Episode Description: Is grocery store inflation busting your budget? Rising food costs can certainly strain finances for ministry households. Check out Married to the Ministry for tips on feeding your family for less.
Related Links and Product Info:
MTTM Ep 20: How to Let Go and Say No When You’re Overwhelmed (Delight Series)
MTTM Ep 22: A Practical Guide to Organizing the Chaos Out of Your Home (Delight Series)
MTTM Ep 24: Smart Money Tips for Ministry Families with Rachel Cruze
MTTM Ep 25: Money-Saving Hacks for a Stronger Home Economy (Delight Series)
Hello and welcome!
Thanks for joining me today. Glad you’re here.
Our goal at Married to the Ministry is to help pastors’ wives embrace truth and delight in ministry life. So, we offer encouragement that’s rooted in the truth of God’s word. Throughout this year, I’ve been trying to focus more on how we can choose to be delighted in this role that God has placed us in as we support our husbands and serve our church families.
One of my favorite people joins us today–my sis-in-law Kathy Armstrong. She is not a pastor’s wife, but she has been serving in ministry alongside her hubby Rex for 30 years. In addition to teaching a kindergarten Sunday school class together, they lead Financial Peace groups and they’re both involved in Bible Study Fellowship. Kathy and Rex homeschooled three amazing young men who call me their favorite aunt. Thanks for being here today, Kathy.
Kathy:
Oh, I’m so excited. It’s always fun when we get to have a chat.
Janet:
I know, and I have often said that when I married Greg, I was extra blessed because I got Kathy in the bargain. So we are sisters, we are friends, we love to do things together, but for the last several months on the podcast, we’ve been looking at different ways we can choose to be delighted in ministry life because sometimes real life just sucks the joy out of being a Christian, out of the Christian life, doesn’t it?
Years ago, Kathy and I developed and taught a class along that theme.
So why don’t you tell us, Kathy, a little bit about what we learned studying and teaching that material?
Kathy:
Well, sure. First of all, we began studying it ourselves because we were feeling a little desperate and out of control in our household.
Janet:
I was feeling a lot desperate and out of control.
Kathy:
Kids, stuff, just all of it can be overwhelming at times, but we really had a heart for helping ladies understand how to do ministry outside of their home and the importance of opening up your home to neighbors, friends, book clubs, Bible studies, just different ways to engage with the people around you, but when we started in that with the end goal, we realized that women were very hesitant to open up their home because they felt like their homes were disorganized, they felt like they didn’t have the skills. They could barely feed their own family. How were they going to fix a meal for another family?
So we just began to walk that back, and then, of course, in God’s word we found all the answers. So we began a deep dive in Proverbs 31 where she talked about money management, raising kids, your relationship with your husband, how to do ministry, where does work fit in with a life as a wife and a mom. So those are all the lessons, really, that we learned to get people to the point of learning how to use their home in a place of ministry.
Janet:
Yeah, and we have talked about several of those topics here on the podcast (see above for those episode links).
Are women still stumbling over the basics of cooking and cleaning and money management and all that? Are people still struggling with that today?
Kathy:
Well, I think we’re all struggling with it. The economy’s not what it’s always been. We have to find ways to make our food dollars go a little further. I don’t think it’s just the rising food prices that we have seen, but I think it’s more of a cumulative effect across all categories of expenses between gas and utilities and insurance and healthcare. Everything has gone up, so we’re having to make those dollars stretch further than we had the luxury of doing just a few years ago.
Janet:
Right, and that adds stress as people are trying to figure out how to make ends meet when the ends are farther apart than they were. Kathy’s a great cook. She loves trying new recipes and cooking new things, and I just want to cook what I know is easy and I’m not going to mess up. So we have a different approach to food prep.
Kathy:
But the end goal is the same—people get fed!
Janet:
People get fed, yeah, but she’s very good in the kitchen and enjoys doing that. When we were teaching our classes, I would always pawn this lesson off on her because I wasn’t the cook, she is.
Also, they had a season in their life where after they had kids, her husband went back to school for a job change, and so she’s lived the whole dad’s in school plus working a job, and I know a lot of ministry families, the husband’s in seminary or bi-voc and he’s working two jobs, and lots of times if the wife’s working too, that time fixing food can be as big of a pressure and a stress as the money. So anyway, she is going to walk us through some ways that we can save money on food.
How are we supposed to save money on food when costs keep going up, up, up? Do you have some tips for us?
Kathy:
Costs do keep going up and up, but we do have some strategies, I think, that we can employ.
First of all, I want to talk about family dinners because they are just so important. Research has worn that out that family dinners, having dinners together as a family have been linked to better academic performance for our kids, higher self-esteem, and a greater sense of resilience in our children. So it’s just fascinating when you delve into some of the research about family dinners and why they’re important and why it’s worth it to us as wife and moms to make that a priority, to fight the battle at the grocery store, to provide those meals for our family. Studies show it boosts vocabulary in younger children. It improves the storytelling skills when they are sharing their story about their day, which links to higher reading levels later on.
Janet:
Wait a minute— Are you saying that if we’re eating in the car on the way to ball practice, Chick-fil-A, that doesn’t count as family dinner? Is that what you’re saying?
Kathy:
I think there are better options for us to choose. That does count as dinner, but I’m not sure we’re getting the maximum benefit for that.
Janet:
Okay. You said it increases kids’ vocabulary and storytelling ability. Tell me what you mean by that.
Kathy:
Well, when we’re at the dinner table with all the family and you’re just having discussions, discussions about politics, discussions about a Bible verse, you are using words that a young child wouldn’t normally come in contact with in their kindergarten or their first or second grade classroom or things like that. Their storytelling abilities, just developing that narrative as you ask them what happened to their day and they go along and they just give a narrative of something that happened or a funny thing that happened at church or in Sunday school or at school, those are developmental skills that are reinforced at the dinner table with adults and people of varying ages. Because if you think about it, most kids are in a classroom with everyone in their same age. So when they have the opportunity to speak to people, even if it’s their family members of different age groups, it just really builds a lot of skills moving forward.
Janet:
Okay. Well, I like that. That is really added value for an activity that is easy to discard and disregard as really being that important. So I like that you’ve elevated it to not just a platform for feeding your children physically, but it’s really an additional opportunity for educating them, connecting with them. I like the word reinforcing that you used, how you’re reinforcing, you’re teaching them logical or sequential thoughts and story, those storytelling skills that you mentioned. I like all that.
Kathy:
Yeah, and how you said you didn’t enjoy cooking and I do enjoy cooking, but either way, if we can view this preparation time is not just a dreaded chore that has to be done, but maybe for the motivation part flip it as just an opportunity to develop and invest in our kids for success later in life.
Well, that is some great motivation for why we’re cooking and stuff. How are we supposed to do that on a budget?
Kathy:
That is the question of the hour. I think it’s important for us to start off with acknowledging that having a plan saves you money in the long run. So for instance, avoiding fast food stops. That’s hard on the budget. It’s hard on our bodies.
It’s easier to tell the hungry kids in the back seat, “No, we’re not going to stop at McDonald’s because dinner is already made. It’s already at home.” So I feel like it’s not that your kids have this burning desire to eat at McDonald’s or Wendy’s, it’s just that they’re hungry, and if they know when they get home they have another hour and a half to wait before they eat and then everyone’s cranky, sometimes it’s just easier to run by and pick up the Chick-fil-A just to stop the stress.
It’s stressful for you if you don’t have a plan. It’s stressful for them because they don’t know if they’re going to get to eat. When you have three hungry boys in the back seat, that can be a problem. So when we use things like our slow cooker, our Instapot or even the timer on your oven that you can set to come on when you’re headed to track practice to pick up the kids, then you’ve created the convenience from your own kitchen that a restaurant or a fast food or a takeout would provide for you at a much cheaper cost.
Janet:
Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. You’re paying a lot more for convenience outside of your kitchen.
Kathy:
Yes. When I would pick my boys up for practice, I would just bring a snack in the car and then tell them dinner would be ready when they got home. So they’re just hungry. They’ve just burned a lot of calories at whatever practice they were in. So understanding where that’s coming from and what causes the stress is part of the battle.
Janet:
I was also going to say the stress on the mom too, especially if she’s working, but the whole crock pot, slow cooker, whatever, I’ve never used an Instapot, but I’ve got the crock pot going in the kitchen right now and setting the oven for a woman who’s at work all day knowing that, “Okay. I set the oven to come on at 4:00, and when we all get home at 5:00, dinner’s going to be done,” so that takes the stress off the mom who carries the burden for feeding everybody.
Kathy:
Yeah, I agree. So if you can set out a menu plan for at least one week at a time, if you know what you’re going to have for dinner tomorrow night, you can prep it the night before, have the kids prep it. Whoever’s first home can get the rice on or whatever, it needs to be done.
So when you have just a simple plan, we’ll talk about that in a minute, it also allows you to purchase just what you need for the meals so you’re not spending extra money on impulse purchases at the grocery store. You’re not picking up those extra cans of green beans or whatever because you’re not sure. You can’t remember if you have it, but when you get home, you already have eight cans of green beans at home. So that’s just wasted money that you’re not using sitting in the pantry. So there’s a lot of incidental costs that having a plan helps you to alleviate.
What’s a simple way to menu plan?
Kathy:
Here’s a super easy, simple way to do a plan. When all my boys were still in the house, a simple weekly plan for us looked like this:
- Sunday, we would always do a crock pot lunch so it would be ready after a long morning at church, and then we would have breakfast for dinner on Sunday nights, always, whether it’s pancakes, waffles, and then I would triple the recipe and freeze those so we would have breakfast throughout the week.
- One night was a chicken dinner. The next week we would do a beef dinner, but one night’s a chicken or a beef dinner.
- One night would be a meatless meal, so that saved on some protein costs. We would do a quiche or we’d do breakfast. We’d do a lot of dried beans that you can do a lot of things with soups, burritos, vegetable soup, and a grilled cheese. There’s lots of creative ways to do meatless meals.
- Friday night was always homemade pizza night, and what that does for you is you always have the basic ingredients. So whatever way you wanted to be creative, if you wanted it to be a cheeseburger pizza, if you wanted to try something else, a standard supreme, and then you let the kids make it themselves because they’re way more likely to eat it if they made it themselves.
- And then Saturday was usually what we called corn. We’re having corn for dinner, C-O-R-N, clean out refrigerator night. That way, your refrigerator is ready to go for Sunday or Monday for the rest of the week.
So when you have a simple thing like that, it allows you to take … If you see that chicken breasts are on sale, you can grab a bunch and cook all of that at once, which we’ll talk about in a minute, so you can easily switch, “Okay, We’re having chicken this week and not beef because the chicken was what was on sale.” So it’s easy to categorize things like that so you have staple ingredients and you’re not spending money on things that you don’t need, and then you also have the basics for when you need to pull something together real quick for a meal. So that’s just a simple illustration of how you can make the menu plan as simple and easy as you possibly can.
Janet:
I know especially that helps you put down on paper, “Okay. Thursday night, we’re all going to be at the ball fields. So how do I need to prepare for Thursday night when we are going to be eating in the car if I don’t want to drive-through?” or whatever. You know that, “I got a pack of cooler with sandwiches,” or that kind of thing. So that is the beauty of the menu. If your husband’s going to be out one night for a business meeting and not home, well, then you might feed the kids something different since he’s not going to be home eating.
Kathy:
That’s right. That’s why they make cereal boxes!
Janet:
Hey, there were many, many nights we had apple slices and grilled cheese and popcorn for dinner when Greg wasn’t coming home until late, but you’re right. When you write it all down and you are matching up your calendar and your weekly activities with the sale papers, then you really are maximizing your efforts with a plan.
Kathy:
Yeah, and it’s easier. We went through a season where one of our kids had a lot of digestive issues, so we really had to watch what he ate. So I was having to prepare everything, but that allowed us to meet at the ball field and have that meal together as a picnic at the ball field before they started their game or whatever, but I was able to give him nourishing food that wasn’t going to cause problems for everyone later. So it’s very flexible and works with whatever kind of dietary needs that you have in your family because not everybody can go through and eat something from a fast food place.
How else can we make the most of our food dollars?
Kathy:
Well, I think another thing is that we need to watch out for some of those budget busters. When I work with moms, I find that most of them aren’t spending large amounts or wasting large chunks of money. It’s little bits all along the way that steal away that part of your food budget. So we need to be aware of those and look for those.
Treats:
I personally love a London Fog Latte, which are very hard to find a good one in town, but the other day, I was running errands, happened to be close to a place that I love theirs, and so I went in as a treat and ordered it. Girl, that thing was like $6, $6, $6 for a cup of tea. Well, that’s terrible. It just took all the fun out of it, and I swore I’m not going to do that when I can make that at home. So that would be a personal example of a budget buster. What used to be a treat when I was by myself is now a hard no because it just takes money away from other areas and things that I would rather do than spend $6 on the tea.
Convenience Items:
Another thing we already alluded to with the fast food is that convenience costs. You will always pay more for something that is more convenient. So what that looks like in the grocery store on your preparation continuum, the more something has been prepped for you, the more expensive it’s going to be.
For instance, if chicken breasts are 3.99 a pound, but if you go over into the deli section and you were going to buy some of that pre-shredded rotisserie chicken, that rang in at $8 a pound. So that’s quite a significant chunk of change. So there’s a time and place for convenience, but if that’s a regular occurrence, you will pay for chicken breasts less than half the price for you to do it yourself.
Ground beef is about 4.60 a pound, and that’s in the big five-pound bulk pack, and if you were to buy the pre-pattied hamburgers, that’s $10 a pound. So that’s $10 for four hamburgers, which is still cheaper than going to Huey’s and buying a hamburger where it’s $12 for one hamburger, but there’s no difference except someone has already pattied out the meat for you. So just be wise with what you’re purchasing.
Individually packaged foods:
Janet:
Another budget buster that I think a lot of people aren’t calculating in their head is individual packaged drinks. Everyone drinks so many sodas, so many bottled waters, so many Bodyarmors. Nobody’s drinking anything that was made in a pitcher like Kool-Aid or Crystal Light Lemonade. Everybody’s drinking stuff that came prepackaged in an individual bottle, and that adds up big time.
Kathy:
That does, and I’m glad you said that because I was actually on the chip aisle yesterday as well, and so I thought, “Let me see these,” because I know a lot of us would buy individual packaged chips. It’s easy to throw in the kids’ lunch or to have a portioned out control. The same thing, if you were going to buy Chex Mix in individual package, it’s about 53 cents an ounce, where if you bought the big box, divide them in Ziploc baggies yourself for your children, it’s less than 30 cents. So it’s almost a double in cost buying snack-sized portions of things. So if you run that across everything like a Lunchable, individual yogurts, cookies, peanut butter crackers, all of those kinds of things, it’s something that you can package out and divide at home for a fraction of the cost and have healthier ingredients.
Cheese sticks are about 40 cents an ounce for the prepackaged cheese sticks that you would throw in versus a cheese block that’s only 30 cents an ounce that you can cut and make your own cheese sticks or cheese cubes. It takes a little bit more preparation, but the savings is worth it in the long run, especially if you have kids. So that’s another example, I would say, of a budget buster.
Janet:
A couple of episodes ago, Rachel Cruze from the Dave Ramsey Financial Peace Group talked with us about how grocery costs were high, but they were one aspect of finances we could control.
What are some other strategies that we can use to help us save money at the grocery store?
Kathy:
Well, I’m glad you brought that up because your top three budgets for a household are housing, transportation and food. Your housing is probably a fixed expense. Your transportation is almost a fixed expense unless you just find a new job that’s closer to your house and a shorter commute and things like that. But food, out of those three, is the one that we probably have the most control over.
So we do like to think about some strategies for stretching those dollars.
Purchase fewer non-essential food items, which would be some of those convenience things that we talked about, the pre-made bakery items, buying frozen pancakes and frozen waffles and things like that that can easily be made at home.
Janet:
Or the huge amounts of food at Costco and Sam’s that … That’s a lot of outlay at first.
Kathy:
Yeah. Unless you have three teenage boys at home and then the Costco chip bag is like a single serving, so that’s a real problem in our house. I feel like those big box stores have some validity and they have some great savings. You just have to be wise. When we didn’t have a lot of money in that budget, it was hard for me to shop at a Costco or a Sam’s just because I would have to spend so much at one time for fewer items even though it would last me a long time. So sometimes you’re not able to just because you don’t have that much at one time to spend.
Switch to some generic brands. That’s an easy way, even if it’s your favorite.
Buy in bulk and maybe split that cost with a friend. If you are in a big warehouse store, Sam’s or Costco, that y’all could split some of those meat costs and things. So you’re still getting the same value, but you are able to reduce the overall cost.
Buy fewer premium items like meat when we were really having to watch our food costs, that’s why we put a meatless meal in every week. It helped us to just cut some of that costs.
Eat your leftovers. We were studying in BSF the Book of John last year, and I just always love this first when it comes up, John 6:12, this is after the feeding of the 5,000 and it says, “And when they were filled, Jesus said to His disciples, ‘Gather up the leftovers so that nothing may be lost.'” So if you have a family that doesn’t like leftovers or pushes back, you can tell them if it was good enough for Jesus, it is good enough for you. So we don’t want to be wasteful. We do want to be a good steward, but really, if your family really does, if they really don’t, some husbands just are like, “I’m not eating this again,” that’s a great opportunity to freeze that entree, freeze the other part of the ground beef or the chicken or whatever you didn’t eat, and then you pull it out and reinvent it as another meal later on in the month, and that way it doesn’t feel like it’s the same meal or they’re eating the same meal for three days in a row. So that’s an easy way to handle leftovers.
Get back to the basics. Eating at home with food preparation is really the biggest way to cut your costs, eliminating the drive-throughs, the Uber Eats, the outside meals. There’s just no way around that. When you have the basic cooking ingredients on hand, you can prepare many of the convenience items yourself. Now they’re selling prepackaged overnight oats in the grocery store. That is super cheap to make, super easy to make and you can prep them and have enough for the week. So I don’t know why we would go and buy overnight oats already made when you can control all the ingredients,
Janet:
Well, and you’re talking about controlling the ingredients. Every single thing you buy at the store has sugar in it. Even stuff that you don’t think has sugar in it or realize, or it doesn’t make any sense why there’s sugar in it, everything has sugar in it. So when you’re making it yourself, you can control how much sugar you’re feeding your family or salt or whatever fat or whatever you’re trying to be conscientious about feeding them.
Kathy:
Just all the preservatives and ingredients that you can’t pronounce and have no idea what they are, you can eliminate those.
Janet:
Yeah, and that’s taken a toll on our health.
Kathy:
As a nation, yes, it has. I remember as a young mom, I was going to make a quiche, and I realized I didn’t have any pie crusts. Someone’s asleep. You can’t run to the grocery store, and so I thought, “I guess I’m going to have to make a pie crust.” I’ve never made a pie crust in my life. Oh, my goodness. It’s like four ingredients, super easy, and it costs me nothing. So that was the first light bulb went off that I was like, “Huh, I could be making all of this myself,” and it took less than 10 minutes, super easy.
So if you run that scenario out to bakery items, the frozen French toast, French toast sticks, frozen biscuits, muffins, pancakes, anything that you go down the freezer aisle that is already made as a convenience, you can do that at home for pennies on the dollar.
Teaching our kids:
Kathy:
So be thinking about meal prep at home and how to get your kids involved with that. So like I said, on Sundays, if we had waffles or if we had pancakes, I would just triple the recipe and freeze all of it and it would be ready because I’m not a morning person, so I’m not getting up and fixing anyone a hot breakfast ever. So that allowed them to serve themselves.
Janet:
Well, and you mentioned earlier the difference between ground beef in a package and pre-made hamburger patties. I was thinking, what boy or even little girl wouldn’t love to get their hands in a big bowl of raw hamburger meat and squish it and make it into patties? I mean, cooking is teaching moments and educational stuff. If we’re not cooking, then our children aren’t going to be cooking because they need us to teach them how to do that stuff.
Kathy:
Yeah, and if you set out a few spices and tell them they can put in, make it whatever flavor they want … Our rule was, “I don’t care what you put in it, but you’re going to eat it. We’re not throwing this away.” So they would come up with all sorts of concoctions, but they would eat it because they did it themselves. So it was a super fun time. We’ve got great memories of that, but teaching your kids to cook is a huge life skill. If you want them to move out of your house, they need to know how to feed themselves. So those are important life skills and they’re fun. You can make it fun. It doesn’t have to be such a chore. So think in advance like that.
Like we said, we had a pizza night. So instead of ordering pizza out, it’s so simple to make it on your own. Pizza dough, literally like three ingredients. Very easy to make. Pizza sauce, you’re making your own pizza sauce. We’ve recently been watching our sugar intake as well. If you go down the pizza sauce aisle, you would be shocked at how much sugar is in all of these pizza sauces.
Janet:
Oh, yeah, and spaghetti sauce.
Kathy:
Oh, yeah. It’s crazy. So making those on your own, freezing them in individual portions, super easy way to make that happen. So that’s a great easy strategy. It does require a little more work because you’re doing the preparation yourself, but like you just said, you’re not only benefiting your budget, but it’s easier on the body and your health and physical and mental wellbeing. So I think that’s really important for us to remember.
Distracted eating:
Janet:
Well, let me just butt in with this too, and we were talking about this yesterday and you laughed at me, but I know another way to save money on food costs, since you were just talking about benefiting your body, is to eat less. I know when I have been very cognizant and aware and careful of what I’m eating, and I only eat when I’m hungry and I stop eating when I’m no longer hungry, I have been shocked at the small amount of food that it actually takes to make my body function correctly. Sometimes we eat more than we need, which makes us feel bad, makes us less healthy, and costs us money unnecessarily, when if we just ate less, it would be better in lots of ways. I am talking to myself for years.
Kathy:
Well, I think that is the beauty of the family meal together. When you’re not rushed, you’re not just trying to slam something down so you can get out the door and get to the next thing, but you’re sitting, you’re eating, you’re having conversation, you’re lingering.
Janet:
It’s a meaningful experience.
Kathy:
You’re still getting the experience. It’s not all about the food, but you have time for your body to register that it’s getting food and you are filling up versus just slamming something down, getting on the run and then 20 minutes later you’re like, “Oh, I shouldn’t have eaten that whole thing.”
Janet:
Well, you wouldn’t know this because you’re not a TV watcher, but I can tell you that when you are eating in front of the television, you are not paying attention to how much you are putting in your mouth. You’re on autopilot because you’re looking at the TV, you’re watching your movie or whatever, and I stop eating when the bag is empty or when the bowl is empty. So eating on purpose at the table with meaningful conversation is just better on so many levels than … But if you are going to eat in front of the TV, then pour some chips or cookies or whatever on a napkin or in a little bowl, your popcorn, one bowl of popcorn, and take that. Don’t take the whole bag of chips to the couch while you watch TV. And, a bag of chips now can be six bucks depending on what kind of chips you’re buying!
Kathy:
It’s insane how much chips are, actually. A good substitute for chips I found with the boys was popcorn. Very easy, very yummy to make. If you make it on the stove top, that’s our favorite way. Microwaved popcorn would be considered a convenience item. Cooking it on the stove top is home preparation for pennies on a dollar.
I would tell my boys, “These are the chips for the next two weeks. If you eat them all in the first couple days, then no more chips for the rest of the week.” So another way to teach some virtues of self-control.
Janet:
Self-discipline, moderation. We don’t really teach moderation anymore.
Look for cost-effective cuts of meat. For instance, chicken thighs and chicken drumsticks, my boys went through the stage where they just loved chicken drumsticks. I had not cooked them. It’s not something that my mom cooked for us growing up. So I started cooking those. Those are 1.99 a pound versus 3.99 a pound for chicken breast. So that is a huge savings.
Janet:
My son-in-law coats drumsticks in spices and cooks them in the air fryer. Oh, my goodness. That’s when I bought an air fryer was after eating that meal at their house. You and I have been swapping out chicken thighs for chicken breasts in some of our crock pot meals that are so flavorful, so juicy, and so much more economical.
Kathy:
They’re really more flavorful than a chicken breast. So we’re hooked on that. Easy way to save some money. If you’ve not used that before, then try some chicken thighs and some chicken drummies. Super yum.
Cook before you freeze:
When you find a good sale on chicken breast or some meat that has been marked down that needs to be cooked that day, go ahead and buy it, bring it home, cook it and freeze. Go ahead and cook it and then freeze it because then you’ve created another convenience item, so that when you’re low on time, you can just pull that ground beef or that chicken breast. It’s already cooked, put it with some rice, make the casserole, do whatever to it that you need to do, but cooking in advance like that is a huge time saver.
Janet:
Well, I learned that from your mother and I have done that our whole married life, and it has enabled me to feed your brother because that does help. You buy a bag of the chicken, you put it in a Pyrex dish, maybe pour little Italian dressing over it or canned tomatoes, cook that so they’ve got some good flavor in them, and then chop them up in two cup bags portions because every recipe calls for two cups of cooked chicken and then ground beef because I sold Tupperware for a very brief season in my life, and they taught us how if you cook ground beef in this Tupperware colander, all the grease and the gunk and the nasty drains out, and so you’re freezing lean, cooked meat instead of freezing fat and stuff you don’t really want to eat, and it took a lot less room in your freezer
Farm to freezer:
We got half a cow last year, and whenever you buy half a cow, which I would highly recommend that as another way to save money on meat, the quality of the meat was wonderful, but I ended up getting 50 pounds of ground beef. When a butcher gives you your half a cow, it’s usually all frozen, and so I had to make special arrangements to get all of my ground beef in advance before they gave me all the rest of the stuff frozen because I said, “I don’t need 50 pounds of frozen ground beef. I need it raw so I can cook it.” It took me two days to cook 50 pounds of ground beef, but that was literally a year ago, and last week, I took out my last bag. The cost per pound for beef that way, everything ends up costing about what you pay for hamburger meat, and we’ve eaten steaks and all kinds of really good stuff. So that’s another way to save money is to find somebody who raises cows and buy your meat from them.
Kathy:
Now, is that something that you could go in together with a friend or another family and split up cost?
Janet:
Oh, yes because I’m only buying half a cow, but I did buy a freezer last year, and you can get freezers on Facebook every day of the week cheap, so I highly recommend that.
Kathy:
Yeah. We bought ours at an estate sale around the corner in our neighborhood on the last day.
Janet:
But yes, cooking your meat in advance is the secret to successful meal prep and menu planning.
Chicken meals:
Kathy:
So let’s just take the chicken. If we bought 10 pounds of chicken, cooked it and froze it, these are some of the meals I just jotted down real quick that you can make, simple, easy meals you can make with a chicken that’s already cooked.
- chicken enchiladas
- chicken pot pie with your homemade pie crust that you didn’t spend much money to make
- stir fry
- quesadillas
- chicken salad for sandwiches
- chicken broccoli rice casserole
- Greek pitas
- Add barbecue sauce for barbecue sandwiches or barbecue nachos.
So those are just simple, easy things when you have the chicken already cooked. So in your menu plan where you have the chicken meal that week, you can just have all of those things that you could choose from. So whatever’s in the pantry that you’re able to whip together, the hard part’s already done, which is always cooking the meat for the entree.
Homemade broths:
And then then another thing that we love is to not throw out the bones of your chicken. If you cook a whole chicken or if you use drumsticks, we’ll keep a bag in the freezer that we will collect all those drumsticks so that we can make our own broth. So easy, so flavorful and so nutritious to have bone broth your own. So that is at no additional cost because you’ve already bought the chicken or the drumsticks. Chicken broth is well over a dollar a can now, and from one chicken carcass, I can easily get five to six cups of broth. So that’s just an added savings.
Janet:
Many times the pre-made ones have tons of sodium in them. I know if you splurge on a rotisserie chicken and you boil that carcass, that makes really good broth because it’s got all that seasoning and stuff in it too.
Kathy:
Yeah. So another way, to try to use whatever part of your groceries that you can, so if you have carrots, if you’ve scraped them, you’ve got carrot peels, you have the tops of onions, onion skins, all of those. I learned this from my grandmother, from Granny Annie. She would keep a Ziploc bag in the freezer and she would just collect all of those. So all of my pressed garlic, all the garlic skins, any of that, the tops and the leafy parts of celery, I don’t throw any of that away. I put it in the back. So when I collect enough chicken bones to make bone broth, I throw all of that in my big crock pot, I put in all of those veggies with them, all the tops, all the onions, all the garlic, throw in a few peppercorns, and then I just cook that on low from anywhere from 12 to 24 hours, and then you have a deep, rich … You want to cook it long enough that you can pull some of that collagen from the bone. Sometimes you’ll throw a tablespoon of vinegar or something in there that helps pull that collagen out. Anyway, you’ve got great bone broth, very healthy in the winter to add to soups. Freeze the broth in one or two cup portions, and then I will freeze one or two ice cube trays with that bone broth. So if I need to thin something out or a sauce that’s gotten too thick, I can throw in one of those cubes of the homemade bone broth that doesn’t have the additional salt and everything that you just discussed. So that’s just an easy extra bonus that didn’t cost you anything.
Janet:
If I cook a roast beef, I’ll save the leftover juice in the bottom of my crock pot from cooking a roast, and I’ll freeze that and use that as my beef beef broth.
Kathy:
There’s just a lot of ways that you can make it stretch. You may have to get creative on some of those. Again, I think that dried beans are an underused source of protein, fiber, all sorts of yummy things that you can do, and it’s like a dollar a bag that you can cook your own dried beans, black beans soup. We like black beans, sweet potato tacos. We love black beans, red beans and rice. There’s just a lot of ways that you can use more economical choices at the grocery store.
Janet:
Kathy, you’ve given us lots of motivation and lots of ideas and lots of really hope, I think, for being able to feed our families and feed them well with nursing food that de-stresses the feeding. “What am I going to fix for dinner?” is one of the most stressful things a mom can think. So half the time just knowing what I’m going to cook, even if I hadn’t cooked it yet, I’ve already made the decision, so all I have to do is look on the piece of paper and make it, and I know that I already have the ingredients for it, I mean, that takes all the boogeyman out of cooking dinner.
We don’t want our lives to be so stressful that we miss the joy of having a family, we miss the joy of being together, we miss the joy of all the blessings that God has planned for us. Sometimes we just can’t see them because we’re so stressed out in the basic mechanics of life, the cooking, the cleaning, the carpooling, the wrangling the kids into bed, all that kind of stuff. So the easier we can make some of these basic hurdles to happiness, then the more delight we’re going to have and the more we’re going to be able to enjoy the abundant life that Christ has given us. Ministry families have stress just like everybody else does.
Kathy:
Well, isn’t that what we learned in our Proverbs 31 woman? She had a lot of tasks in that chapter that she did to minister to her family, to minister to people in her community. So there were a lot of verbs in there about what she did, but we also learned there were a lot of adverbs in there that told us how she did those things. When it said that she got joy from serving her family, it wasn’t because she loved mucking the barn or cleaning the bathroom or hauling water from the river.
We really came away from that study realizing that she loved her family and she loved the Lord, and that is what provided her motivation to serve her family. So again, I think if we can maybe switch our mindset from it always being a chore and it always falls on me and why does the mom always have to do this, but just look at it as an opportunity.
I tell you what, family meals are really important because one day, your kids will leave your house and you will have family meals by yourself because there’s no one else left at the house, and it happens a lot sooner than you think. So use that time now to love on those kids, develop their worldview, give them something to chew on not just for their mouth but for their minds and for their heart, and give them that picture of relationship that’s so important to God the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. So yeah, the motivation of we love our family, therefore we will serve them, so important.
Janet:
That’s what ministry is, whether you’re ministering to people at church, people in your community or we have a ministry to the people who live in our house with us, our children, our husbands, and they are worthy of good ministry as well.
Well, that’s a good place to end. Thank you so much, Kathy. I appreciate it. It almost makes me want to go in there and cook!
Friend,
I hope that this has given you some new ideas as to how you can serve your family and lower your stress level as you minister to those that the Lord has given you to minister to.
Thanks so much for hanging out with us, and until we get together again, let’s just keep loving Jesus, loving our husbands, and loving our people!
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