Feeding an Army

So I was standing in line at the grocery store the other day , and the guy in front of me jokingly remarked about how much food his two boys ate in a week.  So I casually mentioned that I knew all about the consumption of food....with seven kids and all. I love the look of stunned disbelief mixed with slight admiration and slight "what are you crazy???" that comes over their faces when I say that.

 But, with food prices the way they are these days, I guess it is no wonder that people wonder how we manage to feed everybody without getting eaten out of house and home. 

Part of living within your means involves understanding the difference between shopping for  ingredients versus shopping for prepared foods...the grocery store version of fast food.

With a little creativity and some planning, it is possible to eat nutritiously with out breaking the bank! For example, instead of chips we make popcorn top of the stove which saves us quite a bit, both in money and in calories.

But buckets of popcorn do not a health diet make, so how do you eat well without breaking the bank?

Anyone who has read anything about investing has probably heard about a technique called dollar cost averaging. Basically the principle of DCA works like this, if you constantly spend x amount of dollars on any given investment, sometimes you will get more, sometimes you will get less.

If you know what to look for, you can find some great deals on food that goes on sale. For example, turkey goes on sale at our local grocery store for $1.00lb....which means that we can get two 20lb turkeys for about $40....which is a lot of turkey.

Each one of those turkeys translates into a week of meals for our family of 9! So that works out to $10 a week! Throw in some salad ingredients (3 romaine lettuce heads @$5...) so that is 1.42 on turkey, 0.71 for salad, throw in a few cents for rice and frozen veggies and that works out to less than $3 a meal for the family....that is 0.37 per person! 

Now someone out there has probably said, I don't want to eat turkey for a weeks on end and truth be told neither do we. However, that is what freezers are for. There are a bunch of turkey recipies that freeze really well. We make a batch of cream turkey, freeze it and then use it as a base for turkey pot pie, turkey a la king, pasta and turkey cream sauce...and the list goes on.

Using the principle of dollar cost averaging you can get some really great food deals AND it give you an opportunity to expand your pallet.

 

By the way, for those of you who are taking part in the TiPSI Dad Push Up challenge, welcome to week two!

 

If you have been doing your pushups you will have done 55 push ups at the time of this post. Keep up the good work! If you are just hearing about the challenge for the first time, feel free to join! No need to try to catch up, just join now and follow the directions for the rest of the year. The more the merrier!

 

TiPSI Dad