yesterday was alices half birthday, she is now officially one and a half. we didnt have any exciting plans for the day (just the doctors office for her 18 month checkup, which made me feel very organized), and it didnt feel right to not do anything special. so i decided early that morning that wed have alices favorite dinner, hummus and flatbread (recipe here), and then id make half a cake. you know, cause its her half birthday (commence forced laughter).
remember how in my last post i mentioned that i do all my baking from scratch? well that includes cake. and frosting. i do this for two reasons: one, convenience, we always have all the baking staples (butter, eggs, vanilla, flour, sugar, baking powder, etc.) in stock, just in case we need to bake something (it happens more often than you think), so we never have to run out to buy any mixes. two, i get to avoid all the preservatives and chemical crap thats in all the boxed mixes, which helps me rationalize how much cake we eat, since, you know, its "healthier" if its made from scratch. (note: im not entirely sure if this is actually any cheaper than buying the boxed mix, its just my preference)
so heres the cake i made:
basically all i did was make a single 8 inch yellow cake, cut it in half, and stacked and frosted the two semicircle cakes in the same manner one would do to a regular cake. this seemed easy enough in my mind, though i didnt realize that my favorite yellow cake recipe (from the good housekeeping cookbook, which, if you dont have it, i highly recommend you go buy it, its the best) made two 8 inch layers, and it wasnt possible to cut it in half (it calls for 3 eggs). so i had to scour the internet (ok, just googled) a recipe that resulted in a single layer. honestly it came out kind of dry and crumbly and i was a bit disappointed with it, but it was still cake, and still tasted good. for the frosting i also kind of had to eyeball all the ingredients, since i didnt need a full recipe to frost half a cake. that actually came out much better than expected. also, frosting the cut edge of the cake was kind of a pain, but all in all it came out pretty cute.
when we got home from the pediatrician (alice is great, by the way), i found an exciting surprise in our mailbox, our free shutterfly prints were here!
i love shutterfly because if you sign up for their emails, every couple months theyll send you a code for 101 FREE prints, all you have to pay is tax and shipping (if you order only the 101 free prints the total comes out to $7.74). they do this pretty frequently , this was my third order since halloween, and i'm always surprised at the turnaround (i ordered on monday, the arrived friday, even our christmas cards that i ordered in mid december came in just a couple days). this is definitely one of my favorite free things! im really, REALLY bad at getting our digital photos printed so this has really helped me catch up on alices baby pictures. i guess now i dont have much of an excuse for not making alice a baby book though... remember when i said i dont scrapbook? ha.
last thing! im really excited to announce that next week ill be doing my first craft tutorial! stay tuned to learn how to make a really cute wedding present!
ill be the first to admit that i do a lot of things that one would associate with those moms. i bake everything from scratch, i make homemade sauces, heck, i even made most of alices baby food, including oatmeal. but lets get a few things straight, i do NOT scrapbook, i do NOT make quilts, and i most certainly do not, and will not, make an elaborate monthly calendar of freezer meals. yes, i will occasionally make soup or beans and freeze half of it for later, but thats mostly because theres only three of us and i cant seem to make a three-person pot of soup, but i am fundamentally opposed to cooking food just to put it in the freezer and IMMEDIATELY TURN IT INTO LEFTOVERS. i dont care about all the "time i could save" by cooking all our meals for the month on one day, i refuse to feed my family what are essentially full-sized leftovers for the entire month. plus our schedule is super irregular so theres no telling what our plans will actually be more than a day in advance, and im really terrible at remembering to thaw things in a punctual manner.
so when it comes to meal planning, i had to come up with something flexible that allowed for spontaneity and fresh dinners every night, but kept me from having to go to the grocery store every couple of days to fill in the gaps for that nights dinner (this was our model for the first two years of our marriage, and it wasnt so bad when it was just the two of us, but once alice stopped sleeping through the grocery shopping, it HAD to stop). a couple months ago i FINALLY found a good routine thats not only saved us a lot of time and money, but its also been really easy to stick to.
see, i used to keep FOUR grocery lists going on at any given time, one for target, one for vons, one for smart and final, and one for the local mexican grocery store (sometimes id even make a spontaneous trip to sprouts), cause each store has its different things that are cheapest, and different days of the week with different specials, thats what my mom always did, etc. etc. THIS WAS A TERRIBLE PLAN. basically i was in some kind of grocery store every day that i didnt have to go to work (and some days that i was working at night), WITH A BABY, buying a couple things at each store, and frequently finding myself one key ingredient short of the dinner i wanted to make, AND i was over budget almost every week.
im really happy with my new routine, mostly because now i go grocery shopping exactly once a week, two if theres an emergency, which has saved a lot of gas, and has given me what feels like infinite free time. its also helped us eat a better variety of healthier food for less money, so im kind of kicking myself for not figuring this out sooner.
the plan starts on tuesday, when the grocery circulars come in the mail, and once i know what vons has on sale, i can start analyzing what we already have, what staples weve run out of, and what meals we could make with minimal additions. i pretty much exclusively shop at vons because im kind of obsessed with vons.com and their "just for u" app, which has extra digital coupons that you can load onto your card (many of these can be combined with sales and manufacturer coupons, and most weeks theres an item thats completely free), and what they call "personalized deals" which are sort of like price matches on things that other stores have on sale, but mainly for items that they know you already buy (its kind of creepy but its save us a ton of money, especially on produce). plus, going to one store, once a week has REALLY cut down on impulse purchases, keeping us UNDER budget most weeks.
anyways, all of the new deals online dont go up until wednesday, so i have to wait until then to figure out approximately seven dinners requiring as few items as possible, as well as what fruits, breakfasts, and lunch supplies are going to be cheapest. then i write all the dinners in no particular order on the incredibly ugly dry erase board thats on my fridge (i really need to find something more attractive). then we go to vons on wednesday afternoon or evening since thats the day that they do all their clearance markdowns, and we have the best chance of getting some super cheap salmon or 50 cent pasta, occasionally adding a meal or two to the list while at the store.
and if you dont believe me that this is a cheap way to shop, here is an actual photograph of my actual vons receipt from last night, for a whole weeks groceries, PLUS some extra canned goods:
basically, every day until the next wednesday, we can pick any of the dinners from the list knowing that we have everything we need on hand. i love it because if we dont feel like having pizza on thursday, we can have something else, if i dont have time to make pasta salad on whatever day or we spontaneously have dinner at my moms or go out or whatever, no big deal, and most importantly, we almost never have to rush to the store to get that one thing we ran out of to make dinner. its awesome, cause you know, i get to be frugal AND flakey, and whats better than that?
p.s. i just joined bloglovin, so now its easier to follow me or whatever.
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by far the most difficult part of couponing is keeping everything organized so that you know what you have and how many and when they expire (at least in my case, i suppose this part comes naturally for some). since i started doing this less than a year ago, ive gone through many different methods, and now that im getting several copies of each sunday paper insert ive had to re-think EVERYTHING.
right now i have one copy of each coupon in a coupon book i got at an office store a couple years ago, and all the "extras" paper clipped together by type in a small accordion file, and its mostly working, if somewhat bulky to use while shopping. but im sure ill figure out something more efficient someday.
i used to check for expired coupons every week as i added my new ones, but that meant that EVERY week i had to meticulously sort through every single coupon to maybe throw out a handful, but i lost patience and decided that i would just add in the new coupons and sort out the expired ones once a month. this ended up being a big mistake since adding an entire months coupons (many of which expired through the month) to my book without taking any out basically exploded to book. seriously, it wasnt even close to closing. then i realized that most (though not all) coupons expire the end of the month, with most of the others expiring somewhere around the 15th. so now i clean them out twice a month, which has turned out to be much more manageable.
this week turned out very nicely and my book is slimmer and more organized than ever. since it was a holiday weekend and there was only one small insert with a few coupons i even wanted, AND it was the end of the month and i was able to throw out this giant pile:
as good as that felt, that wasnt even the best part. this year i challenged myself to keep track of how much money i spent on couponing as well as how much money i saved, since after a few months i noticed that all the newspapers and printer ink was starting to add up. so i decided on a few different metrics to track monthly (total paper coupons used, total club card/redcard savings, total savings, average % saved, and the cumulative total profit after all coupon-related expenses), as well as at the end of the year. (i also decided that i would only keep track of purchases at vons and target, since those stores account for virtually all household purchases) i realize this is an INCREDIBLY nerdy thing to do, but i just HAD to find out if couponing was a mathematically worthwhile hobby, since it really is more time consuming than you would think. (also i secretly love calculating statistics since thats about the only kind of math i can do well, but dont tell anyone)
i really had no idea how this was going to go, but the end of march marked the first quarter of collected data, and i was so excited about the results that i just HAD to share them.
my total (cumulative) savings at the end of march (all vons club, coupons, redcard, sales etc.) was $775.72. (and thats after spending $75 on newspapers and printer ink, so really weve saved $850.72) . now, i know youre thinking "well OBVIOUSLY you must have to spend a TON of money to have saved that much", and i would like to take a second to point out that we have a strict grocery budget of $50 a week at vons, and about $35 a week at target, and thats for EVERYTHING, from food to toiletries and even diapers. so, no we do NOT spend alot of money on groceries. for further reference our average savings per transaction is around 40%.
unfortunately, we arent exactly in the financial position for this to be an extra $775 in our pockets, its more like $775 of groceries that we would have otherwise had to do without, but someday, if i keep up with this, we will get to enjoy this "extra" money. anyways, long story short, i have, in fact, mathematically concluded that couponing is, indeed, a worthwhile pastime.
