Thrifty Thursday - Thanksgiving Dinner On A Budget

I’m always very happy whenever November 1st rolls around.  That seems to be when it becomes socially acceptable to start talking about Thanksgiving.  It’s my favorite holiday, so I start talking about it, and planning it, long before now, but at least as of today it seems to be alright with everyone else.

We’ll be hosting an evening Thanksgiving meal at our house again this year.  I’m still absolutely loving the fact that Nick doesn’t have to work the holidays anymore.  We’ll also be taking Thanksgiving dinner to the local hospice house for lunch.  I’ve been in touch with them, and they’ve said they’re happy for us to bring the meal.  I’m always a little nervous that they’re going to say no, so I’m pretty excited that they said yes.  They never really offer any feedback as to anything they especially liked or didn’t like, so I’m planning to stick with essentially the same menu and setup as the last two years.  I’m assuming it isn’t broken, so I’m not going to try to fix it. 

Occasionally someone will mention the costs associated with feeding a crowd, or with cooking two separate Thanksgiving dinners, so I thought that would be a good topic for a Thrifty Thursday post.  I’ll just go ahead and get a few things out of the way. 

First, I’m not breaking anything down by specific prices or numbers.  This is mostly because I hate math.  I mean, I really, really, really hate math.  I enjoy blogging, so I’m not about to mix math in with it.  It’s also because it’s just not accurate.  A good price for something for me may be a terrible price on the same item for someone who lives in a different place, and an impossibly low, never going to find it priced like that for yet another person living in yet another place.  I think general guidelines are probably just easier for everyone.  And they don’t involve math! 

Second, I know a lot of grocery stores are regional, so I realize you may not have the same ones in your area that I do.  Again, it’s just meant to be a general idea of what works for me.  I’m only naming specific stores in case any of you have the same ones available.  I love Aldi.  If you haven’t shopped at Aldi, give them a try, even if you’re not hosting Thanksgiving.

Lastly, if you’re hosting Thanksgiving, do what works for you and your guests.  You may very well have different priorities.  Don’t get caught up in trying to make it look like someone else’s ideal Thanksgiving. 

All of that being said, here’s what we do to host Thanksgiving without going broke.

Start early.  This is the time of year when grocery stores start putting the things you need for the holidays on sale.  Pay attention to the sale ads, and get the things you need ahead of time, while they’re on a good sale.  You probably won’t find butter cheaper than you will during the next few weeks.  It’s also a great time to stock up on flour, sugar, nuts, and other baking essentials. 

Shop around.  If you’re fortunate enough to have a few different grocery stores near you, check everyone’s sale ads, even if you usually only shop at one.  There’s likely going to be some competition among them to get you in the door, so if time and distance allow, consider buying the best priced items at each store.  I typically shop at three different grocery stores every week to get the best prices on what we need. 

Remember the main parts of Thanksgiving Dinner are relatively inexpensive.  Fortunately for those of us who love Thanksgiving, the traditional dishes aren’t typically very expensive.  Most grocery stores will price their turkeys very low this time of year, especially if you spend a certain amount in a single transaction.  Potatoes and sweet potatoes are typically inexpensive anyway, and likely to be priced even lower leading up to Thanksgiving. 

Buy store brands, or shop at Aldi.  I typically never buy name brand flour or sugar, unless it happens to be on a great sale that makes it cheaper than the store brands or buying it at Aldi.  I think there’s some difference if you’re buying something already prepared (salsa, cookies, etc),but when it comes to ingredients, the finished dish seems to come out the same, whether you’ve used name brand ingredients or not.  I’ve been using Aldi brand cheese, evaporated milk, and pasta in my macaroni and cheese for years.  The same goes for their canned pumpkin in my pumpkin pie. 

I will say, though, that in my experience, Aldi isn’t the cheapest place to buy the turkey.  Overall, I haven’t been terribly impressed with their meat prices.  Here, Harris Teeter or Ingles typically have the best prices on turkeys. 

Look into the price matching policy at the store(s) you regularly shop.  Some stores have a policy that they’ll take competitor’s coupons, or meet or beat competitor’s prices.  Read the fine print, but that may be a way for you to get the best prices, and still be able to shop at your regular grocery store.

Be on the lookout for coupons.  Look for coupons in the weekly sale ads or papers, and pay attention to the fliers the grocery stores mail you.  Take note of the expiration dates, and any minimum purchase requirements so you can plan your lists accordingly.  A Publix recently opened near us, and they seem to be in serious competition with Harris Teeter, so we’re getting coupons in the mail from both stores.  My trick for remembering to actually use the coupons is to fold them around my debit card. 

Don’t serve appetizers.  I realize this one isn’t going to work for everyone, but it does for us.  Our style of entertaining is very informal; it’s what we’re comfortable with, and it’s what works well with our house.  We have a fairly small kitchen, and eating area as well, so we end up serving Thanksgiving (and most meals we host) buffet style, and we usually eat fairly quickly after guests start arriving.  If we say 6:30, people are usually eating by 6:45.  Buffet style makes it easier to get started if you’re still waiting for a few people to show up, so you don’t have hungry guests waiting around.  There’s so much food already, and since we’re not sitting around waiting, it works for us. 

Don’t serve alcohol.  Again, I realize this choice isn’t for everyone, but it works for us.  Cocktails, or even wine and beer, can get expensive quickly, so sticking with nonalcoholic beverages (tea, coffee, soda, etc) is an easy way to reduce spending.   

Plan your menu carefully.  I tend to go a little bit overboard when it comes to the Thanksgiving menu.  In all honesty, not serving appetizers is about the only scaling down I’ve done when it comes to the menu now that we’re actually able to host Thanksgiving. Obviously, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but some things to keep in mind when deciding what and how much to prepare are the eating habits of your guests, whether or not you want leftovers, and whether or not you’re planning to send leftovers home with guests. 

If most of your guests are vegetarians you probably don’t need 20 pounds of turkey.  If most of your guests prefer desserts other than pumpkin pie, you probably don’t need multiple pumpkin pies.  Don’t feel like you have to make something no one loves just because it’s Thanksgiving, or that you can’t make something everyone loves because it’s not a traditional Thanksgiving dish.  The important thing is that everyone is happy, able to spend time together, and enjoys a good meal.

If you’re the type to go overboard with cooking, and know you’re likely going to have enough leftovers to feed your entire neighborhood for a week, ask your guests to bring containers with them so they can take leftovers home.  And know that you probably won’t be cooking for the rest of the weekend. 

So what about you?  What are your tips for hosting Thanksgiving on a budget?  What are the must have parts for you?  What are you willing to skip? 

Thrifty Thursday - How We Did With The Pantry Challenge

I didn’t really have a good picture to go with this post.  Let’s face it, pictures of a bunch of cans of tomatoes are kind of boring, so I thought I’d share this picture of Caroline.  I think she looks adorable, and I’m always happy to share pet pictures.  Now, on to the actual post.

It’s finally February.  January always seems like the longest month to me, but it’s finally over, and we’re a little closer to spring.

With the end of January comes the end of the Pantry Challenge.  I think we did fairly well with it, though we still have a long way to go.  I have a serious grocery shopping addiction, and an extreme habit of overbuying groceries.  Not for the last month, though.

Our grocery total for the month of January came to $63.85.  Not bad for a whole month.  I think it actually could have been lower had a couple of our grocery trips been to Aldi instead of Wal-Mart, but convenience won out twice.  Once when I went to buy cold medicine and picked up a few grocery items while I was there, and once when Nick went to buy a retirement card for a co-worker and picked up a few grocery items while he was there.

I wish I could say we kept our total so low because we’re just that good at buying groceries cheaply, or because I got really creative in the kitchen, but that’s just not the case.  It was really because I’ve stocked up on so many things.

We ate out an average of once a week in January, which is about normal for us.  We also made more of an effort to use up leftovers, rather than letting them get shoved to the back of the fridge, and we made more of an effort to use things up before they expired.  Other than that, it was pretty much cooking and eating as normal.  We bought eggs, milk, yogurt, sugar (because no one wants me to run out of sweet tea) bread, produce, lemon juice (because fresh lemons are way too expensive and pitiful here right now), and probably a few other things that aren’t coming to mind at the moment.  No meats or canned items, though.  All of that came from the freezer and cabinets.

We’ll probably do a modified version of the Pantry Challenge in February, but haven’t decided yet exactly what that will entail.  I’m not in favor of not keeping a very well stocked freezer and pantry because it is nice to have things on hand.  I like being able to make a meal for someone with very little notice, I like not having to rush to the grocery store ahead of bad weather, and it’s nice not to have to go out for things if we’re not feeling well.  That being said, I do need to find a better balance.  It’s probably possible to be well stocked, but not overstocked.

So what about you?  Did you do a Pantry Challenge in January?  Or have you already found the perfect way to be well stocked, but not overstocked

Thrifty Thursday - We’re Doing A Pantry Challenge

In case you’re not familiar, the Pantry Challenge is when you make a concentrated effort to stay out of the grocery store, and to use up what you have on hand.  The idea is to force yourself to use up the random things lingering in your cabinets and freezer, to get a little more creative in the kitchen, and to save money.

Good Cheap Eats hosts one every January.  You can read more about it here, and it’s not too late to join in.  It’s fun to interact with other people, and you can usually learn something; a new way of preparing something, creative uses for leftovers, etc.  Honestly, it’s kind of fun just to get a little (virtual) peek into other people’s kitchens.

We’ve decided to make January a Pantry Challenge month.  It seems like a great way to save some money this month.  And I have a tendency to seriously over shop (and overspend) at the grocery store.  I love grocery shopping.  I seem to use grocery shopping as a sort of retail therapy.  Shoe shopping is no temptation for me, but show me a great sale ad for any of our local grocery stores, and I tend to go way overboard.  The picture is the one cabinet I’m willing to show you. 

I’m trying to develop better habits, so a Pantry Challenge seemed like a good idea.  My goal is to keep the grocery spending this month between $50.00 and $60.00.  Based on what we have on hand, it seems doable.  I’m only planning to buy produce and dairy since we’re very well stocked on basically everything else. 

I went to Wal-Mart during lunch on Tuesday to buy some cold medicine.  Nick has a terrible cold of some sort, and I’ve been teetering on the edge of coming down with it, so we needed the cold medicine.  It was the first time I’ve been to a store this month.  I know it was only the 9th, but for me to go over a week without grocery shopping is progress.  Anyway, we needed milk and eggs, and a few vegetables so I decided to get them while I was there. 

Aldi would have been a cheaper option, but I really didn’t feel good, and just wanted to get everything in one stop so I wouldn’t have to stop at a second store after work.  I’m not counting the cold medicine or tissues in the food total since those aren’t groceries.  I spent $18.49 on actual groceries which included milk, eggs, bread, some produce, and apple juice.

I think that puts us mostly on track so stay in the $50.00 - $60.00 range for the month, so we’ll see how the rest of the month goes. 

So what about you?  Do you tend to go overboard in the grocery store?  Are you doing a Pantry Challenge this month?

Hospitality & Entertaining – Entertaining On A Budget

While extending hospitality doesn’t have to involve anything extravagant it can become fairly expensive in a hurry.  Sometimes the budget just doesn’t allow spending a lot of money on one meal or event.  Fortunately, entertaining at home doesn’t have to be expensive. 

Here are some of my favorite ways to keep entertaining at home budget friendly:

Serve a taco/burrito buffet.  Inexpensive ingredients like beans, rice, and vegetables can be used to stretch more expensive items like meat and dips.  It also allows everyone to customize their own meal to their liking.  This works especially well if you’re hosting a large group, or if anyone has any dietary restrictions. 

Serve soup or chili.  This works especially well during the colder months. Chili is inexpensive to make, and you can stretch it even further by serving rice and/or macaroni noodles with it.  Biscuits, bread, or cornmeal help to stretch it even further, and are just perfect with soup or chili.

Have a brunch or serve breakfast for dinner.  Breakfast foods are typically less expensive to make, and most people don’t seem to have time for a big breakfast due to work.  Take advantage of that and serve breakfast for dinner or host a weekend brunch.

Serve what’s on sale/in season.  Let the grocery store sale ad or what’s ready from the garden help determine your menu.  In season foods usually taste better anyway.

So what about you?  What are your tips and tricks for entertaining on a budget? 

The Save Up & Clear Out Project

I read about a Pantry Challenge a while ago.  Parts of it sounded intriguing; I liked the idea of using up some of the random things that have been on the shelves for a while, or that we have just way too much of, or that tend to go bad before we use them.  There was a great sale on canned tuna a while back, so now we have a lot of tuna in the pantry.  I recently had to throw away a box of beer bread mix from a specialty store because it expired before I got around to using it.  I never seem to use up more than half of a carton of sour cream before it goes bad.  I liked the idea of maybe addressing issues like these.  Part of it sounded kind of annoying, though; I don’t always have the time to get super creative when it comes to meal planning.  Hubby’s work schedule is weird (to put it nicely) and some days there’s a very limited window of time to get dinner ready between when I get home from work and when he has to leave for work.  It doesn’t leave much wiggle worm for extreme creativity or made from scratch everything.  And we like food.  A lot.  Neither one of us are terribly happy when dinner isn’t great. 

One of the perks of the Pantry Challenge is that in theory you’re able to save up the money that you normally spend on groceries, or use it for another purpose.  I definitely liked the sound of that.  The bills, even with insurance, from my medical issues earlier this year are insane.  We also had some septic tank issues last month, so that was a big hit to the savings account.  It could definitely stand an infusion.

I haven’t been very diligent about keeping the grocery spending as low as I can.  We’ve switched to organic milk and organic beef.  Because I’m trying to avoid soy now we’re pretty limited as to which brands we can buy of a lot of different things.  I’ve found myself justifying a higher grocery bill because we’re trying to eat healthier and buying more organic foods.  But I need to be more conscientious of checking to see which stores offer the best deals on organic milk and beef and trimming the cost of other grocery items to help balance it out.  In an effort to do this we’ve allotted $200.00 for groceries this month.  It works out to about $44.45 per week when you factor in the half week at the beginning of the month, with about $22.20 for the short week. 

We’ve also slipped into the habit of eating out quite a bit more than we should.  It started slowly, but has built into a pretty bad habit.  It’s kind of shifted from “hey our favorite Mexican place sounds great for Friday night” to something along the lines of “I’m tired/had a bad day at work/don’t feel like cooking/didn’t defrost anything/it’s just easier/ we won’t have to clean up the kitchen”, which leads to eating out a lot more than we should.   It’s bad for the budget, and has brought the weight loss to a halt.  Fortunately we haven’t gained, but restaurant portions aren’t the way to keep that from happening. 

The eating out thing is a little tricky, because as I said before, we like food.  We like trying new foods, and going new places.  We don’t have much time off together, so we tend to eat out when we do as something that we both enjoy doing to spend time together.  We talked about it and decided that saying we’re not eating out this month is just setting ourselves up for failure, so we’ve imposed a limit.  We’re allowing ourselves three times of eating out together this month, and we each get one time of eating out on our own with friends or co-workers.  If we both don’t use our own option by the end of the month we’ll allow ourselves the fourth time together. 

We’re hoping that we’ll save some money this way, start losing weight again, use up some of the things that we have too much of right now, and eliminate a lot of food waste by actually using the bottles of salad dressing, bunches of herbs, cartons of sour cream, leftovers, and everything else that ends up languishing in the back of the refrigerator.  I’m also hoping to come up with some new recipes this way; some of the best recipes are born of desperation, so I’m hoping for some good ones. 

One of my other objections to the Pantry Challenge was the daily blogging of what you eat.  Daily blogging doesn’t seem to happen for me lately.  And I think that kind of daily blogging makes for very boring reading!  Maybe, maybe if you’re someone like Kate Middleton the world cares what you eat for breakfast on Tuesday, otherwise I don’t think so.  So, I plan to only post recipes or quick meal ideas, or how to make something cheaply.  I hope that will keep it interesting. 

Basically this all comes down to our very own Save Up & Clear Out Project; $200.00 for groceries this month and limiting eating out to four times this month to save up some money, using up things we have on hand to clear out the pantry and freezer, and sharing recipes and time savers we utilize to do this.  I’d also love to read about any of your quick go-to meal ideas.