Grocery budget

Every now and then, an article shows up on Deseret News with the story of how a family of, say, 4 cut back their grocery bill to some still rather large amount. Kevin and I discuss these articles in shock -- how could people still spend that much?

Now, the more I've thought about it, the more reasonable it is for a family of 4 to spend, well, several hundred dollars on food. I mean, our family of three doesn't spend much, but it's made up of not very tall people, including a stay-at-home mom and a toddler who really doesn't add much to the grocery bill. So if we lived somewhere where food was more expensive, had bigger appetites, and lived a busier lifestyle, it would make sense to spend closer to that range.

But even so . . . I think there are legitimate ways to save money at the grocery store that might be overlooked. So I thought I would share some things that have worked for us to keep our grocery bill low these days.

Planning

• Have a meal plan for when you go to the grocery store. Plan your meals around what's on sale, and stick to it. As an added bonus, this makes the rest of the week go much more smoothly because you know every day what you're going to make.
• Look at coupons, but don't obsess over them. Honestly, most coupons won't save you money because they're making you spend money on things you don't need like snacks. We find that we get the most use out of coupons for things like cereal, especially when that cereal is on sale.
• Go to the same store as much as possible. I don't know that this necessarily saves as much money as going to the store with the cheapest deal, but I do know that it saves time and energy. Additionally, the longer you go to a certain store, the better feel you have for when things are on sale at that store. That way, you can kind of guess when the things you want will be on sale, and save up til then.
• Try to go to the store as little as possible. It's very hard to go to a store to buy one item because there just might be something else you'd like, so the fewer trips you have, the fewer chances you have to buy extra items.

At the store

• Buy the cheapest version you can stand. There are definitely some things that name brand is the best for, but it's worth it to check the store brands first.
• Pay attention to unit price. Usually bulk will be cheaper per ounce, but not always.
• If you are low on something, and you know it will be on sale soon, get the smallest amount possible. For example, if you know that cereal will be on sale next week, go for the 14 ounce instead of the 18 ounce if the 14 ounce will get you by for the week, even if the unit price is more. Why? Well, because it should still cost less overall! And since you'll be able to get your cereal for much cheaper the next week, the average unit price will still be less. (I just checked this with an imaginary $2 box of 14 oz, $2.50 box of 18 oz, and $2 on-sale box of 20 oz. Buying 1 $2 box of 14 oz. and 4 boxes of $2 20 oz. ends up being slightly cheaper per ounce than one 18 oz. box and 4 20 oz. boxes.) This one isn't a huge deal, and honestly the results will vary, but generally buying more of something that's more expensive than it needs to be isn't going to save you money. 
• Don't be afraid to buy a lot of something if it's on sale and it will last. Hooray for food storage and freezers!

Lifestyle

• The biggest way to save money is to not buy something. There are things I've discovered since getting married -- we really don't need ice cream in the freezer all the time. Or juice, or crackers, or snack foods, or supplies to make cookies, etc. It's not necessarily bad to want those things, but that's all they are -- wants. And, the less you buy them, the less you want them.
• Plan your meals so that you don't throw food away. Keep tabs on your produce and leftovers, and use them!
• Use your freezer! Meat lasts so much longer in the freezer than the fridge, and if you buy it on sale it can be so much more affordable. Freezers are also great for fruits, vegetables, and bread. But not milk, I've heard. (Ew.)

Eh, there are probably other tips I could share, but this is long enough for now.

What else have you used to save money/change your spending habits?

Family and food

Hey, September's over, which means the Proclamation Celebration is technically over.

But it's only barely over, so that means I can talk about my family one last time (ha), especially in conjunction with . . . GENERAL CONFERENCE!

I have to say, my favorite memories of conference have always been at my aunt Elaine's house. During the Sunday morning session, she would let us gorge ourselves on her amazing cinnamon rolls and orange rolls and ham and cheese rolls, just in time for us to listen to Elder Hales or Elder Scott. And by listen I mean read their talks later in the Ensign because we were in a food coma.

That memory got me thinking about my Moon family (my dad's side of the family) and how cool they are. They are good at a lot of things, but if I had to narrow it down, I'd say they excel at pretty much everything. Painting, acting, ballet, singing, decorating, sewing dresses and Halloween costumes, crocheting, making magnet boards in the shape of adorable things, woodwinds, running marathons, painting Calvin and Hobbes onto shoes, writing fiction, motivational speaking, lacrosse, photography, and a myriad of other things that I'm forgetting.

But one of my favorite things about the Moons is how good they are at food. Maybe it's because cooking is the only domestic thing that I can foresee myself being decent at so I pay more attention to it, whereas everything else I look at in amazement with no clue where to even start.

Oh goodness. My aunts are so good at food. Every family gathering had delicious food, often things that I had never even considered before but that tasted delicious. From salads with amazing dressings to pies that could feed the whole of Nigeria, from authentic tamales to perfect parfaits, they know how to do food. (And it always looked gorgeous, which is another bonus.)

Although most everyone appreciates good food, I wonder if we realize just how much it can bring people together. We laugh about the dinner before the Relief Society broadcast, but it really does enrich the overall meeting. There's just a happier atmosphere at any activity when fresh fruit is available.

Even if we appreciate the taste of good food, it's pretty easy to overlook the work that goes into it. It hasn't really been until this last year where Kevin and I have had to fend for ourselves for nearly every meal that we began to understand how much work it is to plan a meal, budget for the food, cook it, and clean it up. And that's only with 2 adults -- these family gatherings can have around 50 people! I can scarcely get my mind around it. And yet my extended family would do that regularly, and even thrived on feeding other people.

What am I trying to get at? Well, first of all, thank you for feeding me all those years. It tasted good. Second of all, I really feel like nothing is temporal with God, so every labor of love involving food will be another blessing on your head in the next life. Third, even though food in and of itself cannot provide spiritual nourishment, when it's coupled with spiritual nourishment (including time with family), that is what I consider a fullness of joy.

And last of all, I think I need all those sweet roll recipes for this Sunday.

Blueberries!

All my life, I've wanted to like blueberries. I remember trying a stray blueberry once when we were making muffins for Achievement Days that tasted like it came straight from heaven. Sweet and flavorful and healthy and wonderful . . .

And I could never find more like it. Every time I've gotten blueberries, I've just had to hide them in pancakes or muffins because they were just too sour or bland for my liking.

So when I learned that Michigan has farms where you can pick your own blueberries, I didn't see what the big deal was. Now strawberries, ooh, those would have been good if we had been around during the first weeks of June.

But blueberries? Meh. We buy them because they are in season and healthy, but I just never wanted to eat them plain.

Luckily for us, we heard from friends that blueberries were actually amazing when you picked them yourself. So we decided to put it to the test. We invited the Roberts, who barely got a chance to breathe after driving here from our old ward in Provo before I called them and invited them to partake in a true "Michigan experience."

And, oh, it was worth it. We found a patch down in Milan* less than 15 minutes from their place and began our adventure.

I love Michigan

The fun started as we drove up to the house. A bunny scurried past us, and chickens and little dogs surrounded our car. Our favorite was the duck that thought it was a chicken. And of course Joseph had to chase all of them around. Luckily they were the kind that ran instead of pecked.

After getting some instructions from the owner (or the owner's son? never figured that out), we drove a few hundred yards over to the blueberry patch in the middle of the woods.

We grabbed some buckets, and then for the next few hours . . . we picked blueberries!

I never knew that dark, shiny blueberries could taste so much better than the weak sauce light blue ones at the store.

Pretty sure he's dropping a stick into the bucket

Kelsie and her haul

Kevin at work

Dropping a beautiful berry in

The weather was beautiful, the company was great, the blueberries were delicious . . . everything was perfect except for one small detail -- Joseph was tired.

What kind of mean parents keep a child up through a morning nap, even if he skips it every now and then?

That said, he still was pretty pleasant through it all. However, he got mad when I wouldn't let him squish my blueberries with a stick.

Then he helped me pick for a while, but he wanted to squish all of them with another bucket and I wouldn't let him. So that was sad.

He wasn't as selective about his blueberries as the rest of us.

But we eventually found a way to keep him happy.

This trick also works at church sometimes.

Dropping sticks and grass through the cracks

Once Kevin and I had a 6-pint bucket full of blueberries and Kelsie had half a bucket full, we felt like we had accomplished enough for one morning and were ready to come home with our spoils.

Jared, Kelsie, and Kevin (and Joseph)

yummmmmmmmm

Tired boy

Jared made it a point to only pick the darkest, biggest, shiniest blueberries. This was his haul.
 

We went back to the owners' house, paid for our berries, and got to listen to a delightful 87-year-old woman reminisce about WWII for several minutes. And Joseph got to chase more chickens. And then we went home.

And that is the story of how I now love to eat blueberries plain and have done so in abundance the past few days. The end.

*For my Ann Arbor friends who read this, we recommend it. I know there's one up near Dexter that's forever away, but this one is so close and a bit cheaper and the blueberries are divine. They don't have much info online, but there is this.

The Great Cache Valley Food Tour, Part 2

On Monday, we continued the food tour through Cache Valley. Surely this was going to be the day with the Mr. Rogers-esque factory tours.

Crumb Brothers Artisan Bread
Our first stop was at a cute building near Logan High School which was landscaped with native plants. That was my first clue that these guys were probably more environmentally-conscious than the average person. I was right. The building was made with wood taken from an old bridge over the Great Salt Lake. The yeast was wild yeast rather than commercial yeast, which meant it took 3 times as long for dough to rise. The flour was organic and local. The lighting was natural. They had taken every effort to make their bread the same way it had been made for thousands of years.

Except maybe the oven. Imported from Italy, 40,000 pounds of cement . . . it was pretty cool.

And the bread was delicious. So were their pastries.

Bluebird
We made a quick stop at the Bluebird candy store. They didn't do tours on Mondays, so we didn't plan on that, but we still tried to make it feel like a tour.

"What should we get?" we asked, hoping to hear which kind of chocolate was their pride and joy, which may then lead to a story of the history of Bluebird. The lady behind the counter responded with a friendly smile but no soliloquy. We looked around, trying to find things to ask about. I could see some machinery in the back, and by the machinery were the biggest chocolate bunnies I had ever seen.

"What do you make those for?" I asked.

"Oh, we just make them for fun. For Easter." Of course.

On the counter, there was a toolbox with chocolate hammers and screwdrivers and the like. Come to think of it, I should have taken a picture. Oops.

"This is cool. Do you use a mold to make these?"

"Yeah." Of course.

Well, since our tour wasn't happening, we just decided to grab a few chocolates and go. And they were good.

Aggie Cheese Tour
After lunch with friends, we came home and got ready for the Aggie Cheese Tour. When it was about 10 or so minutes before we needed to leave to get there on time, I realized that it had been a few hours since Joseph had eaten, and that when he woke up he would want to eat. So I hurried and began to pump. He woke up just then and I began to feed him at the same time. Problem was, it was one of his rare times where he spent more time screaming than eating. So between burping him, putting him back on, calming him down, and trying to pump enough so that we could dump him on my mom to finish eating, we ended up leaving about 5 minutes later than we would have liked.

"But it's okay," I said. "I mean, all of these other tours have been really flexible, some self-guided. We've been the only ones there. I'm sure that being 5 minutes late won't make a huge difference."

We got there, realized that we weren't sure where to park since it was a Monday and school was in session, went around the student parking lot and then realized there was actual Aggie Ice Cream visitor parking. When we were turning in, we had to wait for two other cars to pull in ahead of us.

"Wouldn't it be funny if those two cars parked in the last two visitor parking spots?" I asked. They did. So then we had to find other parking (we decided to take a risk and park in non-visitor parking in the Aggie Ice Cream parking lot because the parking lot was mostly empty anyway). We then followed a very old and slow man into the store. When we finally got to talk to someone about the tour, we found out that yes, where we parked would be fine, but no, we were too late for the tour. If we joined in now we would mess up the entire world somehow.

"Just come back tomorrow," she said. "Okay," we responded and we grumbled the whole way home. By the end I was mostly annoyed that we hadn't fought harder. If we had said "We're not coming back tomorrow. We're never coming back. We're moving across the country and this is our only chance to ever see how you make cheese (never mind that we've been to 2 other cheese places)," we may have gotten in. But whatever. I decided in my bitterness that I would never patronize Aggie Ice Cream again.

Cox Honeyland
Well, the Aggie Cheese Non-Tour had left a bitter taste in our mouths, so we decided that we had to try once more for a tour. And what better way to get rid of a bitter taste than with honey?

So off we went to Cox Honeyland down the road just a few miles, making jokes along the way about Cache Valley being the proverbial land of milk and honey. (The other pun I'm proud of was unintentional: "I feel so cultured going to all these cheese places.")

Once there, we sat down and watched an awesome movie about how bees pollinate and make honey. And by awesome I mean one of the kids had a mullet. "It's kind of geared for 6th graders," the lady in the gift shop told us. But Kevin and I both thought we would have made fun of the video in 6th grade, too. Still, it was educational and cool to learn about the bees.

When it was done, we went to a glass frame where we were able to watch the bees at work. We saw them spitting the nectar into the honeycomb, dropping pollen, and being kind of cute in an odd sort of way. I never thought I would say that honeybees looked cute.

"They're actually pretty tame," the gift shop lady told us. "They've been domesticated for thousands of years. Farmers generally kill off the aggressive ones. They'll only sting you if you step on them or agitate them." Who knew? (That doesn't go for wild honeybees, though.)

And then we got to sample different kinds of honey. Even though it makes perfect sense, I'd never stopped to think that honey tastes different based on what the bees are pollinating. They were all really good, though.

And thus ended the Great Cache Valley Food Tour. No Mr. Rogers-esque factory tours, but still fun.

Oh, and since every post can be improved with a picture of a baby, here:

I kind of love his frowny faces. Until they turn into screaming faces.

The Great Cache Valley Food Tour, Part 1

So since Kevin, Joseph, and I are moving to Michigan in a month, I decided that we needed to take advantage of all that Utah has to offer, minus the outdoors stuff. (It's just been too hot, and hiking with a newborn sounds about as fun as . . . hiking with a newborn. I think I'll use that expression from now on to describe unpleasant things.)

But what else does Utah have? Turns out that up in Cache Valley they take great pride in their food, and several food places offer tours of their facilities. After seeing a description of the food tour in a Deseret News at Kevin's parents' house, I decided that we needed to go.

Before we went, I felt like this blog post was going to be a Mr. Rogers-esque description of how food is made, complete with amazing pictures. Instead, this is what you'll get. Enjoy!

Rockhill Creamery
On Saturday morning, Kevin and I left Joseph at my parents' house and headed up to Richmond, Utah to see a creamery. We walked up to the building, desperately hoping that the food brochure was enough up to date that the tour still happened so we didn't sound like idiots when we asked for it.

We weren't disappointed.

We learned that Rockhill Creamery makes fancy cheeses--the kind you see French people eating in movies. We sampled the various aged cheeses (Gruyere was my favorite) and then went to the cellar to see a movie about how they made the cheese and see 500 or so cheese wheels stored down there. It was legit.

As we left, my 14-year-old brother Spencer called. "Uh, how do you pick him up?" My parents were gone, my sister Kiana was in the shower, and he was left with a screaming baby and no idea how to take care of him. I tried to describe to Spencer where to put his hands and reminded him to support Joseph's head and that there was milk for Joseph, but finally I gave up and just tried to talk to Joseph over the phone. "Joseph, this is your mommy! You're okay!" (One of the weirder things I've done in a while.) His screams seemed a bit quieter, but that may be because Spencer moved the phone away. He hung up and called my parents, and I decided that my baby would eventually get taken care of. So the food tour continued!

Pepperidge Farm
Since we were already in Richmond, I figured we ought to go visit Pepperidge Farm. When I was in 8th and 9th grade, I got to go visit the actual factory and see how Goldfish were made and how a little robot matched the tops and the bottoms of Milanos, but tours weren't common and I wasn't able to get one arranged. Still, it had a little outlet that sold slightly broken cookies and crackers for way cheap, so I figured we could take advantage of that.

No such luck. There was a sign on the door saying there was no inventory for July 14th. Lame. I had been so looking forward to mint Milanos. So we pressed onward.

Gossner's Cheese
I already knew that there was no tour available for Gossner's, but the brochure said that there were windows that we could look through to watch the action. Except . . . there's no action on Saturdays. So we got to see idle machinery.

On the upside, there were lots of cheese samples in the store, including squeaky cheese. Any trip that involves free cheese and crackers is a success.

Aggie Ice Cream Tour
This one wasn't originally on the agenda, but we decided to go and see if it looked fun. $3 each. Never mind.

("But you would have gotten that much worth in ice cream!" my mom said when we told her that we didn't go. Oh well.)

And thus ended Saturday's adventures.

And Joseph was fine when we got home.

So we're electrical engineers . . .

On Friday, Kevin defended his masters thesis and passed with flying colors. As is traditional, there was food for the committee and audience. Kevin's parents brought a wide variety of foods, including a fair amount of fruit. In addition, they filled our fridge with even more fruit.

Combined with the fact that we have a lot of milk to get through fast, I decided it was time for us to use the blender for the second time in our married lives and make some shakes.

The first was a strawberry pineapple orange juice blend. As we moved the pitcher from the table to the blender base, some orange juice dripped out. We hurried and put it on the base and determined to tighten it when the fruit was blended.

After blending it, Kevin tried to tighten the pitcher. Only problem was, it didn't seem to follow the lefty-loosey righty-tighty rule, so instead as he lifted the pitcher up all of the shake spilled out over the base and counter and microwave.

Not being one to waste food, I grabbed a spoon and began to eat the shake (at least the stuff that had just spilled onto clean stuff like the base). Unfortunately, it needed ice cubes and sugar, so after a few bites we determined it wasn't worth eating and began to clean it up. After going through several paper towels, I had the brilliant idea to rinse off the rest of the base in the sink. I knew enough not to immerse the base in water, but I probably used more water to rinse it off than I should have.

After it was all clean, Kevin decided to plug the base in so we could try again. As he plugged it in, the motor started whirring. It's not supposed to do that. I decided to get any remaining water out by blowing it dry with my hair dryer (on its cold setting, of course . . . we don't believe in setting fires in our apartment). So I dried it and plugged it in and the motor wasn't whirring. I figured it was all fixed so I brought it back. But now it wasn't just that the motor wasn't turning on . . . none of it was turning on. We had broken the blender (mostly me, but I'll share some blame with Kevin).

Well. We still had a lot of fruit and milk we wanted to use up, so we remembered another appliance we had used exactly once in our marriage -- the food processor! We filled this one up with milk and strawberries and bananas and oats and pressed "grind."

Nothing. We tried a different outlet. Still nothing. Checked to see if there were any other switches that needed to be turned on first. Nope. Checked to see if anything had tripped the circuit breaker. Nope.

And just like that, we had a broken blender and a broken food processor. Good thing we never used them! (It kind of put a damper in our homemade salsa plans, but the peppers had already died anyway.) Those are two things we won't have to pack to Michigan!

The blender graveyard

But yeah. Here we both are with masters degrees in electrical engineering and neither of us had a clue how to fix the blender or food processor. To be fair, we both got our masters in radar, not in household appliances. But still.

On a happier note, Leslie was over here and was using my laptop and she kind of broke the keyboard about the same time we discovered the broken food processor, but she figured out the problem. Maybe she should have done electrical engineering.

On another happy note, we did get to eat our shake eventually because our neighbors were kind enough to lend us theirs for a few minutes. And the shake was . . . yummy enough. And healthy.

On yet another happy note, we've been enjoying faces like this for the past week:

I've decided that every post can be improved with a picture of a baby.  Maybe I am a mommy blogger after all.

Spaghetti

The other night we made some delicious spaghetti and spaghetti sauce. (Recipe: brown some ground beef with onions and garlic. Once cooked, stir generic traditional spaghetti sauce in. Add Italian seasoning and red pepper at will.) I don't know what it was about it that made it special (probably hunger), but it was the most delicious thing I had ever eaten.  As I was eating, the thought came to me, "This is so good! Why did we never have stuff like this when I was growing up?"

And then I remembered. My mom made spaghetti and spaghetti sauce all the time. But I was never brave enough to actually try the spaghetti sauce because it was, I dunno, red. So I would instead just eat the spaghetti with a little bit of parmesan cheese on top. That sounds really nasty now.

Sometimes I wish I could be a kid again just so I could take advantage of all those missed opportunities like spaghetti sauce.

"Home"-coming

Like most of our brilliant ideas, our celebration of homecoming week began as sort of a sarcastic conversation.

"I want to go to homecoming, but I don't want to pay for it," I said sometime that week. "Maybe we should do it in the livingroom."
"We could do that," Kevin said facetiously. "And, like, move stuff so we could dance better."
"And make our own crepes and chocolate fountain, cuz that'd be the only reason to go to a sponsored dance."

You get the idea. By the end of the conversation we weren't being too sarcastic anymore. It was settled. We were going to actually celebrate Homecoming Week with a dance in our apartment. That Thursday I mentioned that neither of us had been to BYU Spectacular, and so we figured with the money we'd save on not going to a dance, we could go see it. So we did. And it was spectacular. And I felt so accomplished for having done 2 Homecoming activities. I think that's a record for us.

Anyway, onto Saturday. While Kevin was taking a math test I cleaned and cleaned and pretended I didn't have homework. Then I decided that I might as well decorate for the dance.

Okay, so they're not the classiest decorations, but still . . . Christmas lights! And tissue paper! And they're not coming down until January! (minus the fact that most of the tape has stopped sticking . . . ) (Speaking of not taking stuff down, hey, October 21st is coming up, which means the raptors will finally be coming down.)

Anyway, after our gourmet meal of . . . Papa Murphy's (my epic plans for some fancy chicken dinner went out the window about the time I vacuumed the living room and used up my domestic energy) and a shopping trip mainly composed of junk for the dance (which still cost less than an actual dance would have cost), it was time for the dance!

I would include pictures of us, but the ones I took of me look weird, and I didn't end up taking any with Kevin. Sad. Just know that we looked wonderful, Kevin especially.

As for the dance . . . it was awesome. We didn't really remember many dance moves except the samba routine from Dance 185, but we always had the deacon shuffle to fall back on so it was okay. After an hour or so of dancing, we decided to make our crepes and chocolate fountain. And by chocolate fountain I mean chocolate chips melted in the microwave. Add to that strawberries, bananas, whipped cream, powdered sugar, marshmallows, rice krispies, cinnamon bears, and oreos, and we just gave ourselves the best refreshments of any dance I've ever been to. Plus we put the crepes on our cake platter, which made it even classier.

About this time my sister Kaylie stopped by for crepes and chocolate fountain (we had extended an invitation earlier that afternoon), and then we continued dancing. Luckily, the songs on the playlist were the the more jumping-up-and-down kind (think "Friday," which has inexplicably won my heart), so she didn't feel like a 3rd wheel too much. In fact, probably my favorite part of the evening was when she favored Kevin and me with an interpretive dance set to Aerosmith's "Don't Wanna Miss a Thing." I wish we had recorded it. She is very glad we didn't.

After that, we decided to call it a night (we didn't want our downstairs neighbors to start banging on their ceiling). All in all, I think it was my favorite dance ever. I think Kevin and I should continue having sarcastic conversations.

Bathroom Sink Spaghetti

Last night while I was cooking pasta for dinner, I remembered a game Leslie and I used to play when we were little.

It was called Two Orphans/Widowed Mother and her Daughter/Teacher and Student/Princesses. The premise was this: there would be some hardship, and we'd have to deal with it. All alone. There would be invisible villains we'd have to fight and hide from and help each other escape from.

And when you are working so hard fighting evil, you get a little hungry. So Leslie made this brilliant discovery that if you fill the bathroom sink with hot (or lukewarm) water and then get some noodles from the pantry and put them in the sink, by the time you're done fighting the villains the noodles are now nice and soft and cold and delicious.

And I don't think we ever cleaned the sink out before we did this.

Yeah, I'm surprised Leslie and I ended up as okay as we did. Minus her getting cancer, of course. (But according to her that's from eating old ground beef.)