Week 4: Feeding the Family for $50 A Week!

Week 4 is here!!!! I have to admit, the level of planning and preparation it takes to go to the grocery store these days is starting to wear on me. I always thought I planned out my meals ahead of time and stuck to my list but in reality I made a very rough plan of the meals I wanted to eat, never based on what was actually already in my pantry and I never stuck to my list. Now I find myself scrambling to put together a weekly menu on Saturday nights in preparation for Sunday grocery shopping. As I eluded to last week this week I'm starting to work out recipes for a new project I'm working on so I can't just rely on what is in the pantry and growing in the garden to help get me by and keep me under budget. But, that doesn't mean that all plans go out the door. I just have to be smart about the ingredients I use and make sure I make the most out of every dollar I spend. So here goes nothing.

I ended up having to make a couple more purchases than I planned on, I accidentally bought my daughter crackers that had been made in the same facility as peanuts. She doesn't have a peanut allergy but they are her snacks for school and we can't take the chance so I had to re-buy her snacks plus we seem to be doing through almond milk at a frantic pace around here so I had to double up. Out of the blue my daughter who hates all other types of milk besides breastmilk suddenly decided that she likes coconut milk after watching me make a smoothie with it last week so I ended up buying So Delicious Coconut Milk as well, which was not originally on my list. We also ended up picking up this beet/green juice that my daughter loves. Can you see a pattern in why I ended up spending more money than I anticipated this week?!

This weeks' menu:
Breakfast:
Homemade Bacon
Buttermilk Biscuits
Smoothies - just throwing together whatever is in the fridge and freezer
Fresh Fruit - watermelon, grapes, apples, blueberries from the garden


Lunch:
A lot of leftovers. I have a lot of different types of lettuce growing in the garden so I'm making wraps quite a bit these days. I made some beer battered tofu Sunday night that will probably make it's way into the wraps. Caesar dressing is my favorite in wraps I'll be using the recipe from Quick & Easy Vegan Comfort Food.

Dinner:
BBQ Seitan with Dirty Rice and steamed cauliflower
Fried "Pork" Chops with Au Gratin Potatoes and steamed Brussels Sprouts
"Crab" Cakes with fresh baked dinner rolls or farro and Green beans from the garden

All in all I ended up spending $72.13 this week. After going 3 weeks of being under-budget I have managed to go over-budget by $12.38. But there is still one week left to redeem myself and bring myself back within the constraints of my budget for the month. So just in case you're keeping track July has 5 weeks so my monthly budget is $250 ($50/week) I'm currently at $212.38 so next week I'm going to be pulling every cheap trick I have out of my hat to get back on track! We'll see how it goes!!!

Week 3: Feeding The Family for $50 A Week!

Week 3 - the week that almost broke me! As I looked my shopping list up and down this week I could tell this was going to be a tough one. Before I even started shopping for the stuff we needed to make this week's meals I had to replenish my stock of some big ticket items like Vegan Worcestershire sauce, soy flour, earth balance margarine and extra virgin olive oil . Even though I hadn't planned my menu out yet I knew these were things that I needed to keep in the pantry just in case as they go in quite a few things I cook. Sure, I could go weeks without using them but the food hoarder in me just can't stand the thought of going to make a recipe I love and being one important item short. So the food hoarder won and these items stayed on the list. My daughter also fell in love with farro last week (it wasn't one the menu but I had some in the house so I used it as a side instead of brown rice for our stir-fry and it was a huge hit!) So farro was added to the list as well. And on top of that my daughter was also out of snacks at school so I had to buy extra snacks for her. Needless to say the list was looking rather expensive and most of the things I needed on it were from Whole Foods.

On Sunday, our grocery shopping day, I marched off to Whole Foods with my little one in tow ready to tackle this grocery list and brace myself for the financial impact. After 2 weeks of doing this I've realized one thing for sure. I mostly follow the menu's I've set out but the days I do things and when I cook things tends to be all over the place based on how much time I have that day and how much prep time I get without a toddler crawling on my head. So this week, instead of listing what we're going to eat day by day I'm going to list in general what the menu plan is for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the week. I should also add that we do snack a lot as well, with a toddler snacks are a way of life. So I always buy at least 2 types of fresh fruit every week and usually make some type of muffins based on what is in the fridge or the garden. 

Breakfast:

Biscuits

Waffles

Breakfast Sausage from Quick and Easy Vegan Comfort Food

Fresh Fruit

Breakfast Sandwich (I never ended up making these last week so hopefully I'll get around to them this week)

Hashbrowns

Tofu Scramble

Lunch:

Usually left overs and a hodge podge of things that are in the freezer

I'll likely also be making some wraps and having leftover black bean soup a lot

Dinner:

Square Pan Pizza with Yellow Heirloom tomatoes, broccoli, bell pepper and basil - everything 100% homemade from scratch, basil comes from the garden

Pigeon Peas and Rice with Steamed spinach

Pinto Bean Burgers with chickpea fries and veggies

Indian Spiced Chickpeas with farro and veggies

The vegetables for the week are variable and depend on what the garden yields this week I bought frozen spinach and kale this week as well as fresh broccoli to put on the pizza which we had tonight so there is plenty of broccoli left over to munch on for another day or so. Green beans are still the main crop high yielding crop in the backyard garden with carrots, sweet potatoes, tomatoes and corn soon coming up on the horizon. I also bought some red potatoes this week. They were on my list but for the life of me I can't remember why. Maybe I'll make some cheese sauce out of them of just roast them up and have them as a side with dinner one night. I do have an abundance of fresh rosemary that is just begging to be roasted with potaotes.

Somehow, even with only shopping at Whole Foods and my list of big ticket items by grand total for the $56.77. A little over budget for the week but still under budget for the past 3 weeks. I'm so happy I started off this experiment way under budget it has given me lots of wiggle room to play around with as the weeks go on. Three weeks down, two more to go! Geesh, why did I have to pick the month with 5 weeks in it to experiment!

Week 2: Feeding the Family for $50 a week

So here we are at week 2! Week 1 was a success, I spent less than $26 on groceries and every meal was a slam dunk with the family. In order to keep the budget in check my goal was to make as much "from scratch" and homemade as possible so preparing meals definitely took more time than usual but the evidence of my hard work was in the flavors. I was originally stumped on what I would be making for Independence Day but by day 3 there were smatterings of leftovers from each meal still hanging out in the fridge and between that and what was in the pantry I was able to get a really good celebratory meal together for lunch and dinner. For lunch I made ball park hot dogs (from scratch, recipe is in Quick and Easy Low-Cal Vegan Comfort Food), with baked beans, steamed broccoli, leftover skillet fried corn and sliced cantaloupe. For dinner we had BBQ Tofu (using the Hickory Maple BBQ Sauce recipe from Quick & Easy Vegan Celebrations ) that I paired with steamed green beans from the garden, brown rice and left over gravy from the chik'n fried steak I made earlier in the week. Then I capped it all off with some homemade strawberry ice cream made of cashews, frozen strawberries and agave nectar (so simple!)

Now, it's time to turn our attention to this week's menu. You guys have been rockstars on Facebook and I love following everyone's journey to try to eat on a budget. For Independence Day one of my Facebook friends, Kim, suggested I make a sesame peanut noodle salad. I got all inspired and ready to make it and then I suddenly realized I had a full menu so that little nugget is getting added to this week's menu.

This week I did half my shopping at Whole Foods and half at Publix. Whole Foods is my weakness. I can walk down those aisles for hours just looking at all the great food and, undoubtedly, 1/2 of it will end up in my shopping cart. But this time I stuck to my list, aside from the Green Lemonade my daughter loves (how can you resist a toddler asking for green juice?!) For the first time ever my Whole Foods grocery bill was only $21.24 (I used about $5 worth of coupons). A few items from my pantry were destroyed when a glass bottle filled with fermenting kombucha exploded so I had to buy a few more items than I originally planned. But all in all my Publix grocery bill was $36.69. So my total for this week is $57.93. Which means, for my 2 week running total I have spent $83.49 which still puts me about $16 under budget and that is with a couple splurge items added to the list like fresh pressed vegetable juice. Oh! And I bought more organic items this week as well since I saw I had more room in the budget.

So here goes nothing, my menu for the week

Monday July 8th
Breakfast: Whole Wheat Pancakes, Breakfast Sausage, Green Pina Colada (fresh pineapple, So Delicious Coconut Milk, baby collard greens and salad greens from the garden all blended together)
Lunch: Whatever leftovers are in the fridge
Dinner: Sesame Peanut Salad with Agave Roasted Carrots (from the garden) and Roasted Tofu

Tuesday July 9th (My 7 Year Vegan-anniversary!)
Breakfast: Breakfast Biscuit - biscuit, vegan egg patty (I'm trying out a new recipe, if all goes well I'll post it), cheese sauce (not sure which one I'm using but I think the queso sauce from Low-Cal Vegan Comfort Food)
Lunch: A wrap made out of whatever I have leftover in the fridge/freezer and likely some Caesar dressing (recipe from Quick and Easy Vegan Comfort Food)
Dinner: Black Bean Soup from Quick and Easy Low-Cal Vegan Comfort Food,  with steamed veggies tossed in flax oil and homemade dinner rolls

Wednesday July 10th
Breakfast: Breakfast Biscuit and Kombucha
Lunch: Leftover Black Bean Soup and Salad (same southwest salad I made last week)
Dinner: Homemade Whole Wheat Pasta with Alfredo Sauce (recipe from Quick and Easy Low-Cal Vegan Comfort Food topped with Sun-dried Tomatoes and Basil (from the garden)

Thursday July 11th
Breakfast: Breakfast Biscuit and Kombucha
Lunch: Leftovers from Monday - Wednesday (probably something rolled up into a wrap)
Dinner: Leftovers from Monday - Wednesday

Friday, July 12th
Breakfast: Vegetable & Cheese Omelette (I have some daiya cheese hanging around in the freezer somewhere, and I'm using the recipe from Vegan Richa for the omelette - all the greens and veggies will come from the garden)
Lunch: More wraps made out of a hodge podge of leftovers
Dinner: Gumbo with Andouille Sausage over brown rice (using the recipe from Quick and Easy Low-Cal Vegan Comfort Food but adding okra since I have some frozen okra that's been sitting in the freezer for months)

Saturday, July 13th
Breakfast: Whole Wheat Pancakes, Fruit and Naked Tofu Scramble
Lunch and Dinner: Leftovers and whatever I can scrounge up in the freezer and pantry

Sunday, July 14th
Breakfast: Oatmeal & Quinoa (I mix the two together usually with a little cinnamon, brown sugar and hemp seeds), fruit
Lunch and Dinner: Leftovers

Whew! That's it. I like to experiment with recipes so I usually only cook out of my own cookbooks once or twice a week but experimenting means that something might not come out just right and with this new budget I can't afford to waste any food or time on a cooking experiment gone wrong so I'm using tried and true recipes. I'm probably going to start working on a new project sometime this month so we'll see how that affects the budget when I'm working on new recipes. I guess it is more incentive to make it perfect the first time!

Feeding the Family for only $50 a week

Sunday is grocery shopping day. Every Sunday morning I wake up and the first thing on my mind is "what are we going to eat this week?" When it comes to buying food I have very little restraint. I come from a long line of food hoarders. Well, maybe hoarding is a strong word. Let's just say if the zombie apocalypse comes I'll be just fine living off the food in my house for a couple months. Sure, by the end we might be down to sun dried tomatoes and pretzels but food is food right? So needless to say the whole $50 a week thing should be easy right? Well...not exactly. Especially not when trying to feed a toddler. If it were just me I would nix the fresh fruits and vegetables and go for frozen or live off bananas for the rest of the month. But the little one loves her fresh vegetables and fresh fruit. She loves healthy, fresh food so I can't skimp on the fresh stuff for the sake of my budget experiment. We also try to buy organic whenever possible. I acknowledge that this probably isn't going to be able to happen on $50 a week but I sure will try! One of my greatest challenges will repressing the food hoarder in me. I have a blog named Vegan Guinea Pig for crying out loud! Which basically came out of the fact that if I see something interesting at the grocery store I'm going to buy it, try it and tell you about it. Well...that can be pricey as my last trip to the grocery store will attest to.

I'll be cross blogging for the entire month of July so be sure to check out the The Lady and Seitan blog too as I will be posting all my Paula Deen inspired recipes over there. I'll also be cooking from scratch as much as possible to save money, making double batches whenever I can and freezing them for later.

First things first - the menu. My daughter will be eating morning snack and lunch at school (they have a vegan menu so I don't have to pack her lunch...yep, pretty awesome) so that takes a lot of pressure off during the week and means I can slack off at lunch a bit more than usual. So here's my plan for the week.

Monday July 1st

Breakfast: Bran Muffins, Naked Tofu Scramble (from Quick and Easy Low-Cal Vegan Comfort Food), Homemade Kombucha

Lunch: Leftover Lil Mac's (recipe coming soon) and Chickpea Fries

Dinner: Fool Your Friends Tacos on homemade wheat tortillas with salsa and maybe some vegan sour cream, Friend Cream Corn (recipe coming soon)

Tuesday July 2nd

Breakfast: Bran Muffins, Naked Tofu Scramble (from Quick and Easy Low-Cal Vegan Comfort Food), Homemade Kombucha

Lunch: Southwest Salad (a mix of lettuce from my garden, black or pinto beans, salsa, corn and a homemade chipotle vinaigrette. If I have any tortillas left over from Monday's dinner I might cut them thin, fry them up and top the salad with them)

Dinner: Chik'n Fried Steak (recipe coming soon) with Fresh green beans (from the garden), southern cornbread (recipe coming soon)

Wednesday July 3rd

Breakfast: Oatmeal Scones (made these last week and froze the leftovers), cantaloupe and breakfast sausage from Quick and Easy Vegan Comfort Food (I made these a couple weeks ago and froze them)

Lunch and Dinner: No clue yet, crossing my fingers I'll have some leftovers from Monday and Tuesday to work through.

Thursday, July 4th

I'm not 100% sure what I'm doing for the 4th yet but I have a feeling I'll be making some black bean burgers and possibly some hot dogs from scratch depending on how much wheat gluten I have left. I made hot dog and hamburger buns from scratch on Friday and put them in the freezer so I don't have to buy buns either.

Friday-Sunday July 5th - 7th

Not exactly sure what I'm making yet. I'll have to take inventory of what I have left in the  pantry. I've already started to prepare the seitan for the chik'n fried steak (made a double batch so I can use the other half later) and I'm super low on Bragg's and getting low on vital wheat gluten. I want to make chik'n parmesan from Quick and Easy Low-Cal Vegan Comfort Food. I have some marinara sauce in my deep freezer that I made a couple months ago so that would go perfect with it and more green beans should have popped up in the garden by the end of the week to give us more fresh veggies.  I'm also thinking of making a gumbo if I have the time and vital wheat gluten left to make the andouille sausage. I didn't buy celery and the celery in my garden didn't come in so if I make it I'll probably sprinkle some celery seed in the mix instead of going out and buying a big stalk of celery just for 1 or 2 ribs.

 

And that's my plan for the week! All in all I only spent $25.56 on groceries so far this week! I didn't buy anything organic this week but perhaps I'll have a little more leeway to do so next week. My goal is to not go back to the grocery store until next Sunday but even if I have to I'm still way under my goal so I have plenty of wiggle room. Oh and in case you were inspecting the receipt above. Yes, I did make the cashier void out my onions because she rang them up wrong just to save 18 cents!

Keeping It In the Vegan Family - Hey English Graphic Design

A little over 4 years ago I saw a flyer for the 1st annual Atlanta Vegan Bake Sale. The flyer was fun, creative and above all unique. Coincidentally, I was looking for someone to design my first website for my first cookbook Quick and Easy Vegan Comfort Food. And so I sought out the graphic designer behind the flyer I'd seen. As it turns out that designer was Steph Timms and the icing on the cake was that she was (and still is) vegan! My preference is to keep things in the vegan family as much as possible whenever I can. The food photography and styling for all my cookbooks has always been vegan and the graphic designer I have worked with on every single one of my project is vegan as well.

Steph has done every inch of my branding since my very first cookbook. She has not only created all of my websites she is also the creative mastermind behind both of my blogs creating the logo for The Lady and Seitan blog and the reworking the Vegan Guinea Pig blog to make it seamlessly blend in with my main website www.aliciacsimpson.com The latest project Steph worked with me on is for my non-profit. Out of everything we have ever done together this was, without a doubt, our biggest undertaking. Pea Pod Nutrition and Lactation Support, Inc. is more than a cookbook, more than a website for my fans to get to know me and more than a blog - it is my passion. After I had my daughter I decided that there was no way I could justify leaving her for more than a 10 seconds if it wasn't to go out and make the world a better place. Pea Pod was a project I had been working on for years but now I had the push I needed to turn all that planning into a real organization. Of course, I turned to Steph to communicate my vision. After 4 years of working together we work like a well oiled machine. She knows my style, she knows the colors I like, she knows that I lack all creativity outside the kitchen so when I throw an idea at her she knows how to interpret that crazy idea and turn it into magic. A couple weeks ago I emailed her with no design concept, no colors, no anything and said "I need a rack card, it needs to be 3.5"x8", here's what it needs to say." Within 48 hours I had a rack card (for those who don't know what that is it is basically a medium side promotional flyer that fits a standard size envelope). Not only was it done in just 48 hours but it was perfect, yes perfect, 100% flawless on the first try. We ended up making some small tweaks to it but that's only because Steph had some more she wanted to do with it. When it comes to artist I always trust their vision and so I trusted when Steph said she wanted to add some images from the website to the card and tie everything together from a branding standpoint. I'm so glad I trust her! The 2nd draft was even more phenomenal than the first. If you're following this that means that she somehow perfected perfection - can you tell I love this girl! Well...I mean, I'm not in love with her our respective significant others might take issue with that! :)

You don't have to be in the city of Atlanta to work with Steph Timms and her team at Hey English - a creative studio. Steph and I communicated largely via email and we live within minutes of each other but I think it worked well for our crazy scheudles but she's super flexible in whatever style you like to work in. So whether you're in Atlanta, Portland, New York, LA, or Zimbabwe you must must must hire Steph Timms with Hey Englsih for your next project. There are none to big or two smal. Please contact the fine folks at Hey English at steph@heyenglishcreative.com and checkout their website at http://heyenglishcreative.com/ Their prices are fair, the work is always done right the 1st time and they are, above all else, creative geniuses.