The Frugal Mom Goes Shopping

Let me just say, right up front, that I hate paying full price for anything. That goes double for groceries. I'm certainly not the cheapest person out there, but I do like to save a buck. Why should I pay more than I have to?

When I was a kid, my mom held a series of low-paid jobs. We ate a lot of beans, soups made with turkey necks, and plenty of leftovers. I continue to cook this way. When it was just me and my husband, we spent about $250 a month at the grocery store, including paper and hygiene products. With the addition of our son, that jumped to about $400 a month including diapers.

In general, I shop in four stores. Most of our groceries come from Super Target, with others from Aldi, Dominick's (Safeway), and Sam's Club. I will rarely shop in Jewel (Albertson's) or Trader Joe's. Trader Joe's is too far away, and I have a harder time finding true deals at Jewel, so I only shop there if the deal is truly great.

At Aldi, I buy snack foods, cheese, milk, eggs, and some produce. Earlier this summer I got pints of strawberries for $.25. I bought 8, then halved and froze them for later use in smoothies and jam.

At Sam's I get butter for about $1.25 a pound, along with chicken wings, hamburger patties, bananas, and bulk baking supplies. Sometimes they have great deals on meat such as ground beef.

I buy most of our meat on sale at Dominick's. I never pay more than $2 a pound for meat. That means we don't eat a lot of steak or fish. Whenever I get a large package of something, I break it up into smaller packages and store in our freezer in the garage.

I also make use of coupons. There are two types I use: store coupons and manufacturer's coupons. Target lets you "stack" these coupons, using one store coupon and one manufacturer's coupon for each item. That's how I recently got free sticks of deodorant. Target offers store coupons three ways: mailed booklets of coupons, coupons that print with your receipt, and online coupons. There's a lot to say about coupons, so I'll save that for another post.

My goal is to provide my family with nutritious, filling food at the lowest price I can. I don't spend more than about two hours a week dealing with coupons and sales. I always make a list, and try not to go shopping more than twice a week. More than that and I spend more.

Finding Nemo cake

The cake was the fun part. I didn’t want to use a bunch of plastic pieces, nor did I want to cover it in fondant. I’m not a fabulous pastry chef, just an interested home chef. So I made a simple layer cake and a few dozen mini-cupcakes for the kids. For the cake I used two mixes I got on sale awhile ago. With each mix I baked two slightly shorter layers and 18 mini-cupcakes. (In retrospect, that number of mini-cupcakes was overkill.) I used a French vanilla mix and a devil’s food mix. To the vanilla cake I added miniature chocolate chips. In the finished cake, I used two vanilla layers and one chocolate layer. For the chocolate cake, I used the “too much chocolate” cake recipe. Once the cakes were baked and cooled, I stacked two vanilla layers and one chocolate layer. In between, I put a chocolate truffle filling. (Easy: a cup of cream and a cup of chocolate chips melted and mixed together in a ganache, sweetened and thickened with enough powdered sugar to make a stiff frosting consistency.) Then I iced the whole thing in a turquoise buttercream, using the same recipe I’ve used before and colored with Wilton icing dyes.

For the decorations, I used fondant. I bought it at JoAnn with a 40% off coupon. I colored half of the 1 pound box with orange dye and mixed it until it was smooth, then rolled it out as thin as I could.

To make two different sized fish, ideally I would have found two different cookie cutters, but I couldn’t find them. I found a one-inch fish cookie cutter and decided to use that. I took it to work, photocopied it, then reduced it to 50% and copied it again. That copy I glued to an index card and cut out, leaving me with a template.

I then cut out 6 big fish and 6 small fish. I let them harden some overnight, then brushed them with Wilton white pearl dust. After that dried, I drew on stripes with decorator icing and eyes with black gel icing.  I placed a big fish and a small fish on the top of the cake and the other five pairs around the sides. In retrospect, the fish were too big and heavy. I had to anchor the big ones on the cake circle. That left me with a pretty big area of orange, rolled out fondant. In a moment of inspiration, I freehand cut out Owen’s name in the fondant and dusted it with pearl dust.

I think it turned out pretty well! And it tasted good!

Saving Money on a Themed Birthday Party

My son has recently become fascinated by “Finding Nemo,” mostly through merchandise and seeing clownfish in books. He’s only seen some of the movie twice. He was enthusiastic enough about it, though, that I decided to make that the theme of his birthday party. In retrospect, I probably could have done it cheaper, but we had a good time and learned a lot.

First, let’s talk decorations. I spent about $60 on decorations, mostly from our local Card and Party Warehouse and PartyAmerica.com. Because the Disney movie I chose was so old, I had trouble finding party gear at our usual stores. We invited 9 kids and 10 adults. We ended up with 7 kids and 7 adults, plus us, so 8 kids and 9 adults. I bought two packs of dinner plates, two packs of lunch plates, 2 packs of napkins, 1 pack of cups, a tablecover, stickers, temporary tattoos, and three hanging fish online. These were all themed. I also bought two packs of streamers, goody bags, silverware, and plain cups and plates, along with Take and Toss cups for the toddlers. We also bought a dozen helium balloons and a Nemo and Marlin helium balloon. Invitations were done on Evite.

We spent about $65 on food. Nearly $50 of that went to pizza, beer, and beer nuggets. The rest went to cake-making supplies, Goldfish crackers, Swedish fish, and fruit for a fruit salad.

The goody bags were simple. I filled them with individual Goldfish bags, Finding Nemo fruit snacks, and crayons. Since I got the crayons on sale for $.25, each bag cost me about $1.25.