Day 4

Today I did the first bit of grocery shopping, hopefully enough to take us for the next 5 or 6 days. Milk, eggs, bread, a few ingredients for soup and home made mac & cheese. Passed up Coffeemate, which I am seriously embarrassed to admit I love. Not the weird flavors, but the regular kind. I don't enjoy coffee without it. Yet, I'd feel too selfish spending $4 of our budget on something only I use, that I really could live without. So I'll be having plain old milk in my coffee, and probably drinking less coffee too.

A family in my children's school is in a time of need, and I signed up to bring them a meal, knowing it means squeezing one more meal into our 29-day budget. I told the kids we'd be having some meager dinners for a few days so that we'd have enough to prepare a nice meal for the family. So Day 1, we had a few frozen meatballs left in a package - too few to make a meal so they'd just been sitting there. I tossed them into sauce with some leftover breakfast sausages. No one seemed to notice. The next night was grilled cheese and soup, the night after, a mix of roasted veggies for us and fish sticks for the kids. Not my usual style of cooking but inexpensive for sure. And I think the kids secretly liked it. It helped that we had some ice cream in the freezer. One of the primary tenets of Frugal February is, .99 brownie mix (or a bit of ice cream purchase in January) can make everyone forget a meal of leftovers.

Tonight I made a double batch of dinners and a double batch of muffins, one for us, one for the family. What kind of muffins? Lemon, of course, from our backyard tree

32 pounds of them, to be exact, though we've given away a lot of them since I took this picture a few days ago. We have kept the boy.

Expenditure to date: $36.98.