End of Week 7

It's a Bountiful Basket week! This week we got:

• a head of Romaine lettuce
  
• 8 Roma tomatoes
• 2 eggplants
• 1 big zucchini
  
• 4 green bell peppers
• 2 avocados
• 5 ears of corn
• 1 pineapple
• 1 quart of strawberries
• 3 lemons
• 5 apples
• 8 bananas

I will have to go on an online hunt for eggplant recipes.

This week for dinner we had:

• stuffed shells that I had made before and stashed in the freezer
• creamy broccoli/cauliflower soup that should have been but didn't actually turn out to be a hit
  
• pork roll-ups
• orange chicken and fried rice
• chili
• fried egg sandwiches
• beef stew (from the freezer) and cornbread
  

The fried rice that we had with the orange chicken is a new recipe that I found on a new favorite blog. This is something I will make again and again. The orange chicken was so-so, from now on I'll just add a bottle of cooked chicken directly to the fried rice and call it dinner. Or maybe I'll call it "chicken fried rice".

This week I spent $67.84 on groceries*. Woot!

*I feel like I need to tell the whole truth about my grocery bills. The money I'm counting when I say what I spent on groceries is for breakfasts, lunches, snacks, and other things like milk, butter, eggs and sour cream. I have set aside $100 per month to stock up on meat and other things like canned/frozen vegetables or cheese when there is a great sale going somewhere, and to replenish my basic food storage. I buy ground beef, chicken, and pork in bulk when it's on sale and process it in my pressure canner. I am using lots of food from my basic food storage pretty much every day, things like:

• rice
• beans
• oats
• sugar
• wheat and flour (I've been baking all our bread and have discovered it's not that much of a hassle if I just work it into my schedule on a day when I'm home for a couple hours. I like to start it first thing in the morning.)
• mashed potato flakes
  
• etc.

I'm not figuring the cost of all those items into my weekly grocery bill. If I was it would be a lot higher. My rationale for this is that we are temporarily living more frugally while all my adult children are temporarily living at home and temporarily eating up everything as fast as I can prepare it. We also are trying to pay off some debts that we owe.