Eggs and Meat Coming Out My Ears

About a month ago there was a great sale at Shoppers Drug Mart. Eggs were on sale $1.49 a dozen, limit of two, $1.79 after limit. Plus there were 20X the Optimum points. We spent a lot of money that day on needs, meds, groceries and more because there were a TON of great sales. Back to the eggs. I way overshot on how many eggs we were going to use before the best before date. I didn't notice they were only good for about 3 weeks past the day we bought them. Now they are way past date and we still have a fridge full. I have been working on freezing them. If you beat them up, they can be frozen. I'll probably use them for baking. One egg fills two ice cube spots in the ice cube tray. I read it was one egg per cube but they must be smaller. I still have more than 2 dozen to go through so I may just freeze them in little containers with 4-6 eggs for larger batch recipes as their time is just about up.

Today is October, a lovely month. It is cool, the harvest is still going on, Thanksgiving is in a couple of weeks, Halloween at the end of the month, still plenty of time to get ready for Christmas. Ahhh.

This is the month we get smarter with our money and resources. No more impulse spending. Mark will be the hard one to stick with this. Since he works at a grocery store, it is so easy for him to just pick up stuff while he's there. He often buys himself treats that while I don't really care, it adds up spending a few dollars a day on chocolate bars/treats and drinks. He also likes to wander the mall and other stores when he's done.

So, how do we do this? I am going to talk to him about leaving his wallet home (except ID 'cause you never know). We are also going to go back to having one day we do all of our shopping. Shopping has become more entertainment than anything. I am going to make shopping lists and meal plans. If we happen to need anything in between (it happens), I'll get Mark to pick it up rather than us all go in and start with the "I wants". These things worked well in the past.

I went over the grocery store flyers for next week. There thankfully wasn't much, probably due to the fact these are the pre-Thanksgiving flyers and I find here groceries are often a little more expensive before a big holiday. Turkeys are on sale for $1.97 /lbs but I am hoping they go down to a dollar a pound after. I always get jealous of the Americans with their 29 cent a pound turkey. If it were that cheap here, it would pay to get an extra freezer.

I have budgeted $50 a week for groceries and $100 a month for food storage. Since there isn't much on my list, Superstore has a chicken dinner on sale for $10. A whole large rotisserie chicken, large tators, large salad and a bag of cookies for $10 is excellent! I can't even find a whole chicken raw for $10 lately and this chicken should be good for a few meals.

Food is just getting so expensive here. I sometimes feel justified in spending more because everything costs so much but I know I can do better. We have a lot of food storage that needs to be used up, so that will help in the short term.

I decided not to get a side of pork this year. We did last year and while it was good, a lot of what it cost paid for bone and fat. It was $1.39 a pound cut, which is decent. It was $122, which included having the hams and bacon smoked. Well, we have a ton of bacon in the freezer (a reusable Sobey's bag full), we have lots of hams, picnic shoulders, pork chops, tenderloin roasts and more. Last week Superstore had a sale on tenderloin pork chops and roasts for $1.49. I bought 6 2lbs roasts and 5 packs of chops (about 2lbs a pack). This is pure meat, no fat, no bone so I'm not paying for waste. I bought a picnic shoulder a couple weeks ago for 89 cents a pound. Well, it was almost entirely fat and bone. We barely got 2 meals out of a 5lbs shoulder, the rest was waste. When you are buying meat, you need to weight the costs of how much meat you are going to get against the value of the waste. Some cheap cuts do work out to be a good value, but sometimes it is not.