Couponing

Today's Boston Globe had beaucoup coupon sections in the Sunday supplements, but out of 4 sections, I only glommed on to 10 - 12 coupons. Most of them are not for food. Lots of vitamins and health "stuff," cosmetics, weird things I would never buy. And the food coupons are invariably for the most processed of foods. No one ever has $1 off on a bag of carrots, although I did have one tomato coupon this fall.

Sometimes you find canned soup or cleaning products, and some paper and plastic. Yogurt is often available by coupon. Haven't seen cat food for ages. It's not on sale either, but we did buy 24 cans and get $1 off on Fancy Feast. Such a deal. One kitty is diabetic and we try to buy cat food without glutins. It's weird standing in the cat food aisle looking for specific flavors (each with its own color). Kitty doesn't care.

The best deals, food-wise, are the BOGOs. Buy One Get One in retail parlance. Chickens and pork tenderloin are particiularly coveted, but just about anything I regularly buy is welcome. Of course bottles of Tabasco would be useless. We are entering a 5 Tabasco bottle marriage. That's a lot of years.

Most weeks I'm too lazy to shop the 3-5 supermarkets and cherry pick specials. I stay with my main store and bop into the others if I'm driving by or in the neighborhood.

We had a half-ham over Christmas and the bone with plenty of meat clinging to it will be utilized for bean soup this week. From scratch with the soaking of the beans. I add lots of onion, and some garlic and carrots. Always yummy. Don't forget the herbs.

Some recipes call for a Parmesan Cheese rind, but that implies that you buy a big mother of a Parmesan Cheese, not exactly a frugal purchase. (See Photo).

The Cheeseparer, paring away

Stuffed Peppers - Yowza!

Our supermarket had big green peppers on sale for 77 cents a pound. I had some ground beef (from a previous BOGO) in the freezer, and all the other ingredients were on hand.

These babies were good. It would have been even cheaper to stuff the ones we grew in the garden this summer.

The second photo is with cheese sprinkled on during last five minutes of cooking. Yum! The recipe called for parboiling the peppers before baking, a definite improvement in getting rid of the harsh raw taste. Those Southern folks sure do understand cooking.

http://southernfood.about.com/od/stuffedpepperrecipes/r/bl30220q.htm

Savings at the Grocery Store

This week, with a hard memory of our retirement investments tanking, I went over the grocery specials more earnestly than usual, and the store, perhaps responding to the bad economic news, had a number of tempting specials.

We broke down and bought one large pumpkin for $9.99. We usually buy three but the crop failure this year has them at astronomical prices. Hard to do without a pumpkin. Just need one.

Except for the specials, I only bought groceries I needed for this week. We're trying a new cheese spread for the cocktail hour. We've discovered some of the pretty good "spreads" made in-house at the store are about $5.00 a pound, which is a decent price, cheese-wise.

So the final grocery total came to $65.77 and the savings were $40.73. That's not bad. I didn't have to buy any paper, plastic or cleaning products. We bought a 24 case pack of cat food earlier in the week at Walmart. BTW, Walmart has the best and the cheapest cat litter. We never buy anything else.

I potted up 8 geraniums that I saved last winter and put in the big whiskey barrell by the side of the house. They grew and flourished and will spend the winter indoors again, thereby saving beaucoup bucks.

I made spaghetti alla amatriciana this week. We got three meals out of a pound of spaghetti and a 28 oz. can of tomatoes and 1/4 lb of bacon. This works out to pennies a meal. Can't beat that. Tasted first-rate, too.

Cheaply yours,

The Cheeseparer