Buying in Bulk
I’ve come to find that I really love our standing freezer. It allows me to buy things in bulk and actually feed my family for a reasonable price!
There’s no denying that the cost of food has continued to increase. It seems that income tax break that took effect April 1, in Adam’s paycheck is paying for the increase cost of food! Just this weekend I was frustrated that the least expensive organic milk we can find has gone up 50 cents a gallon (now $5.50). When we have to buy whole milk (for Gianna until age 2) and low fat milk for the family this adds up to a few gallons of milk a month. And I laughed inside when our pediatrician told us that the new standards for calcium in kids is a quart of milk a DAY! That’s not going to happen here unless we get a cow. Thankfully they like cheese. And we’re going to start giving the kids a multivitamin with extra calcium.
So today I went “shopping around” for milk. I found organic milk for $5 and decided to stock up on the fat free milk. I bought 4 gallons of fat free milk and 1 gallon of whole milk. Low fat content milk tends to freeze very well which is why I bought so many. (You just need to pour some of the milk out before freezing the jug or it will expand beyond its capacity.) Whole milk when it defrosts will taste grainy which is why I tend not to freeze that. Well, it turns out that 4 gallons of milk is a case and it qualifies for a bulk discount. So I saved 10%-a total saving for the 5 gallons of $4.50. That’s just about another gallon of milk! (I do realized if we didn’t buy organic milk, we would save more. But right now, while we can still budget it, we’ll keep buying it. Occasionally when funds are running low at the end of the month, I rotate a gallon of non-organic milk. This is not my favorite thing to do since the kids drink so much of it. My frugal kindred spirit, Misty, reminded me today that I could use powdered milk to cook.)
When you look in our freezer you’ll see a row of oats on the bottom, the door packed with all-purpose, bread, whole wheat and white whole wheat bags of flour (that I found on sale last week), four gallons of milk, plus all the odds and ends of meats and veggies that I picked up extra of when they were on sale (like the ham that was on sale for Easter!). Hopefully in a couple of weeks our next quarter calf will be coming. We found we can go through a little less than a quarter calf in half a year. Not bad.