Saving Moo-la...

So after about two weeks of being "big" grocery store free, we've really saved some money and our food has tasted better. We actually almost cut our grocery bill in half. Now, granted I have been cooking from scratch and it has been more time consuming. But, there really is no substitute for fresh made-from-scratch food. The reality is that when you are buying from the grocery store, you are mostly paying for packing and not the food itself. This is a great article on the "packaging" problem:

http://www.wisebread.com/paying-for-packaging-its-time-to-stop

We are a family of six and for the last 12 days, we've fed our family (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) for a total of $20 a day...and that was with eating twice too. I fix all four of my kids their lunches for school, I make sure they have something nutritional for breakfast, and I cook a sit-down dinner in the evening.

We've had pizza...homemade crust, a jar of organic pasta sauce, fresh broccoli, onion, and a little tofu cream cheese on top.

We've had black bean soup...black beans cooked, fresh garlic, chicken-free chicken stock, salt, pepper, with a little almond cheese sprinkled on top.

We've had stir fry...lots of stir fry. Stir fry is a great way to use your vegetables before they go bad.

I've made about 4 loafs of bread. I've made granola. I've made the breakfast bread pudding. I've made two different kinds of lentil soup. Tonight we're having Pad Thai noodles with peanut curry coconut milk sauce.

Tomorrow is farmer's market day! I have to stock up again. We are running low on our fruits and vegetables.

Yesterday, I had to buy dog food because the dogs were down to about a fourth of a bag. I wanted to make sure that since we were making the switch to vegetarian dog food that we could do 50/50 for a little while to get them use to it. Also, the guinea pigs were out of their pellets and timothy hay. The shocker when leaving the pet store (locally owned) was that the pets' grocery bill was almost as much as our food bill. Thankfully, their food last for a month or more.

 feel good about switching the dogs to vegetarian food. It really has bothered me to still be that we've still been meat "consumers" even if we weren't the ones consuming the food. I felt like we were still contributing to the problem rather than being a part of the solution.

I know this is probably a controversial subject. I could have easily gotten into a back and forth with the young sales lady at the pet store that was selling me the food. She was telling me that dogs really shouldn't be on a vegetarian diet unless it is for health reasons because they are carnivores....all this while she was ringing me up at the cash register. I didn't rebuttal. BUT, domesticated dogs are actually omnivores not carnivores. I've done quite a bit of research on this subject and feel confident in our decision to make the switch. It is a moral issue for me and one that I think my pets will do fine with.

One of the best things I came across in my reading, that reassured me that it was ok to take an ethical stance for your pets, was a comment that someone had left at the end of an article. The person was just identified as J:

"I'm only speaking from my experience with my two dogs - no cats - but my dogs have done extremely well on a vegan diet. Every check up with the vet over the past four years has been successful. One might say that I am imposing my own ethical choices on my dogs but providing them with a vegan diet is not the only tangible way of doing that. Putting dogs in kennels, leaving them outside, giving them standard medicine that has proven to be fatal to other dogs, putting them on a leash, making them go through training, feeding them any form of pre-made food over letting them roam freely in a field to catch their own food, giving them baths, etc. All of these things, to me, are examples of how humans have domesticated animals and, thus, have imposed their own beliefs and judgments on their "pets." It is never just about their diet - every other decision we impose on them is an example of this as well."