Grocery savings: frozen dinners

My mission the last few weeks has been to come up with a plan for after baby #2 comes. She is due November 3rd, and I feel the weeks closing in on me so rapidly. When Olivia was born I went to the store ahead of time and bought a ton of nice looking frozen meals. The prices ranged from $5 to $8 a meal, but they were ready to go, and we had frozen dinners for a few weeks. I cooked nothing. When I started feeling the pressure of getting things together again, I started to think about those frozen meals. They were SOOOO easy. But SOOOO expensive in the long run. Something I could definitely save on our budget.

I contacted a cousin of mine, and she sent me all of her freezer friendly recipe's. She spends a week or so cooking these meals, making some for them to eat, and the rest to freeze. Everything from enchilada's, soups, casserole's, you name it, she does it. So she sent me all her recipe's, and I'm getting started. Today I'm making a HUGE pot of corn chowder. We will have it for dinner, and I will freeze the rest for after baby. Yum!

Grocery savings: Beans

Today I'm trying Great Northern Beans. My mom used to make them all the time, and it was tradition that the first snow of the year brought Great Northern Beans over potato's. It was great! So I soaked the beans all night in cold water to start rehydrating them. Then this morning I called my mom and asked her how to make her beans.

Boil the beans in water. I used a bag of beans, and 7 cups of water. I boiled them for 2 hours, and kept tasting them to see when they were really soft, (like melt in your mouth soft). Then I added salt, pepper, and half a stick of butter. Meanwhile I boiled six pealed, medium potato's in salted water. I peeled them, and quartered them first. I boiled them until they were tender to a fork, and drained them. Then I put a few potato quarters in each bowl, and covered them with the beans. SO GOOD!!!!!!!!!!! Sometimes my mom would add a ham hawk for flavor, but not usually. And I like them both ways a lot. They are excellent with fresh bread as well, but unfortunately I forgot I'm almost out of flour. So we won't be doing that tonight.

Grocery savings: Cleaning Products

I researched today, how to make your own cleaning products. I have calculated all the cleaning products I use and I think this would also be a good way to cut back on grocery spending. The product I use in the kitchen the most is Clorox Cleanup. I found a few interesting recipe's. Some of them looked kind of dangerous, so I skipped over those. Most people know not to EVER mix cleaning products.

First recipe:

1/4 C Clorox

1 tbsp Dish Soap

Fill the rest of the spray bottle with water

This recipe had a warning about mixing liquid soap and clorox. It says it can produce very toxic fumes. If I try this, I will try a little in a well ventilated room only, and see that there is a lot of air movement.

Second recipe:

1 part Clorox

1 part Purple Degreaser (can be found at Home Depot)

1 part Water

It didn't say anything about this, if people have tried it or not. This one I'm a little more hesitant of, not knowing anything about mixing Sodium Hydroxide (which is found in Purple Degreaser) with bleach. If the others fail, I may research this one more in detail.

Third recipe:

1 C White Vinegar

Fill the rest of the spray bottle up with water

This one is a more mild form of Clorox Cleanup, obviously. Vinegar is a very cheap product to buy as well. So I may try this first. My main concern is raw meat juice in the kitchen. I have small children, and don't want anything getting to them. So I will research further to find out if this works as well.

This one also said to try a sprinkle of baking soda instead of comet. I don't know about this one. Baking soda doesn't seem to have the same cleaning ability as comet, but I'm going to try it anyway. You can buy a very large box of baking sode for a few dollars, so this would also be cheaper. We'll see how it works.

One thing that I spend quite a bit on is Swiffer Wet Jet. It's so convenient! But I could go through a bottle of the cleaning solution for the Swiffer in 2 weeks, and they're a 3+ dollars a bottle, not to mention the mopping pads. So there again, a place I could cut back on. (**sigh**) This one's gonna be a sacrifice. :)

In the bathroom I use The Works toilette bowl cleaner. We have hard water, and NOTHING cleans that like The Works. So far, I have found nothing that even claims to be the same as a home made product. So, I am trying a few others.

First recipe:

Equal parts White Vinegar and Baking Soda

a little Salt

This one is a dump recipe, meaning you kind of have to guess as you go. After pouring ing. into toilet bowl, leave sit for 20 min, then scrub with a toilet brush. I will try this one today. I'll let you know how it works.

I tried the recipe for the toilet cleaner directly above. It worked very well for cleaning the toilet, however it didn't get all the hard water stains completely out like my loved The Works cleaner. So my mission continues to a recipe for that.