Life On The Central Coast

Hey everyone!  HAPPY FIRST WEEK OF SPRING! Are you meal planners or wondering each and every night what you will make your family for dinner? We try to meal plan because it saves us so much money! We shop only for those items we will be using in the upcoming week. We have cold cereal, oatmeal with yogurt, eggs and toast for most breakfasts. Our lunches are mostly the previous night's leftovers and we really try to use up everything during the week in some form. We have one Date Night per week, and we also allow ourselves one lunch out during the week. Here's how a typical week looks.  SUNDAY Beef Barley Soup With Homemade Sourdough Bread & Butter 1 1/2 lb Leftover Cooked Pot Roast  1 32 oz. Carton Beef Broth 1 Pkg. Au Jus Gravy mix 1 Pkg. Beef Gravy Mix 1 10 oz. Can or Jar of Mushroom Stems & Pieces (and the liquid) 1/2 Cup 10 min Barley from Trader Joes 1 tsp. Garlic Powder 1 tsp. Onion Powder  1 tbsp. Parsley Flakes 1/2 Tsp ...

We are great fans of Costco and have been for years. We have 4 children and cooked at home most meals so we got used to buying bulk. But as newly retired people, we had to ask ourselves if buying bulk was still the most money saving way to buy. And simple answer is yes! The thing to know about bulk shopping is to only get those things you are use frequently. Most of the canned and frozen foods have a shelf life of about a year. And if you bulk shop, you really need to get used to finding that date. Our favorite list of canned items include: olives, diced tomatoes, corn, beans, refried beans, tomato sauce, the canned chicken, beef and tuna. I noticed that Costco doesn't break down their food prices so you can see how much per can, but that is NOT difficult to do. You take the total price for the bulk pack, divide it by the number of cans and that is your per can price. Why do you need to know that? So you can compare prices with what the similar item costs in your local groc...

Do you guys make a budget every month? We started doing it a couple of years ago knowing that our retirement would be coming soon and we would have to know how to live within a budget.  We use the Quicken for Mac program and is it ever insightful!! You set your budget and tailer it to meet your own personal needs. As you spend money and assign the money into your categories, the program keeps track of how you are doing within that budget. You can select monthly and by the entire year. One of these days I'll have to make a video explaining how it works for us. Anyway, for us, food kept coming up on our budget overages, meaning, we set the budget for a certain amount and each month, we were going over. Now in the "olden days" we had really gotten used to dining out at night, having several lunches out a week and those luscious coffee creations 4 out of 7 mornings!! No wonder it wasn't balancing. But we had the money then and we didn't even LOOK at what we wer...

You'll never guess what we did this week! Went to our local supermarket and bought 50 lbs. of russet potatoes. Yup, the REALLY big bag. I have been getting the canning bug and wanted to make some canned potatoes for my pantry. Canning is a really good way to save money if your already own your equipment. I've been doing this since 2010 and slowly building up my supplies over the years. Now my canning costs are mainly for jars, rings and lids. I keep the rings and use them over and over but the lids need to be replaced after each use. And the jars I can still pick up on Craigslist pretty cheaply. I also shop the "end of season" sales every year.  So, I bet you are wondering just how many quart jars of potatoes you can get from 50 lbs of potatoes and the answer would be.... about 18 to 20 quarts. We're halfway through the bag and have done up 14 quarts leading me to believe it will be more like 28 quarts of potatoes in the end. That works out to .35 per j...

Soup is so good! I could literally eat it at every meal. You can put in meat, veggies, herbs and spices, pasta, rice and the list goes on and on. For today's meal we are going to be making Spinach Tomato Tortellini Soup that I found over on the Damn Delicious website. As I've stated before, it is meatLESS NOT meat free. We do eat eggs and dairy on our meatLESS Mondays.  What I like about this soup is how quick and easy it is. You buy the fresh pasta tortellini, or in our case this week, little mini cheese filled ravioli. You can used homemade chicken broth or buy that at the store too. And the vegetables and herbs; garlic, onion, spinach, basil, oregano and bay leaf, if you're lucky, can all be grown in a small home garden. The vegetables we use a lot of during the year, we buy in bulk cases from Costco as well as the broth and that helps to keep the overall price down. Also, since it is enough for 4 servings, we can save half the soup for another night this week wi...

One of the ways we save money during the week is to have a couple of meals that are meat"less" and by that I mean way less meat. We are not vegetarians and on those meat"less" days we DO have eggs, cheese, butter and milk.  Tonight for dinner, we will be having Cheesy Polenta with Roasted Vegetables.   (click on link to be taken to recipe) We try to eat seasonally and locally and because the temperatures on the Central Coast of California are still cool,  we have access to both butternut squash and Brussels sprouts at our local Farmer's Markets. As gardeners, we also grow both of these items and they can both be readily found at most grocery stores.  And let me tell you, if you have never had polenta before.... WHY NOT!!?? You are going to love the rich cheesy, corny taste and how it mixes perfectly with the sweet butternut squash and the smokey Brussels Sprouts. You have GOT to try this dish out. So the cost breakdown for the end of Fe...