19 Rolls of Toilet Paper, $159, and Biscuits

So, the life of a being a wife and mother has kept me pretty busy but, I did say I would share how I'm getting my family of six through two weeks on a tight budget. With all the big bills falling due within these two weeks, we were left quite short of what we normally need to run our household. We cut as much as we could before I suggested (insisted) we cut down on the grocery budget.

We have fairly consistently gone over on our food budget each month but I felt up to the challenge of getting by on less than half of it. Our budget for two weeks is $150 to spend on food and $0 to spend on other household items like soaps, toothpaste, toothbrushes, or say, a broom.

Luckily I already have a broom. I also looked through my pantry and found that I have

• 7 tubes of toothpaste
• 4 bars of soap
• 1 jug of liquid hand soap
• 20 rolls of paper towels
• 39 dish sponges
• 19 toilet bowl cleaning tablets
• 2 cans of oven cleaner
• 18 rolls of toilet paper
• 12 boxes of facial tissue
• 496 Quart size Ziploc freezer bags
• 42 liquid ant baits
• 750 dishwasher detergent tablets
• 4 jugs of Drano
• 3 large containers of hand lotion
• 6 packs of dental floss
• 2 large bottles of face wash
• 1 bag of cotton balls
• 2 large jugs of Windex
• 1 large jug of 409 kitchen cleaner
• 14 spray bottles of Tilex Fresh Shower
• 1 bottle of Ammonia
• 1 1/2 large jugs of Pine Sol
• 1 large bottle of peroxide

Add to that enough vitamins for last 4 months and you can see why I did not have to buy any household products at all. I was able to keep to my budget of $0.

Now before you go and think I have a major spending problem or need to see a shrink for hoarding, let me explain that almost all of the above items have been siting in our pantry for over 1 1/2 years and I have actually already been using them. The items were bought when I had extra money to spend on such things. They were purchase using coupons. Most were bought at the warehouse store, Costco, with coupons. It did not hurt our budget to buy them. ALL of the items are things that my family already uses. They are brands that I normally buy or wanted to try.

For more information on how to increase your pantry stock painlessly, visit my dear friend Keep's blog - http://keepsaving.blogspot.com/2010/09/stockpiling.html. Of course, Keep's blog is the first place I went when I knew I needed to make our money really stretch. It is always good to brush up on saving skills now and then and Keep is the master.

So, where did the $150 go and why did I type "$159" in my entry title? Well, I went over my budget by $9. No worries, though. As you'll find out, we have enough.

I bought basic perishable groceries like milk, eggs (because our multi-purpose hens are not pulling their weight at the moment), cheese, fresh vegetables, baking powder that I had run out of, brown sugar, etc. Keep in mind that we go through these basic items faster than most families of six might because I make our meals from scratch for the most part. So, while I might spend $110 on these items, I'm making the money go further because I'm not buying packaged, boxed foods, or kit meals.

I'm finding that, with my past stockpiling and recent planning, my family is not really suffering on our current budget. My family even ate out twice. We had Taco Bell take out of their cheap Grande Meal (12 items). We chose mostly bean and cheese burritos plus two 5 layer burritos, that my two older boys love, and one Mexican "pizza" for a discount because it was offered as a special add-on to the Grande Meal. The total came to about $15 and filled us. We even had left overs for the next day.

On another night I was in town running errands. I knew time would be too short for cooking so I planned for and bought 3 large pizzas from Little Caesar's for around $20. I know we could have had three pizzas for around $15 if we had ordered from their Hot and Ready selection but, while I much prefer veggie pizzas, my children gag on them. So, I paid just a little more and pleased everyone.

There you have it. That is where $159 went. Still, I have done a lot in order to not spend anymore money than that.

The day after our budget was set, I went outside to take inventory of things we might sell to make up for the money we were short in our budget. I got rid of two packages of unused insulation, that was cluttering my rabbit barn, just by placing a free ad on Craigslist. Someone actually paid me so they could haul it away to use themselves.

I also advertised extra hay racks I had purchased as a package deal on Craigslist about a month ago in order to get the rabbit nest boxes they came with. I only needed one hay rack for our goat shed, so I'm reselling the extras. No takers yet but I see a little extra money from those in the future.

I have yet to put up an ad for the nice restaurant store plates, bowls, and cups I switched out for new ones a few months ago (I'll explain why I bought cheap, plastic plates on another day - it's all part of a plan). I had originally offered them on my local FreeCycle.com and had no less than 7 responses but no one wanted to drive out to the country to get them (even though I was pretty specific about where I lived before they asked for the dishes). The dishes are worth about $200 in total but offering them for free produced no serious takers. Now, I'm going to use psychology to get rid of them. Put a price on something and people will do anything to get a good deal, right? Even pay for something that was offered free before. I'll let you all know how that works out.

We only needed about $30 to fix the deficit in our budget and we realized that the feed for the animals is stretching. No doubt because we switched the goats to a new mini-pasture and the chicken bucket has more in it from all the home cooked meals I've made this past 1 1/2 weeks. Hoorah for weeds and scraps! We are no longer short on our budget.

Want a new recipe from allrecipes.com that I've already tried and tested? It's our most recent favorite. Of course, it's fast and fabulous - just the way I like 'em.

Fluffy Biscuits

by Nancy Horsburgh

6 cups white flour

1/4 cup baking powder

3 Tb sugar

1 1/2 tsp salt

1 1/2 cups shortening

3 eggs

2 cups milk

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Combine all dry ingredients in a medium-sized bowl. Cut in shortening until it resembles coarse crumbs. In a separate bowl combine eggs and milk. Lightly beat eggs into milk. Stir milk mixture into dry ingredients until just moistened thoroughly. Dump dough onto lightly floured surface, sprinkle top of dough lightly with flour then roll out until about 1 - 1 1/2 inches thick. Cut with 2 inch biscuit cutter and place onto large, ungreased cookie sheet. Gather remaining dough, lightly knead together, roll once again, and cut out more biscuit dough until all used. Bake for 8 - 10 minutes. Melt butter onto the tops of the biscuits right after they come out of the oven. Makes 36 fluffy biscuits.

Notes: Because you know I hate work, the above recipe is tripled from the original which yields only 12 biscuits. The above photo is all that is left after my boys scarfed down 2/3 of this tripled recipe. Feel free to cut it down to thirds if you don't have as many mouths to feed or don't want to freeze the extras.

The left over biscuits are now in my breadbox and will be had for a hurried breakfast tomorrow, along with a slather of pear butter and a glass of milk, as we run out the door in the wee hours of the morning (probably late) for the rabbit show. Ha! More money saved by not buying breakfast at the rabbit show. Sweet.

The Belt Tightens

In our attempts to give our children the education they desperately needed, and whereas their previous schools failed to give them the education every child deserves, we went into great debt paying tutors so that our children would be taught the very basics of math and reading. (Yes, just 1 1/2 years ago, our very bright 9 yr old did not have a clue how to read and our 6th grader could barely grasp certain Kindergarten math concepts!) Besides the money we poured into their basic education, we also suffered from the self-inflicted plague of living beyond our means, or "get what I want now" syndrome. In a few words, we were in deep doo doo.

We decided to end that financial suicide trend and stopped using credit cards all together when we moved to start our new life in the country. We adopted the "Don't buy stuff you cannot afford" concept that seems such a foreign concept to so many Americans. I LOVE this SNL skit.

Don't Buy Stuff You Cannot Afford

My husband and I eventually began sitting down together every two weeks to plan our budgets. Checking with each other frequently during each two week period to update our spending records and giving each other moral support has kept us on track. We are doing well, even though the cost of living waaay out here in the country is costing us quite a bit. We feel the benefits (like an outstanding school we could not find elsewhere!) are well worth the costs and sacrifices we make.

Well, all the planets must have aligned just right because all our big bills are due this pay period. We cut down or cut out everything that we possibly could including no haircut for me again (going on 6 months now) and slashing our food budget down by more than half of what we normally need to feed our family. On paper, we don't have enough money to get through the next two weeks. *sigh*

So, for these next two weeks, I'm going to be sharing what I'll do to keep our household running and our family of 6 well fed. It'll be a challenge. I only have $150 to spend on food. It does not help that our refrigerator/freezer went on the fritz two weeks ago and I had to throw out almost every bit of food stored in it. I managed to save a little bit in our small deep freeze but we had to start over on basics like ketchup, soy sauce, and and such.

The good news....we have a lot of ways to put food on our table so stay tuned for what I've got up my sleeve.

What am I doing today? I've baked 4 loaves of bread using the recipe in my previous post. Ha! It only took an hour!

I'm also baking yummy chocolate chip cookies, for a treat to put in the boys' sack lunches, as I blog. I keep basic baking supplies in my pantry such as salt, sugars, baking powder, baking soda, and vanilla. I buy white flour, sugar, and honey in bulk at our local warehouse store, Costco, and bulk whole wheat flour at Walmart.

Here's the cookie recipe I used with slight modifications to the directions:

Chocolate Chip Cookies

by Colleen Iermini

3 cups flour

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1 cup margarine

1 1/3 cups granulated sugar

2/3 cup light brown sugar, firmly packed

1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

2 extra large eggs

3 cups semisweet chocolate chips

Combine without sifting, flour, baking soda, and salt. Set aside. Cream margarine with sugars until light. Beat in vanilla and eggs until smooth. Mix in dry ingredients into creamed mixture, a little at a time. Add chocolate chips and stir to mix well.

Drop by heaping tablespoonfuls onto parchment lined baking sheets. Bake at 325 degrees for 12 - 15 minutes. Remove parchment along with hot cookies by sliding parchment onto cooling rack. Once cooled enough to touch, remove cookies from parchment to cool completely. Makes 4 dozen.

My notes: When baking chocolate chip cookies the the ingredients, and the preparation of them, are essential.

• Buy the best vanilla you can afford. It's going to last a long time anyway so don't skimp. It has to be real vanilla.
• Creaming the butter with the sugars is an important step. The butter must be room temperature or it will not cream properly. Keep mixing until is the sugars have dissolved into the butter so that it looks creamy and light - not granular or dense.
• Eggs must be room temperature, too!
• When incorporating the dry ingredients, or flour mixture, into the creamed mixture, mix only until the dry ingredients are just absorbed. Over mixing will result in a tough cookies.
• Gently fold in chocolate chips, nuts, etc. so as to not toughen the dough
• Quality of chocolate is important but the best chocolate will not make up for a poorly executed mixing of other ingredients.

These rules are the same for EVERY chocolate cookie recipe you will ever make. Oh, btw, I use a small ice cream scoop to measure out my cookie dough. Not only is it no muss, no fuss but, each cookie is neat and uniform in size.

Bread in an Hour

Fool Proof Whole Wheat Bread

Recently, a friend remarked that I was "amazing" when she heard that I usually keep my house stocked with homemade, whole wheat bread. I assured her it was not such an amazing feat and then let her in on my secret - one simple recipe from a wonderful neighbor who was willing to share in order to make my life a little easier.

I was given a recipe from my neighbor Sandy Barker. It's an old family recipe but I'm not sure how old. Sandy's family has lived on the same ranch for at least 100 years! Regardless, this recipe is a modern time saver for me. I can produce 4 loaves of delicious whole wheat bread in 1 hour start to finish!

Here, I'll pass it along in hopes it will help another busy mom as it has helped me.

Fool Proof Whole Wheat Bread

by Sandy Barker

Two Loaves:

3 T. (or 3 packages) yeast in 1/2 c. warm water

2 1/2 c. warm water

4 c. whole wheat flour

1/3 c. oil

1/3 c. honey

1 T. salt

2 - 3 c. white flour

Four Loaves:

3 T. yeast in 1/2 c. warm water (same as 2 loaf recipe)

5 c. warm water

7 c. whole wheat flour

2/3 c. oil

2/3 c. honey

2 T. salt

5 - 6 c. white flour

Directions: Sprinkle yeast in 1/2 cup warm water. Don't stir. Combine water, oil, honey, salt, and 4 or 7 cups flour. Beat at low to medium speed in a stand mixer with dough hook for 2 - 3 minutes. Alternately add yeast mixture and remaining flour until dough cleans bowl. Knead 5 - 10 minutes in mixer until elastic. Grease pans. Grease your hands and form loaves. Allow to raise while oven preheats. Bake at 375 degrees for 30 minutes. Put butter on top of loaves while still warm. Hide bread from your family if you want to eat any yourself!

(Notes: This bread can be kneaded by hand, but it is a very sticky dough, so use oil on your hands and on the kneading surface)

A jumble of my own notes:

• Sandy recalls that the recipe has been changed from the original. It used to call for 100% whole wheat flour and no white flour. It still works well as an all whole wheat recipe.
• The directions above were written for mixing up the dough in an electric stand mixer but it can be mixed and kneaded by hand, as well. I use a Kitchenaid stand mixer and increased the amount of whole wheat by one or two cups while decreasing the white flour a bit for a total of 14 cups of flour (the maximum mixing capacity of flour for the model I own). Make sure to check the manufacturer's maximum mixing capacity of flour for the model of stand mixer you own before you attempt to make the four loaf recipe.
• This IS a very sticky dough and you might think that you've made a big mistake when you're done mixing but it's supposed to be this way. I find the dough easier to handle if I dump in out onto a lightly floured surface after kneading in the mixer and then take a knife to cut the big blob of dough into fourths. I then use my oiled hands to pick up each soft blob to shape into loaves by tucking the edges under the dough while holding it in the air, not on any surface. As soon as I've got a somewhat thick, cigar shaped piece of dough, I plop in into a pan and begin to work on the next one.
• Yes, you read correctly, the amount of yeast is the same for the two loaf recipe as it is for the four loaf recipe. Sandy does not know why. It just works.
• This dough ONLY needs to rise for the amount of time it takes your oven to preheat. After mixing, preheat your oven while you're forming the dough into loaves and putting them in pans. After the oven is ready, just stick the doughy loaves into the oven to bake. No need to wait longer.
• The bread in the photo is sliced a little thick but it easily slices up as thin as you like with an electric bread slicer. This bread is excellent for making sandwiches.