Fast food in your freezer for busy nights! Grocery Budget Tracking #5

This is the 5th post of my Grocery Budget Tracking in 2018! Can you feed your family a Clean Eating diet and still come in under your grocery budget? I’m about to find out! This is the real grocery budget of our family, who eats 15 pounds a week of pastured meat…and sometimes Poptarts.

In 2018, I’m committing to tracking my grocery budget twice a month. I hope that will help make it less overwhelming. I have a spreadsheet if you’re curious about every little thing we buy, but I’ll report the general numbers here on All Day Mom (just search “grocery budget” to find all the grocery budget tracking reports).

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Read on to find out how I screwed up buying too much fast food this month and my plan to stay out of the drive thru during baseball season.

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This month I rearranged our grocery budget. The new grocery budget is $520 for groceries and $80 for restaurants, because even though we “never” eat out, after tracking all of our food spending since January 1, it’s obvious that we do indeed eat out. The $80 is supposed to be for a date night restaurant meal, not fast food.

The new grocery budget is technically still $600 total, but my old budget was $600 for groceries with no budget for restaurants. I don’t want to spend more each month on food, so I lowered the grocery budget to allow for a reasonable restaurant budget. If I overspend on groceries, the extra money will have to come out of the restaurant budget. Not losing date night is a good incentive to stay under budget at the grocery store!

Fast Food = Stupid Tax!

We’ve done really well not eating much fast food so far this year, until we hit March:

January fast food: $1.86 (that was an iced tea from Wendy’s so I could get “free” mini Frosties for the kids with our Frosty keychains.)

February fast food: $0!

March fast food: $54.18—all in the first 2 weeks of March!

What happened? We got busy, and I ditched my menu plan. We needed to spend all $2550 in our Flex Spending Account (FSA) by March 15, so we ran around to 2 orthodontists and 2 dentists the first week of March—all of whom were delighted to help us spend our money, of course.

To make a long story short, Jefferson decided he does not need braces so after two days of resisting hard-hitting orthodontist sales teams, I decided we should celebrate not spending $6500 on braces with a “cheap” fast food dinner. That cost us $27.09 and indigestion.

Here’s the funny thing: I had all the ingredients at home to make cheeseburgers, and it would have taken about the same amount of time to fry up grass-fed burgers as it did to wait for our huge order in the Wendy’s drive thru.

Stupid Tax running total: $27.09.

That weekend, Jameson had a speech contest for 4-H downtown (she won a blue ribbon!) It was an all day event, so I packed the ice chest with water and a “snacky” lunch: fruit, veggies, bread, cheese, salami, hummus, and even Jameson’s favorite New York Seltzers as a treat.

Well, we’re new to 4-H so we didn’t realize that she was in an all-state competition, not just a county competition. That made the day a bit more exciting, and she did well on her first speech, so of course a celebration was in order. We ate at Taco Bell (Jameson’s favorite) in between her speeches—to the tune of $19.50. And we were pleasantly surprised by that total. I think we’re the only family who can spend $35 at McDonald’s.

We didn’t eat a bite of the food I packed.

Stupid Tax running total: $46.59.

That Monday we had a round of dentist visits. We had to leave the house super early to avoid traffic and arrived at the dentist’s office 45 minutes early. Hey, kids, let’s go get some breakfast at McDonald’s! Even though I had packed fruit and snacks in the ice chest. I was getting stupider by the minute.

Jameson is always up for fast food, but Jefferson isn’t really into breakfast, so I got out of McDonald’s for the low, low price of $2.17 for two gross McDonald’s egg burritos that I could have made at home for a total of $1.40:

2 organic eggs @ .23 ea.
2 organic tortillas @ .20 ea.
1 oz no-antibiotic sausage @ $3.33/lb.
1 Tbsp organic ketchup @ .06 per Tbsp.

Stupid Tax running total: $48.76.

The next day, we had to go back to the same dentist, up early again to beat traffic, but this time I made sure the kids ate breakfast at home and we packed snacks. By the time we were done it was lunch time, and we needed eggs from Costco, so I decided to pick up a rotisserie chicken for lunch, figuring $5 was a lot cheaper than any other fast food, and we’d have leftovers for lunch the next day.

The only reason I thought of the famous Costco rotisserie chicken is I had read somewhere that Costco now uses antibiotic-free chickens. That is not true—at least, not at our Phoenix Costco. But at that point I was committed and bought it anyway. Still “better” than actual fast food, I reasoned. Really, it probably is not. Worse, the rotisserie chicken is charged full sales tax since it’s a “prepared food”—an extra 42 cents for the convenience of picking up a warm chicken.

Frugal Tip: That $5 Costco rotisserie chicken isn’t quite the bargain people think it is. I’ve weighed the carcasses and meat from a dozen chickens and they always work out to about half carcass and half meat. Our rotisserie chicken weighed 3 lbs. cooked. That’s only 1.5 lbs of meat, or $3.61 per pound after sales tax. And a lot of it is slimy dark meat that nobody in our family wants to eat. I can get organic chicken tenders at Costco—all white meat with no chemical solution injected to make it juicy—for $4.99 per pound, no sales tax. That’s only 28% more to upgrade to organic. (Nerdy math alert: Technically organic chicken only costs 11% more than a Costco rotisserie chicken since we waste at least 1/4 of the whole chicken not eating the dark meat.)

Stupid Tax final total: $54.18.

Put fast food in your freezer for busy nights: How to stay out of the drive thru!

Jefferson’s Little League season just started. That means we’ll be at games and practices 4 or 5 nights a week until June. Obviously from the notes detailed above, it looks like I can’t be trusted to make good food decisions when I’m busy! But last baseball season, we never ate fast food. Meal prep is the secret. Here’s how I put homemade fast food in my freezer for busy nights.

Paleo Chicken Nuggets—I make 6 lbs. at a time in 1 hour, and flash freeze them so they don’t stick together. We can eat a bunch for a quick dinner, or the kids can pull out a few at a time for a protein-heavy snack or Second Dinner after a baseball game.

Paleo Meatballs—Use pureed pumpkin, kale, mushrooms, onions (or whatever you want) in place of breadcrumbs in your normal meatballs recipe. Add a few tablespoons of coconut flour to soak up the veggie juices. I flash freeze the meatballs so they don’t stick together, and we can pull out what we need and have food on the table in 5 minutes. I make batches using 6 lbs. of ground beef at a time (they’re about double that weight after the eggs & veggies are added), and I roll large meatballs so the meal prep goes faster. Rolling meatballs is a great job for kids.

Paleo Chocolate Banana Ice Cream: This is great recipe for a fast breakfast before a Saturday morning game, or for a sweet and filling snack before or after practice & games. I keep sliced bananas in the freezer at all times and it takes 30 seconds to make a batch of ice cream in my food processor. (This is the food processor I use and it’s less than $40! You’ll make your money back on it making 10 servings of organic Paleo soft serve at home instead of buying 10 milkshakes at McDonald’s.)

Easy Organic Enchiladas: As long as I remember to move these freezer enchiladas from freezer to fridge 2 days before we want to eat them, I can put a home cooked meal on the table in less than 30 minutes. I make at least 4 batches at a time. Meal prep = one mess for multiple meals!

Grocery Budget Tracking March 1–15, 2018:

Total Grocery Spending for March 1–15: $361.83

Total Restaurants & Alcohol March 1–15 2018: $54.18—all Stupid Tax!

Total ALL Grocery Spending for March 1–15, 2018: $416.01

I’m tracking my grocery budget by individual categories so I can see what we spend on meat, produce, dairy, etc., and I’m even tracking how much we spend on junk food, fast food, and restaurants! To see my 2018 Grocery Budget Tracking spreadsheet, please subscribe to All Day Mom (you’ll get instant access to all my subscriber exclusives, like this adorable BB-8 multiplication table printable!).

Have you read these posts?

Found Money #1 Freebies #2 Gift Cards #3 I Made The Call #4 Credit Card Points
How to upgrade to organic and save money on your grocery bill!
Put fast food in your freezer for busy nights with these Paleo Chicken Nuggets!
Feed your entire family a completely organic meal twice for less than the price of one combination plate at your favorite Mexican restaurant when you make Easy Enchiladas!
Build your vacation budget from $0 to Disney with my book: Disneyland on a Budget: How Our Family Spends 30 Days a Year at Disneyland Without Breaking the Bank!