Project on Healthy Low Cost Eating

Food Inc. has just come out and I plan on watching it just as soon as I can. In the meantime on their website I found a link to an online cookbook on eating healthy, frugal, and light on the planet http://cookforgood.com/ . With the addition of another child, (we adopted an older child) a few years ago and the cost of groceries going up from 25% to 35% depending on where you live, we have seen our food bill go from about $88 a week four years ago to $300 a week. Now some of this of course is that four years ago we had three young boys and now we have four teenagers. The stories you hear about teenagers appetites are so true, they eat constantly and they eat a lot! Now I have to take into consideration that this price reflects some toiletries and household items, so if I am figuring correctly our food consumption cost is sitting somewhere around $ 1000. a month. This sounds like quite a bit but we are actually comparable to the thrifty plan that the USDA says if how much a family of six should spend per month,.http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/Publications/FoodPlans/2009/CostofFoodApr09.pdf
So in my cost to spend even less I have decided to chronicle our progress and see if we can get our cost down to around $150 per week. I will post what is working and what is not working.
You should know we already ate minimal process foods. Ate out for lunch about once a week. Ate dinner out as a family about once a month. Meat consumption is only about once a day if not a few times a week. I rarely buy name brands unless they are on sale and are cheaper than the store brand.
We do buy some organic foods, local foods, organic meat, eggs, and hormone free milk. We also shop the Farmers Mrkt. about twice a month.

This weekend I spent $181 on groceries, buying a lot of staples to get started. Much of this was bought in large containers. Yesterday I was in the kitchen for 7 hours making bread and pizza dough, hummus, pasta with homemade tomato veggie sauce, homemade pudding and yogurt.
Today I baked bread, 2 pizza's, and made a strawberry cream pie. It was a labor intensive weekend and I am wondering how I will keep up this week. Currently I have 2lb.s of black beans in the crockpot for Cuban Black beans and Rice.

We also spent an extra $61 on toiletries and the ingredients for the pie I promised my son.

*I have really cooked all weekend and I am tired. It will have to get easier or I will have to find some other way to keep cost dwon.

Courtney