February 5th, 2013

Well on the weight front...  not so good.  But back on track - up 1.7 pounds in 3 weeks of not paying much attention.
Upcoming soon, birthday + anniversary + valentines day.  Sadly, pretty much all just excuses as we never do much to recognize any of them, or if we do recognize them - we just do something for all three. 

The grocery budget has been going very well, provided I'm using cash.  I don't really want to use cash, so I tried to go back to using the credit card with a budget.  I stuck to the budget for two weeks and last week spent so far $30 over.  And still forgot salad.  In my defense I did buy 4 meals worth of chicken and a nice rack of pork ribs for my hubby to play with on the BBQ.

Back in November we went in with my sister/brother in law to share a side of grass fed, organic beef with them.  We spent $510 for half of the side (or 1/4 of a cow).  Our 'side' of cow was 300 pounds - I estimate that we got 150 pounds of nice beef for $510.  That included brisket (to smoke), several roasts, steaks, ribs, packages of hamburger, stew meat, stirfry strips, and soup bones.  I also got a box of burger patties and some of the organ meat.

So far we have had beef about twice a week and have not even used nearly 1/2  the meat.  At about $3.40 a pound for all the meat (and of course prime rib or new york strip steaks are a pricier meat than burger or stirfry strips), we are spending more than I would pay at the grocery store by about $0.50 a pound.  Sometimes I could find a really good sale, or even mark down meat, but I am so happy with this purchase that I am not worried about hormones, antibiotics or any type of salmonella, e-coli or listeria that I think the price difference is worth it. 

We have set a weekly food budget at $100 per week.  This also includes all personal care, cleaning and paper products.  Mostly we are within reason on the budget - but I haven't included things like our bulk meat purchase, I buy chickens 10 at a time locally, spring/summer I buy eggs from a co-worker who keeps a small flock (is a group of chickens a flock?  herd?  swarm???). 
These purchases probably average $25 per week (I don't think our 1/4 of cow will last us the whole year - next year we will try to buy 1/2 cow for ourselves).

This poses somewhat of a problem for our budget.  To cut back on other food purchases, or to increase the budget?