Serving Up Soup ~ Cutting the Spending Down Even More

We cut our food costs down this winter.  We still include meats and fish in our diet, but have now replaced more than half of our consumption, with dry beans.  We did this by making soup more often.

Many people typically serve another food item with soup, and feel soup is not filling for a meal by itself.  However, by replacing the meat with extra beans, such as kidney, pinto, black and other beans, we made many filling soups.

The trick is to buy the beans dry, bake them up in large batches, and freeze them.  When you cook, you can simply take out what you want without using canned beans (which typically have more sodium). 

We also started making our soups/stews without buying broth.  We either make it ourselves, or flavor our soups with onions and fresh mushrooms.   However, for this to be cost effective, we also froze many garden vegetables, and dried home grown herbs.  If I see organic/free range chicken broth marked in clearance, I may sometimes purchase it and cook with it right away also.

Homemade Granola

I have always wanted to get started at making my family a healthy, homemade granola.  What prevented me, was the cost of healthier foods.  Finally, I made it.  We love it.  The only problem now is I am out of honey.  I made this batch with organic cranberries, flax seed, and lots of healthy ingredients.  It took a while to collect the ingredients when they were on sale, but it was worth it.  We only buy raw honey from local people now.  The nice part about making this, is you can pretty much mix it up with what you like.  I was out of walnuts, and had a small bag of pecans in my freezer.  It worked nicely in our granola.

Baking the granola was all I could muster up.  We are slowly recovering from sickness around here, and the antibiotics are not doing so well with my stomach.