budget – Page 12 – A Measured Life

Frugality May Days – The Challenge

Have you heard of the Live Below the Line Project? I first heard about it on agirlcalledjack.com. It’s a 5-day fundraising project in the UK where you live on 1 British pound a day for 5 days to raise awareness for people around the world who go to bed hungry. If you want to know more, click the banner to the left. While I don’t have the discipline to try this project myself, it did get me thinking about my grocery budget and how I can tweak that in order to fatten up my savings account.

The Hubs and I live a pretty simple life most of the time. With the economy being how it is, however, and our rent having gone up $71 a month last month and a raise for me currently off the table, we’re needing to find more creative ways to save money. I often clean using baking soda or vinegar, because those things actually work really well and are dirt cheap, and we’ve cut back on purchasing gallons of drinking water because we realized we were spending hundreds of dollars a year on something we paying far less for from our tap. (I still purchase 2.5 gallon jugs of water for drinking at work, since a lot of chemicals get washed down our only sink, but it’s far less than we used to buy.) I already shop for clothes almost exclusively at thrift stores, with the exception of underwear, socks and shoes. We rarely go out to eat, I use coupons when I can, and try to eat vegetarian a couple times a week to save money. But I’ve been slacking a bit and buying myself muffins and coffee some mornings, and coffee I can make at home or work. Muffins I COULD make at home, but they’re also bad for my calorie budget, so I should just avoid them altogether! I thought it might be fun to see where I can scrimp and save to maybe put a large deposit in my savings account at the end of the month. Here’s my plan:

Work the pantry/freezer. I’ve got a lot of things taking up space in my cabinets and freezers that’s staple food. Nothing like a good spring clean out so I can refill it with fresh food next month!
Limit spending on convenience foods (coffee, muffins, bubble tea, frogurt, etc.) to $20 for the month.
Eliminate eating out with two exceptions: my Walking Meetup Group is meeting for lunch on May 3rd, and my birthday is May 19th, and I want to go out to dinner, dang it!
Make 2 meals a week vegetarian to save money on meat.
Expand my grocery shopping to more stores if necessary to get better deals. (For example, I happened to check Acme’s flyer and could get bone in skin on chicken thighs for just $1 a pound!)
I’m going to be trying out several apps for my phone for coupons and rebates on groceries. I already use the Walmart Savings Catcher App, and have $11.67 in there. Apps I will be trying: iBotta, Checkout51, Shopmium, Extreme Coupon Finder. Websites I will be trying: grocerysmarts.com, eBates.com.
Try to convince The Hubs to hang some of our clothes on a line to save the $1.50 in dryer costs.

I will be keeping detailed track of the grocery receipts and coupon usage, and will update each week with my savings. Right now I have a $450 a month grocery budget, which doesn’t include produce I buy at Produce Junction, but does include some toiletries and aluminum foil and such. I’m going to attempt to shave $100 a month off that at minimum this month, and include the Produce Junction purchases in that total. I’m also starting with a detailed list of what I have on hand, and will be keeping a running pantry list in the future I hope. (I have a habit of sticking leftovers in the freezer and then forgetting about them!)

Here are links to the items I’m starting with:

Pantry

You’ll notice that I haven’t included a list of my dry spices. This is because that list is EXTENSIVE. I also did not list the standard pantry ingredients for baking like sugar, flour, etc. They are assumed. I will be recapping each week the following Monday, including plans for the following week, so my next post on this topic will cover Week 1 and will be on May 11th, with one following each week until June 1st. The menu planning will cover May 3 through May 30th, or 4 weeks.

I hope you enjoy my experiment!

The Common Cold: A Royal Pain In My Butt

Okay, so, I’m not actually THAT sick. I started sneezing Saturday night, and I did something I almost always do when I feel a cold coming on: I popped 3 ibuprofen and 2 benadryl, drank a big mug of hot tea and went to BED. The benadryl helped me sleep, but I still woke up with a sore throat and a pretty stuffy nose. I skipped coffee for two reasons: one, tea always feels better on my throat, and two, I was out of coconut milk. Now, Sundays are grocery days for me, but we’d had a huge storm, and it was below freezing outside, so I wasn’t even sure I was going to go grocery shopping.

IMG_20150214_210656131 — Forgive me, New Englanders, most of this was gone by morning.

So I spent most of the morning on the couch, watching bad television and browsing the internet, drinking Black Dragon Pearl tea from Adagio.com. The Hubs decided he would share his magical Canadian elixir, Buckleys! My mother-in-law brought us a bottle when she came for Thanksgiving. Proof it’s magic: The Hubs was taking it when he found out he had pneumonia a few years back, and our doc took one look at the ingredients list and told him to continue taking it along with his antibiotics. Ha! So around 7 I took a dose of it. And within 30 minutes I almost felt normal!

IMG_20150215_211309765_HDR — Sorcery! Wonderful sorcery!

So I thought I would write a few words about fending off common illnesses. Over the years, I’ve received a plethora of advice for the common cold: take vitamin c, take zinc, take hot showers, etc. I’ve tried them all, and to be honest, I’m not sure any of them work, but I know that drinking hot liquids (sans dairy products) makes me feel better and helps ease congestion. Clear broths, hot tea, even warm water with honey and lemon can help. Studies have even proven that chicken soup helps even more than other hot liquids. Rest and keeping warm are a few others.

For nausea and motion sickness, what works the best is ginger tea. You can buy ginger tea in regular tea bags, or if you have fresh ginger at home, just throw a couple of slices into boiling water and let steep. Even the MythBusters concluded that a ginger pill was the only thing that prevented motion sickness without any side effects!

I’m sure most people know that aloe is a great way to soothe a burn. It’s an anti-inflammatory and the gel-like texture protects those sensitive nerve endings from exposure to the air, which can cause them to throb.

To soothe aches, pains, stiff joints or menstrual cramps, make a homemade heating pad. I use an old athletic sock filled with rice. There’s a great tutorial here, but the only stipulation is that I never heat the sock more than 1 minute or else the rice starts to smell burned. Maybe I have a powerful microwave. Here’s mine, modeled by Bingley!

So what about you, dear readers? Any wonderful home remedies that you’ve found tried and true? Let me know in the comments!

Copycat Recipe: NatureBox Coconut Date Energy Bites

For Christmas The Hubs and I were gifted a 2-month subscription to NatureBox (shout out to the Kornbaus!). Our first box had a few delicious things, most notably the Dark Chocolate Berry Trail Mix and Honeycomb Sunflower Kernels, as did our second box with Dark Cocoa Nom Noms (hard to eat just one of these) and my favorite: the Coconut Date Energy Bites. As always, I checked the nutritional information and took a bite. These pillowy, sweet nuggets of heaven were only 90 calories for 3 bites. The coconut flavor was subtle, the texture of the dates almost fluffy, and the flavor rich and…date-y? Either way, they are seriously good. I definitely felt hyper after eating them, but unsure if it’s a placebo effect, the rush of the natural sugar, or the euphoric high of their maximum deliciosity.

I checked the ingredients list. Surely these things must be loaded with delicious things like the Dark Cocoa Nom Noms. I was wrong. TWO ingredients?! Dates and Coconut?! How novel!

I immediately said to myself, “Self,” said I, “Thou canst make these thine own self!” To which my self replied, “Totes!” (I may have lost my mind briefly.)

So on my next grocery shopping trip, I snagged a tub of pitted dates. I already had unsweetened coconut burning a hole in my cabinet from when I went a little psycho for Bob’s Red Mill 10-Grain Hot Cereal with coconut and Craisins in it. Before work yesterday I decided to try out this potentially simple snack recipe. Here are the results!

I'm terrified of this massive ingredients list. — I’m terrified of this massive ingredients list.

Tools:

Food Processor
10 oz. Pitted Dates
1/2 cup (30g) unsweetened coconut flakes

Recipe:

If you have large flaked coconut like I do, throw it into the food processor and pulse until you have finer flakes. Pour the coconut out onto a plate.

Don’t bother cleaning out the food processor bowl, just toss the dates in. Process until smooth. At this point I looked into the food processor and thought it looked super thick, so I added a tablespoon of water and processed some more. Maybe a total running time of a minute in the food processor.

I laid down some wax paper and scraped the date paste onto it. Then I grabbed a teaspoon measuring spoon.

NOTE: WET THE MEASURING SPOON. EVERY TIME. AND WET YOUR FINGERS.

Just trust me on this.

Scoop out a flattened teaspoon of date paste. Use your thumb or finger to scoop the paste out of the spoon and then use your fingers to roll into a little ball. Plop these babies down on the bed of coconut. When you can’t fit anymore on the plate, roll the balls around in the coconut to coat, and place them in the container the dates came in. Don’t worry, they’ll all fit. (If your dates came in a bag or some other unacceptable container, use a four cup plastic container.) Repeat until date paste is gone.

I managed to get 42 of these babies, which is 14 servings of 3 bites.

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Nutritionally, I think they’re pretty close. If you do the math on my version, you’ll come out with 22 grams for 3 pieces, which is a little lighter than NatureBox, so the serving is slightly smaller. I made a chart so you can see the comparisons. There is a slight discrepancy, but I think it’s due mostly to the ratio of dates to coconut. I used more coconut than was in the original recipe, which is obvious when you look at the comparison photo of the two (you can also see the size difference here).

But HOW DO THEY TASTE?! This is what you came here for, isn’t it? Because, let’s face it, food isn’t worth eating if it isn’t delicious, am I right? (Just say “Totes, Andrea, totes!”)

Mine are even pillowier than the Naturebox version! My guess is due to the water and the processing method. The coconut flavor is stronger in mine as well. In the end, I like the texture of mine better, but the flavor is slightly better in the NatureBox version. I gave one of each for The Hubs to try and he said “Those are pretty damn close!” And we all know, close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and copycat recipes! (I may have taken some liberty with this quote.)

Now, the cost wasn’t super important to me, but I figure a price comparison would be useful here. In a NatureBox subscription, you get 5 bags of snacks for $19.95 with free shipping. So each snack bag is $3.99. A bag of NatureBox Date Coconut Energy Bites is 5 oz. or approximately 142 grams and contains about 4.5 servings according to the package. That’s a cost of about $0.89 per serving. My recipe made 14 servings. I paid $3.79 for the dates and 2 servings of coconut flakes is approximately $0.41. So the total cost of my ingredients is $4.20, which makes mine about $0.30 a serving for 22 g, or if you use a 30 g portion for a direct comparison $0.41 a serving. Less than half the price! The entire process might have taken me 20 minutes, max. And considering you have to spend $19.95 for a NatureBox subscription, you pay even more.

In conclusion, this recipe is well worth making at home if you have the time!

Now excuse me while I go shove a bunch of these in my face.

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