Ways to feed a large family

[Billie]

After reading another post, and seeing the number of children this mom had to feed:) I thought it might be nice to have a thread started that we could refer to with ideas on how to feed large families with some economy. And there's nothing like a mom or dad who have a large family to share those tricks with us. I don't have a large family but some off the top of my head just to get us started...

Bulk buying when things or on sale
Using every space in the freezer, or investing in a home freezer to accomodate
Watching the ads carefully in the newspaper, nothing like hitting a sale of a dozen eggs for .79
Using coupons
Co-op buying
Farmers markets
Growing you own veggies

[Gabriel Guzman]

COSTCO... Sam's Club... BJ's... I used to be a COSTCO guy, until I moved where there is no COSTCO nearby. Now, I do the Sam's Club trip when I can. We don't have a large family but we do need to watch the economy:)

[Donna7]

Hey Billie, thanks for starting this thread! I'll put my two cents worth in as soon as I can...right now my bad arm is acting up and I can only type one-handed...I'm looking forward to reading some others' ideas too!
Donna

[Donna7]

Okay...I'll give this one a try now. I agree with all of the other posts...our Sam's Club is about 35 miles away and I don't get there too often, but when I do I stock up on things they are MUCH cheaper on, like SF Da Vinci syrups (under $5 for the big bottles!)...I enjoy flavored coffee, and have found it to really satisfy me when I'm craving something sweet. They also have really good prices on dairy (especially ricotta cheese!), eggs, and produce, although I've had some of their produce go bad pretty quickly.

I'll have to finish this later...losing my arm again:( ...
Donna

[Inez]

I plan out a week's worth of menus, including a couple of breakfast ideas and one or two desserts. I look at what's on sale and plan meals around that. This way I only buy what I need and don't have things going bad in the refrigerator. It also saves time because I'm not frantically running out to get things at the last minute. I also plan a couple of super-easy meals for nights when I'm too rushed or tired to cook so we don't have to resort to take-out food.

[Donna7]

Well, I'll try again to address this issue! These are great ideas! I do try to shop sales and buy in bulk and store things in the freezer. There are also some stores around here where you can find normally expensive items much more cheaply, i.e. "bent and dent" stores, or Big Lots. You have to be really careful at the bent and dent stores, though...I don't buy dented cans, and the boxed things can sometimes be infested (my daughter bought a couple of bags of brown rice...completely sealed...but they had something in them and infested her entire cupboard, and she had to throw out almost everything! Turned out to be very expensive bags of rice, after all, and she's never shopped there since). But the jarred items, like sun-dried tomatoes, fancy organic salad dressings, etc., are usually much less. I try to make sure they're in date, though.

Shopping the "perimeter" of the store usually doesn't lend itself well to using a lot of coupons, for me, unless there are specific name brand items we use frequently, like Miracle Whip or Folger's coffee. What I do like, though, is finding meats and veggies that are marked down for quick sale. I've started shopping online, though, so I don't get that luxury anymore (worth it not to have to push a grocery cart, IMHO!) Of course, buying larger quantities of meat and preparing my own, rather than using expensive prepared foods, really helps with the budget. Buying a pork tenderloin and a bottle of salad dressing and marinating it myself is often much less than the pre-marinated specialty meats. I have a friend that invested in a meat slicer, and always cooks up turkey breasts and beef roasts and slices her own "deli" meat. Probably a lot healthier, and when I talked to her last she had almost paid for the slicer with the savings. Chicken salad made from leftover roast chicken is wonderful, too! We've never bought a lot of packaged drinks...usually just drink water, with the occasional sodas, but find iced tea is certainly much cheaper than soda and better for everybody.

There are, of course, the standard low-budget low-carb foods: tuna, eggs, ground beef, chicken leg quarters, turkeys on sale around the holidays and corned beef on sale in March, etc. Having a large freezer really does help stock up on those seasonal things, as well as gardening and/or farmer's market and freezing the fresh produce. The large bags of frozen veggies at Sam's are often less expensive than fresh, and much less expensive (and healthier!) than canned.

Well, nothing new here, I guess...just common sense. I used to rely on a lot of cheap, high carb things to extend the food budget. We have at times had as many as ten or twelve people we were feeding, and eating lots of rice and homemade bread! When we lived in Syracuse we were both in school, and I often boiled leftover chicken bones for soup. My husband would come in, lift the lid on the pot, and say, "Oh, we're having bones for dinner again!" Well, we're down to six now; still find it a bit of a challenge to feed everybody PP, but find not buying junk food (chips, soda, etc.) almost evens out the grocery bill.

Guess my two cents turned into a nickel...didn't mean to ramble on so!:o
Take care...
Donna

[gitfiddle]

I have trouble with things like fresh lettuce deteriorating before I can eat it all myself. I found that by customizing DH's salad, he will eat more of it. For him, I throw in raisins and sun seeds and it tastes better to him. Yay! Now I'm weaning him away from iceberg lettuce.

It's sometimes overwhelming to try to change the entire family's way of eating all at once. If you take your typical weekly grocery sales slip and scan down the cost column and look for the worst items, it helps you decide what to avoid. Yes, meat can be expensive, but so is breakfast cereal. I can buy a roast or a whole chicken instead of deli meat, brick cheese instead of individually wrapped slices, oatmeal or bagged store brand breakfast cereal instead of chocolated-coated sugar bombs.

[Omlette]

I noticed in on of the posts, someone mentioned pre-marinated pork loins. I like buying (usually at Sam's) a nice pork loin, fairly large size. I will put it in the freezer for about an hour, depending on size. Then I take it back out, and slice it into 1-inch sections. I will usually get 20-26 nice thick porkchops, out of a $15 dollar loin. I will then package them freezer bags of 6-8 with wax paper in between. This way, I can just pull out a bag to thaw or how ever many pieces that I need.

If I catch roasts on sale, I will buy two and just freeze.