them for .99 to 1.19 a lb. and package them up in packs of 4, which fit perfectly into a 1 qt. freezer bag and is enough for 2-4 meals, depending how I use it.
I don’t eat much beef, but I like to buy large round roasts on sale and cut them into three pieces: 1 for cooking in the crock pot with veggies, 1 for cutting up to make veggie-beef soup and 1 to cut up for beef stew. My mom taught me that trick. You can use it with ham too. I need to give you my easy bbq recipe that turns a pork shoulder into tons of southern pulled pork bbq.
I can cut a chicken. My husband does it better though. I cut red meat down better lol :) We usually take the chickens whole and bake them with some veggies stuffed inside and have dinner and lunch for me and the kids for the next day out of it.. healthier than frying and still provides two meals for a family of four. :)
Deborah ~ I do that with the chicken-leg-bags, too! I like to cook (bake with some herbs and garlic) a few up and keep them in the fridge as a low-cal, high protein snack.
Though I’d love the recipe, I haven’t yet mentioned that I can’t eat pork, so we can’t take advantage of the great prices on pork roasts going on right now.
One thing where you guys have an advantage over the average food-stamp user though is that i see you guys don’t drink milk other than for your coffee and to use for baking (i don’t think you’ve even eaten cereal yet, have you?!). Most people on food stamps have kids, and milk is an important, and spendy, item. I know about 1/3 of my food budget used to go on drinks: Milk, orange juice and grape juice, and V-8 which they didn’t really like to drink, but pretty cheap as far as “vegetables” go, and use it to stretch spaghetti sauce and soups (plus i drank some) to get e tra vegetables in them. But they all grew up with strong bones and healthy teeth! My son is 6’2 and my oldest daughter is 5’11, so i attribute that to both genes and lots of milk! (My son is taller than his dad was, so it’s more than genes.) I’m only 5’6…or was, i’m shorter now…
and i can’t imagine cutting up 50 chickens in a day! that’s like some form of mental torture…and you can still actually EAT chicken after that? When i was in college i had a friend that hunted, and he would give me some ducks and an occasional goose…which i had to behead, defeather, and prepare. I know i could never do that now–i would rather have no meat at all then do it again. My stomach was stronger then, i guess.
Milk and cereal are one of the easiest things to get free or if you have coupons and wait for the right time.
Stores run promos often (buy 4 cereals get a free milk catalina) or( buy 4 yogurts get free milk instantly)
You just need to wait for a time where you have coupons for the cereal or yogurt AND there is a free milk promo.
Here was the last buy 4 yogurts get a gallon of milk deals I did:
https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/311718_287942884567952_100000567288265_1128472_2796461_n.jpg
I have the advantage of having a deep freezer.
After coupons 4 packs of dannon yogurt cost me $1 ($0.25 each pack) plus I got the gallon of milk free.
The activia was a bit more expensive ($1 a pack), but still a decent deal for 4 (4pack)+gallon of milk for $4 total.
I think people who are strapped for cash, need to paymore attention to the sales fliers and stockpile when the deals are good.
We’re beating ourselves up because we are a one car household and John is at work. Leave it to me to discover $1/box cereal with a printable coupon while he is at work. In other words, no cereal yet.
I don’t know how to cut up a whole chicken but I definitely want to learn. As it is, I almost always buy whole chickens, roast them up, then tear off pieces for use in other meals (most of my recipes for chicken I use I only put in 1 cup of chicken pieces to feed the family), then boil the remaining carcass with stock fixin’s to make some yummy stock (which I recently learned to can. Yay!). I’ll then separate out any remaining chicken bits for use in recipes as well, so none of the chicken goes to waste.
I’ve seen it done, but I don’t know how to do it. If I needed to learn, my mom could teach me. Or my stepdad. Probably a better idea to learn from him. My mom somehow gets three pieces of white meat out of a chicken….
Anyway…. How excited were y’all to get those carrots? I know I’d be.
The carrots were awesome. That gave us a total of about 7 lbs in the fridge for the challenge so far :)
I am a Louisiana/Mississippi gal…of course I can cut up a whole chicken. It’s practically a rule in the South….(kidding….or am I?) Hahahaha….I would say dry beans were a staple food groeing up in the South. We made a lot of different meals using dry beans like Senate Bean soup, Lentil soup, 18 bean soup, red beans and rice, white bean and rice and or soup…either way is fantastic. Of course being from Louisiana we ate a lot of gumbo. I guess one of the perks of eating and cooking dry beans was by learning how to prepare them. My dad taught me how to season and cook beans. Beans are a very good source of protein and fiber and a very economical way to make ends meet while maintaining good nutrition.
We love beans! And Louisiana/Mississississsippi folks!
How the heck do you make sausage?? And I would love some of those bean recipes.
As for the milk, not every area of the country has good milk sales. I know we don’t get them that often, or that good here, that we could count on them.
A lot of this stuff you’re doing is foreign to most people, so I hope there are some how-to recipes or videos in our future.
Remember, if you’re piss-poor, you don’t normally have a meat grinder, freezer(except for the little fridge one), etc. Nuff said tho. I am sooo impressed with you two.
Will post sausage recipes in the future. As for the meat grinder, any store with a meat department will grind it for you.
LOTS of how to stuff is in the works, promise!
Okay, I’m putting my foot down. ;-)
From now on, I want recipes from people, how-tos, etc. Let’s make a po-peeps recipe e-book.
Fascinating project! Really reminds me how much I overpay on food because the ability to afford more has given me an excuse to be lazy.
Yes, I know how to cut up a whole chicken, but will not do it because I cannot stand to handle or cut into raw chicken (obviously, not a farmer’s daughter). The last time I tried– more than twenty years ago– it made me gag, and I threw up in the sink, right on top of the chicken, which, of course, had to be thrown away. Buying whole chicken is the one money-saving food tip that will never be practiced in my house.
I know a lot of people who feel exactly like you do, Dianne!
I just love you guys for taking this on! Spent a bit last night reading… now back to it this morning! I love the creativity… and the tenor of the posts and comments. HECK YEAH, Po Peeps cookbook!
On the chicken question… YES, I can debone one. BUT, I tend to roast them whole instead… just easier. But now that I think about it, I could do much better stretching if I DID debone… hmmm. Now you got me thinking.
Michael,
I owe you an apology. I am starting to get a bit more impressed with your purchasing skills, as I read this challenge.
Adults do not need to drink milk.Many other ways to get the nutrients.I’m from Canada, and buying milk cheap here is not an option.I would buy whole milk and water it down when cooking/baking.Buying cold cereal is a waste. Make a more substantial breakfast, much cheaper (pancakes/waffles/egss/muffins etc)
I use my bread machine to make bread/pizza dough (with yeast purchased in a jar)
Yogurt can be easily made at home. Homemade mayonnaise, brown sugar,mustard, barbeque sauce etc.
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