All This Cooking Is Starting to Pay Off

I have to say that I read Mike’s story on how people who eat alone have worse diets and laughed. Like, held my artisanally-crafted muesli (if I make it by hand, I count as an artisan, right?) in my Fiestaware bowl and LOL’d at the thought that I would let any part of a squash go bad before I ate it.

I will be honest — I haven’t purchased any squash this fall, and I should. It is an excellent autumnal vegetable that can be turned into a myriad of delicious soups, half of which can be put directly into the freezer.

Also: look at my freezer! Even when I lived in the microapartment I still didn’t waste food (which I mostly accomplished by doing things like “eating lettuce even when it had started to look like wet leaves,” which might prove that Australian study’s point about how people who live alone have worse diets, because I sure wouldn’t have served that salad to anyone else), but now I have a freezer, and I am so excited to put food into it.

I am also excited to figure out if all this cooking is saving me any money. After I did the math on my fixed expenses and discovered I only had about $700 per month in discretionary income left over, I decided to figure out whether I’d be able to move any November cash from “groceries” to “discretionary” (specifically, “holidays”).

Here’s what I learned: I have almost enough food in my kitchen to tide me over for the entire month.

Breakfast will be no problem, since I already have bags of oats ready to be mixed into muesli. I’ll need to buy another thing of nuts and another container of yogurt in about a week, but otherwise I’m good to go.

Lunch is even better, because I think I can make it to the end of the month without buying anything. I have plenty of bread (and plenty of flour to make more bread); I also have turkey, peanut butter, and a huge block of cheese I haven’t even opened. So sandwiches are covered. I also have four apples and a little over 20 clementines to eat with lunch, as well as two full bags of chips left over from recent entertaining. They live in my freezer now.

What else lives in my freezer?

Two dinners’ worth of chicken noodle soup.

Two dinners’ worth of vegetable soup.

Three dinners’ worth of pulled pork, especially if I eat it with a side of one of the cans of beans I have in the cupboard.

Ground beef, so I can make six dinners’ worth of cornbread casserole.

Essentially I have thirteen dinners in stock, and 21 days in which to eat them — but I also have dinner plans for a few of those days (hello, Thanksgiving!) which means I’ll get very close to the end of the month without having to buy a gob of groceries.

(I love having a kitchen so much. You have no idea.)

So far I’ve spent $72.56 on groceries for November (and about half of that went to entertaining). I wonder if I can keep the entire month under $150. That’d put another $150 back into discretionary/holiday/end of year spending, which would be fantastic.

I’ll let you know what happens. Also, I have added “squash” to my shopping list, just to prove to the Australians that I will eat it all.


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