We're coming off of a difficult 6 months of house repairs, topped off with some really expensive vet bills in the past few weeks. To say that our regular routine of cooking at home and other frugal habits have been disrupted is an understatement. We're slowly getting back into cooking at home, but with the constrained budget it hasn't been very fun. Plus I'm way behind on making staples like chicken stock and other basics that enable us to cook really tasty meals without a ton of work. I've let more coupons expire in the past 6 months than I ever have before, and the pantry is rather bare. I've got a stack of receipts still to be entered into the price book. It will be a while before we are back up to speed.
In the past week, I have been so inspired by Kris's series on Cheap, Healthy, Good about feeding her fiance for a week on $25. The series included the intro, a summary on each of the 7 days, and a wrap-up. I've always loved her site, but this series blows it out of the water -- funny, informative without massive length, and just plain good. There's no way we could do $25 a week right now, but I certainly have been thinking harder about not only the cost, but also the nutritional content of what we're serving.
It also made me think a lot about my grandmother, who fed a family of six kids on an extremely meager budget, and the challenges facing budget-strapped families today that are trying to provide as much nutrition as possible. My grandmother had the benefit of living in a small rural town where they knew local farmers and she worked in food service at the school and probably had much better access to inexpensive nutritious food than a family living in the suburbs with a laid-off breadwinner.
