Making different food choices

Cyndee Levy

We decided to begin tomorrow, Monday, as we could not get our act together before Shabbat. So we have menu planned and gone shopping and will begin in the morning. 

We did fairly well shopping; we had a budget of $189 for our family of 6 and we still have $60 left for later this week. The menu planning wasn't too difficult as I do cook almost every night of the week. But we decided to use more frozen veggies instead of fresh as we were able to get more for our dollar. This experience is already showing us that we have to make different food choices in order to have enough and that we will absolutely have to go with smaller portions in order to stretch the dollar, with three 18 y/o boys in the house this will be the biggest challenge.

We decided to deduct $20 from the overall budget for the coffee, flour and sugar, condiments and the like that we will be using. But, we did pull everything out of the pantry that was part of our menus for the week and deducted their dollar value from our budget. Now the pantry is closed for the week.

In some ways we are lucky because of the fact that I cook a lot and my family are already very healthy eaters.  So we don't some of the things that families usually have on hand for snacking. My family are also big veggies eaters, salads, kale, greens...the less expensive items that can be stretched a bit further.

We will do without meat, expect we have planned turkey meatloaf for Shabbat dinner.

Thank you again for sharing this experience with us through Mirowitz. I know we will learn a great deal.