Happy New Year, Everyone!
I am working on hitting some serious goals in 2020. (You can look at my 101 if you are interested in seeing all of them). One of the goals is to save money to work on paying down our debt, but also to utilize our food stores. I am a bit odd, in that, having very full shelves makes me feel secure.
This is the challenge I posted on Facebook, and I wanted to respond to some of the comments I received....
New Years food challenge from our family to yours. We will be doing a 30 day
PANTRY/FREEZER CHALLENGE
Starting tomorrow we will be eating only food from our pantry, or freezer. We will purchase only a few fresh veggies. Everything else comes from our supply. We won't buy any food items during this time.
I invite all of our Facebook friends to take this challenge with us. It will show us the importance of storing food, and using what foods you have. If you can't do the 30 day challenge do whatever you think you can do.
This will help us to utilize our storage, and menu process. I'm going to try several new recipes that I've always wanted to try.
Along with this "Month-of-Nothing" challenge, I'll be blogging how it's going and some of the new recipes I'll be trying. I'd love to hear what/how you are doing!!
\
Numerous people said that this would be easier for me because I live on a farm....
That is both true and false. I have been doing "Month-of-Nothings" for over 12 years. I usually do two a year. We have only been on the farm for 9 years and the first couple of years, I didn't produce much. We did it living in the suburbs. We did it when funds were tight and it was actually a necessity to be sparing with our cash. We have done it to save money for a special occasion. We did it more often with both of us working full time and not able to garden and not having chickens in the back yard.
Everyone buys canned goods and then somehow it keeps getting pushed to the back of the pantry because there is something else that "looks better." Or you don't plan ahead, come home from work tired and it's just easier to go through the drive-thru or order a pizza. (I get it, we had pizza two nights ago!)
The challenge is to use those things up. To look at what you do have and come up with a meal plan to utilize what is actually in the freezers and pantry. Yes, because I have been farming and canning, I am set up so that I could actually go a few months with buying very little from the corporate grocery stores and just eat out of what I have produced. I AM VERY BLESSED that way. But it has been work to get to this point too.
It's just the beginning of winter. It makes me a bit nuts when I see the craziness right before a predicted storm. People going and wiping out the grocery stores of items because they feel like they don't have enough on-hand.
With this challenge and with this blog, I want to help others understand not only WHY you should have food storage, but HOW to do it economically. And once you have it, utilizing it from time to time to rotate fresh canned items into it. And the added bonus is that it is also a money saver in the long run.
You can look at the posts that have the "tag" Month-of-Nothing" to see some of the posts from the past.
The plan is to share what we are doing with our Pantry/Freezer Challenge so maybe it will spark some ideas for someone else. I welcome your questions either in the comments here (I love knowing I'm not just "shouting in the wind" over here.) or on Facebook.
I haven't blogged much in the past two years for many reasons. Mainly because it seemed as the social media platform has changed and people don't like reading as much as I like to write....lol. I will still be posting on Facebook the short messages, but I hope you'll spend a few minutes over here and share in the "behind the scenes" of our lives out here on the farm.
Pictured above is a perfect example. We had more than half of our Christmas ham (bought from Meijer with an awesome sale!). So I took what was left and with $2 worth of beans, a bunch of celery that was on it's last days, and a $1 bag of carrots and made 7 quarts and 7 pints of bean soup to enjoy through the rest of the winter. A two serving can or Campbell' Ham and Bean soup (about a pint) is currently $1.79. So generally I made about $37 "worth" of soup for about $8 and my time. Plus I know everything that is in those jars. (And to geek out on the math....Mine is $0.023 an ounce, Campbell's is $0.094 per ounce)
If you look though the tagged posts, you will see that almost every January has been a month of nothing...so this is nothing new. But I'd like to share a bit more so maybe others can join in!!
