If you are visiting from the 196th Festival of Frugality hosted at Green Panda Treehouse, welcome to Out of Debt Again! Thank you Green Panda for including my post in today's carnival!

Our first week of using the cash system for groceries was Monday September 7th to Sunday the 13th was a great success! Mr. A held onto the cash for groceries and he ended up spending $158.00. Our goal was to stay under $160. Boy, it sure does make a big difference when everyone gets on board with a new plan!

He did really well staying within the allotted amount.  I noticed a lot less “junk food” came into the house during the week.

I also found myself being much more frugal with the food already on hand which was quite a surprise!!  A surprise, because I already consider myself to be frugal!  I'll share some of them with you, all stemmed from trying to stick to our new grocery budget.

First Frugal Event

I used two packages of frozen spinach during the week. First of all, I wouldn't have been looking so hard in the freezer for vegetables to go with dinner, I would have just asked Mr. A to pick something up. Secondly, if I had bothered to find the spinach, I might not have used it, for inside the bag the spinach was covered in ice. If we weren't trying so hard to stay within our budget, I might have just tossed the spinach to the chickens, thinking surely it was frost-bitten. But it wasn't!  It tasted just fine! I did rinse it under warm water to remove all the frost (which I thought may have had an off taste).

Second Frugal Event

On Saturday evening I made enchiladas, using leftover chicken breast that had been barbecued the previous evening, one of the bags of the aforementioned frozen spinach, and I also crumbled up some scrambled eggs leftover from breakfast that I'd put in the fridge, which no one probably would have ended up eating.  So essentially I made a meal from food that was leftover, which I might not have, if we weren't trying very hard to stick to our new budget.

Third Frugal Event

Later Saturday night I pulled out a bag frozen uncooked hominy that has been in the freezer for months and months, to use on Sunday to make chicken posole.

Fourth Frugal Event

When I made the Vanilla Bean Ice Cream last week, it called for six egg yolks.  Previously, I probably would have scrambled up the remaining whites and given them to the dogs or the chickens, or maybe even, horror of horrors, simply thrown away. But I saved them to put into the scrambled eggs I made on Saturday morning, which I then ended up putting into the enchiladas on Saturday evening.

Fifth Frugal Event

I made ice cream from scratch instead of being tempted to buy it from the store, since we already had the ingredients on hand.

Sixth Frugal Event

Mr. A and I attended a meeting on Saturday morning, previously we might have eaten out for breakfast or for lunch.  Instead, I made breakfast (using the extra egg whites from the ice cream) and Mr. A bought lunch meat so we could make sandwiches and have a picnic lunch after the meeting. Frugal and romantic! 🙂

Seventh Frugal Event

Usually I remove the ribs from romaine lettuce and give to the chickens. While the chickens simply love fresh greens like this, they are just as happy with weeds harvested from around the yard.  Instead, since we were trying to be so cautious with our grocery budget, I diced the romaine ribs and added them into our salad.  The ribs cut up amounted to about one cup which made the salad crunchy and interesting.

That's all that comes to mind. It was a good week, and we are going for our second week which will run September 14 to September 20th. I hope we do as well this week, as we did last week.

Yours Truly,