Thread: Fighting the rising cost of groceries

I reiterate: pay close attention to your menu.
A roast chicken is gone in two days, a chicken in our house will feed us for 6 days.
How?
Coq au Vin, Poule Grandmere: CHicken Tacos/burritos, Wonton soup, chicken chilli con carne, spicy chicken wraps with lettuce onion avocado tomato, chicken cacciatore pasta etc.

Originally Posted by numpty

One thing we found was the kids drank heaps of milk, so I bought Light powdered milk (no frills brand) and used to mix it 50/50 with e full cream bought milk....they drank it for ages before they knew and never complained. We still do it...cuts quite a bit off the cost

Cleaners eat a huge amount of $
Use bicarb soda and white vinegar...good for the toilet especially. Scrub with bicarb first (I have bicarb in a large salt shaker with some rice to stop it clagging up) and then pour 1 cup of vinegar around the bowl and let it sit for 1/2 hr before flushing. Bicarb on a cloth is an abrasive and great for the bath & handbasin. Throw away all those toilet deodorisers and blue things (totally unecessary). For general cleaning a weak bleach mixture in a spray bottle is good esp in the bathroom.

PS...this is NM boosting Numpty's post count

This is great stuff, we do it too, and good for the environment!
Cinnamon is a powerful deodorant/freshener!

I used to spend $150 a week on food and groceries

We now target to spend $100 a week or less for 2 adults and standard poodle

Kathy doesn't eat red meat or pork so its chicken and fish

We buy chicken whole and cut it into portions and carcass is either fed to the poodle as treat or boiled with veggies to make stcok whihc is frozen in 2 cup plastic self seal lock bags for use later.

We don't eat take away a lot

We buy things like tinned food red bean white bean and other sort of beans tomato etc in bulk when Italian Grocery store selling them for under 70 cents a tin.

Also large jars like artichoke hearts are $9 for 2 kilos compared to couple dollars for a tin so need to calculate the savings of buying larger units against single serve convenience.

Fresh food like fruit and veggies cost us around $30 week

We don't find any hardships in doing it and eat well.

Originally Posted by numpty

PS...this is NM boosting Numpty's post count

and here we are thinking Numpty was all domesticated

thanks for that NM, most helpful, you would think a chemistry teacher would know all that.

Hi Ace
We have a seperate deep freeze.
As Ladas states,as long a bulk meat is wrapped correctly its no problem.
Forgot to add,we freeze/pickle/preserve(well at least SHMBO does)as much excess in season veggies as possible,if they dont end up being used they go back to the chooks.Some of the stuff she pickles and makes sauces(mainly chilli) wich she sells at the weekend markets.
Andrew

Just apply more funds towards shopping and do without unnecessary **** like duel diflocks, etc..........

Hi NM
The 4 chooks are an integral part of our orchard.
They eat any fallen fruit,eat the bugs,and green material/scraps that dont go in the wormfarm get thrown to the chooks.They get all the vegi garden waste,at the break of the season they are restricted to a small area of the orchard,i grow a crop of oats/peas/lupins,once its 2 foot high they are allowed to do what they wish with it.Takes them a long time to chew their way thru it,they were still into it at Xmas time!!!.
If there are no seedlings in the vegi garden(as at the moment) the chooks get a special treat,grazing the vegi garden,they dont do alot of damage as they love Slaters and there are heaps easily found.
We would buy a 25kg bag of laying pellets every 10 weeks or so.
Andrew

Originally Posted by Numpty's Missus

LandyAndy, do you find now tho that keeping chooks is getting too expensive? We had chooks for years but found that when the price of the chooks went up to something like $15 per point of lay chook, and feed went over $15 per bag, that even with selling eggs at $2 per dozen to friends, it was cheaper to buy local grown eggs from the markets at $2.50 per doz.
I hate to think what a chook costs locally these days, and the cost of layer pellets

Mind you....I did love having chooks These days the cows get the kitchen scraps and the chook shed makes a great hay shed

i have had the schools chooks here over the holidays (people steel them at when they get left at school- i guess that shows how expensive they are getting ) but they arent quite on the lay yet and they (14 of them) are eating about 1 and a half bags a week at about $27.50 a week, so if they laid a dozen eggs a day and we sold 6 dozen eggs a week at $2 to friends (this is based on them being our chooks) we would be out of pocket by alot more than what we save by having them to get "free" eggs. Sure you can give them scraps and stuff to cut the cost down but they still need the grains and meat meal etc to create a balanced diet.

how much would you say it costs to keep your chooks Landyandy?