Meat. It’s a centerpiece of most American meals, including ours. While at one time I was a vegetarian and now only eat small amounts of poultry, my husband is a meat eater. Every meal needs to have meat. But being on a budget, sometimes a very tight one, I’ve had to learn some strategies to keep our meat costs down.
First off, we have our staple meats:
- Whole chicken
- boneless, skinless chicken breasts or tenders
- lean ground turkey
- lean ground beef
And then we have our splurge meats:
- beef roast
- beef tenderloin (filet mignon)
Now others I have talked to about this think I’m slightly crazy to buy the lean ground meat and the boneless, skinless chicken, but I have found that by strategic shopping and buying the meat on sale or from the grocery store that offers the best price, I get more actual meat (vs fat & bone) from which I can make a wide variety of dishes; My family is eating healthier; and I can still make my budget.
For chicken, both whole and boneless, skinless, I watch the sales. Grocery stores (in the U.S. anyway) have their sales on about a 12 week cycle. And I know that there’s a surplus of chicken in the Spring and the Fall, so prices are consistently low for a few weeks during that time.
I also know what my “buy price” is per pound. A buy price is the price that I know is low enough for me to buy it. For example, if I know that the stores around here usually carry boneless skinless chicken breasts for $2.99/lb or more. But when it goes on sale, the price is usually $1.99/lb or less. So when I see boneless, skinless chicken breasts for $1.99/lb or less then I know it’s time to stock up.
Now, each area is different and each item (and family) has a different buy price. But by paying attention to what we are buying and paying, we’ve been able to strategically lower our food bill, especially for meat.
In my next post, I’ll share how I prep meat for the freezer so that when it’s time to cook, I don’t have hardly any prep time.
A couple weeks ago, I wrote up a great new post for you all and then discovered that earlier that day someone or some program had hacked into this site and blocked me from posting any thing new. <UGH!!>
Now normally, with databases I know well, I’m a security freak. But apparently I dropped the ball with Wordpress. (Gotta love these life lessons). As you can see I can post again, but in the meantime, I’m sorry for being silent for a while. Technology has its blessings, but also its…well ….downsides.
Anyway, check back tomorrow, as I’ve got a new series on saving money on groceries, and saving some prep time for those of us who are short on time. Have a great week!
Last week my 9-year-old son’s baseball team won their division championship game (yeah!). And that’s cool in itself. But what makes it even better is that they placed 8th in regular season standings; but because they didn’t give up they managed to walk away as division champions.
This was a lesson the team coaches very distinctly hammered into the boys – Don’t give up! And it’s a lesson we as adults need to continue to remember – in all the roles we have, as wives, mothers, teachers, friends, and workers/business people.
Perseverance is a key difference between succeeding in whatever we set out to do (and however we define success.) I’ve seen so often with my own children, in our homeschooling, that just as I think they are not going to grasp something – all of the sudden – it’s there.
I’ve seen it with our finances, with our search for housing, with job or client work. When things get hard, that’s the time to continue on, despite what we feel.
And we can count it all joy in the end – for the success, the victory is even sweeter. And it builds our faith. Our knowledge that things will work out. We may not always win a championship game; but we will continue to grow and learn and make progress.
Basically, the concept is to plan out first your time off, including vacations and free days (where you aren’t working); and then to schedule out your support/administration days and your focused work days. Everything is color-coded and marked with moveable stickers (so its easy to make schedule changes).
My 2009 Success Calendar (in January)
Since I ran across this concept at the end of December, when I was doing my whole planning and re-evaluating thing, I decided to give this a try. Right off, it proved useful because my husband and I were able to iron out what our vacation/holiday wish list and get those scheduled and start the planning/budgeting process. Definitely a first for us and so far successful.
Next I scheduled the free days, days where realistically I’m not going to get much work done anyway (too many activities or family commitments). Doing this made me realize why I was getting into bottlenecks with my work. I really wasn’t taking much for free days in some periods of time and in others was taking too many. This helped me kind of plan what I wanted to do, and then schedule around it.
Three types of work days schedule with free time and support days
Next was the work days. Now I have three types of work – magazine work (a steady client), client work (project-based), and then work on this blog and other personal projects. So I ended up scheduling those out. First the magazine work, because that’s on a production cycle and I can predict when the work is coming and how much time it will take. Then, I had to look at the client work I was doing. That was an eye opener. No wonder I was working so many late nights! I had a lot more work than I had time. (oops)
After using this for five months, I’ve discovered that 1) my kids like to come look at it to see what type of day it is (a free day or a work day); 2) I needed move things around a lot; 3) I really needed to make some changes to my habits to get this to work.
It’s interesting moving things around; because the theory is that once the calendar is completely scheduled out, you should only swap days around. Well, it’s harder than you think. I keep wanting to add in work days, skip the free days. Now it’s getting difficult to swap out days because I’ve moved so many free days to the latter half of the year. But it is good for forcing me to really look at how much I’m accomplishing in the days that I am working and how much I’m not.
I expect that as time goes on and I learn how to use this method more effectively and really carve out those focus times during the day (instead of the middle of the night, which has been my habit for the last twelve years). I find its good for me to go back to the interview Carrie did with Sarah Robinson and re-read how she implements it and how it works for her. It helps me keep perspective and learn more about how to make better use of my time.
For now I’m going continue to work with this method. It’s a different way of thinking about my schedule than I’ve used in the past, and it’s hard to break habits. But so far, I have experienced definite benefits to using this method, and think that over time I can make this work further. If you are looking for a way to balance work and home, I would suggest giving it a try. For more information, check out Carrie’s ebook Juggling?? Time Management Tips – Strategies for Your Success from 3 Experts!. The info is in the second interview. (the other two interviews are very useful too!)
Several families in our area have purchased milkweed plants and are watching the amazing Monarch butterfly lifecycle first hand. However, a few have contacted me and others on our homeschool list about their caterpillars disappearing and possibly atacked by predators. The basic question has come down to “How Do I keep our caterpillars from disappearing?”
The first year we did milkweed and caterpillars I freaked out over the missing caterpillars too. Here there were these wonderful caterpillars and then the next day they were gone. But thankfully we figured it out… Once they reach about 1 ½ to 2 inches (or whatever it is when they know they are ready to pupate) then they crawl off and form their chrysalis somewhere else. They will not form the chrysalis on the milkweed.
So what we’ve learned to do is when they were in the big fat stage on the milkweed, we put the ones we want to watch (not all) into a habitat so we can watch the transformation. Whatever habitat you use should be contained, with plenty of air flow and cool (avoid a sunny & humid environment, otherwise they will die). It’s important that it is contained because they will crawl away. (Earlier this year, my 11 year old daughter had one crawl out of an opening and form it’s chrysalis on a single thread from her bed sheet.)
If the caterpillar is big enough and you have some milkweed leaves, put them in there, but they prefer live milkweed. I’ve experimented with putting a milkweed plant in the habitat and that works. I’ve read research on using squash peelings when you are out of or low on milkweed; and it seems that it works best when the caterpillars are large enough and are fed a blend of milkweed and squash peelings. But I’ve never tried it.
Milkweed is poisonous to most would be predators, so overall monarch caterpillars don’t have much for predators. Wasps however are known to attack caterpillars periodically. We’ve found that most of the time missing caterpillars are usually just the result of their time coming to begin the transformation.
Once the butterfly’s emerge, we usually let them go. However several years ago, my daughter wanted to “nurse” a butterfly with a broken wing and we were able to keep it going for a few days on fresh flower nectar (Potted, not cut) and when that wasn’t available, sugar water.
Here’s some instructions for creating your own habitat out of netting. http://www.butterflyschool.org/teacher/makehouse.html We used these the year we “nursed” the butterfly. Since then, we’ve purchased a collapsible butterfly habitat and that’s worked well for us. If you are looking for a collapsible butterfly habitat, I recommend the Butterfly Pavilion made by Insect Lore; it fits a small milkweed plant and is large enough for multiple caterpillars and/or an emerged butterfly to flutter about.
Another choice that has worked well for us is a bug house . This is only good for watching the transformation though. The caterpillar needs to be just about ready for the transformation and once the butterfly emerges, you’ll want to release it pretty quickly, as there’s no room for it to fly. But, it works good as a small portable area to watch the transformation from caterpillar to chyrsallis, to butterfly, and is relatively inexpensive.
Anyway, you choose, enjoy the process. The metamorphisis from caterpillar to butterfly is an amazing thing to behold and so much more interesting to learn about first hand than from a book.
made by Insect Lore; it fits a small milkweed plant and is large enough for multiple caterpillars and/or an emerged butterfly to flutter about.
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