For the last few months I've been working hard to slash our grocery spending. Well, my grocery spending. We've always set a budget for groceries, but I've usually exceeded it, often by at least 50%. And it's a reasonable budget for only two adults and one little 30-pound person who is just now starting to cost money to feed. I'm happy to report that for the last two months I've kept to our grocery budget.
Some of the tactics I've taken are to switch to a low-cost, no frills grocery store, only visiting the fancier grocery store maybe once per month for a few items I can buy only there. I'm trying to skip buying snack foods and empty foods. I'm buying virtually everything in the generic form--and sometimes (or often?) that doesn't taste as good or isn't quite as high of quality, but my primary goal right now is saving money, not obtaining the best flavor or highest nutrition.
My latest, renewed experiment is to try baking our own bread. It began last week when we were all sick and I wanted to avoid going to the grocery store, but we were totally out of bread. I baked a loaf and happily discovered that John loved it when normally he usually will not eat bread. I've baked a loaf of bread about every other day (maybe four loaves) since then and John has became a fiend for bread in various forms, which even causes him sometimes to eat peanut butter. Yay!
This got me pondering how much money I could save compared to buying three loaves of bread (usually $3 each because I don't buy the cheapest available) or two loaves plus one bag of bagels per week. I don't have it in me to do the exact math myself, but this homemaker thinks it is $3 per store bought loaf versus 55 cents for a homemade loaf (with store bought flour). This gal thinks her bread costs $1 to make. By baking our own bread when possible, I think I can save us about $7 per week, or $375 per year!
This article describes some of the benefits of homemade bread, even if you're not going all out to make super nutritious bread with various additives or using home ground flour. And this article is an interesting analysis of which items are cheaper to buy and which are cheaper to make.
We'll see how my continuing experiment proceeds . . .
Katherine,
ReplyDeleteWhat a yummy blog post! mmmmm.....I think I might have to try this out sometime soon.
My cousin has a grinder and purchases her own grains. Her bread is delicious!!
I wonder if MY boys would like homemade bread?
Cool. I need some bread baking lessons. I am trying to teach myself. It's been a little hit or miss.
ReplyDeleteIf you ever want some sourdough starter, let me know. :)
Sarah: My bread-making tips consist of: Plug in the bread machine. Pour in the ingredients. Push the three buttons as directed by the recipe. Walk away for several hours. :)
ReplyDeleteMy experiences with kneading and rising my own bread are mostly miss, not hit! I have found that getting bread to rise in our modern air-conditioned houses is nigh impossible, especially in winter. In summer I was having some good luck getting bread to rise by putting it out on our sun porch.