$12 fruit and veggie haul.

by admin

Preparing a jar of sandwich squash relish.

“ Power, today, comes from sharing information, not withholding it.”

Keith Ferrazzi

My husband went to Market on the move a couple weeks ago and brought back a giant box of all kinds of organic fruits and veggies. All this was only $12. It used to be $10 but everything is going up everywhere, still a great price for everything you get.

Market on the move is a monthly food club where you can pick up boxes of fruits and veggies that would normally be tossed because they are slightly damaged or are becoming a little too old for the shelves.

Instead of wasting food they have markets they set up where people can buy the produce for huge discounts. Anyone can participate.

The supply changes every month. We don’t always go, especially during the hotter months when the selection is not so great. What we don’t eat that week we either make jam, freeze, can, or dehydrate for future use.

Last months box was full of peppers, fruit, squash, zucchini, celery, and tomatoes. There were so many cherry tomatoes.

We made pickled cherry tomatoes.

Pasta sauce.

Jam.

This year for Christmas we will be giving out jam and a loaf of fresh bread.

And squash relish for sandwiches.

There was also peppers added to the relish mixture.

The day of this huge colorful supply of veggies I was in the middle of organizing my pantry. Our pantry is also our storage area. Our home doesn’t have a garage. It doesn’t get air conditioning in the pantry area so in the summer we have to move a lot of our can goods inside to our kitchen shelves.

My daughter has taken up the hobby of fountain pen writing. Now when ever I need something to be written I ask her to label everything for me. Just so pretty to me.

Dishes go in drawers and extra food goes in storage bins inside.

We keep our empty pickle jars after pickles have been eaten. I paint the lids the same color so they look nicer. Some of the dry goods in these jars are dry fruit, cereal, oats, pasta, yeast, flour, dry milk, cocoa and tea, animal cookies. We also have a huge jar of honey on one of these shelves. Honey helps with sour throats, burns, chapped lips, all kinds of things. It taste wonderful too.

I haven’t really gotten to filling up a lot of our empty jars because it is so hot when organizing the pantry. It has also been hard trying to figure out where to put everything.

If you have small kids in the house labeling everything helps them recognize words and also helps them when they need something or are putting away something. Of course you need to keep things very simple when doing that, so print clearly.

Everything I am doing here in the city I also have to do up north. We need to build some extra shelves for Our Little Red House but there has been a wood shortage and what wood there is has gone up to crazy expensive prices. We do the best we can with what we have on hand already. I have some ideas for shelves up north that I will share with you all later in another post. I hope they come out okay.

This whole cabinet will change again. It was empty so I used this space for my son and daughters drinks they picked up at the discount grocery store. At the university grocery store they charge about $3 for the tea drinks but at the discount store they are .50 cents each.

Older homes don’t come with a lot of storage. The neighborhood we are in here in the city was built in the 50’s and is near a hospital. We can walk to the hospital if need be. Back in the 50’s a lot of doctors and medical workers lived in these homes…maybe they didn’t need a lot of storage for food, probably ate at the hospital cafeteria all the time.

All I know, is that it is hard trying to figure out where to put everything when we have no garage and a teeny tiny pantry for our food. I have been working on organizing our pantry along with prepping some for the Winter.

We don’t like to go shopping a lot during the Winter months here in the city because it can get so crazy with traffic with all our out of state visitors that come during the Winter. I miss the snowbirds. When my husband and I would run into visitors hiking, we liked having chats with them and would share ideas on places to visit around our state. Anyway, we have always gotten into a pattern of getting our Winter shopping done by October. This was something we always did even before the pandemic.

So, we are prepping. Think that word gets a bad rap with some people out there in the world. I can almost see the eye rolls now…

“ Oh, you’re one those people ”

There should never be anyone on this planet that goes without food. God has so many plants and animals that everyone should have enough to eat. There is so much waste in my country. Food being thrown away, products being destroyed and tossed, and some of this is being done on purpose in my opinion.

Just buy extra items each time you go out. Look up what you think you may need for your family. At the dollar store they have large cans of pasta sauce and bags of pasta. You can start with $20 every week with 10 meals for a family. Add a can of greens beans with the meal and learn how to bake bread yourself. Bags of flour are pretty cheap and easy to store for awhile.

Look for discount grocery stores in your area. Our discount grocery store sells bags of dried beans for .25 cents a bag. Normal retail price is anywhere from $1-$2 each bag.

They also have huge 3lb. bags of coffee for .99cents. Super large boxes of Cheerios that normally cost $5.99 at our local grocery store are only .99 cents at the discount grocery store.

My son loves protein bars for when he goes hiking with his dad. They cost anywhere from $1.25-$2.50 each bar but at the discount grocery store they are .10 cents each. My son filled the basket up with them.

My daughter loves chocolate and these chocolates are pretty pricey in the regular grocery stores. Think they are $1 a bar but at DGS they are .25 cents.

If you find good frugal resources to buy food from remember to share those locations with your friends, and neighbors too. It is important that the people who surround you, also are prepared so you all can help each other when needed.

They give out free food with each $10 purchase. Free boneless chicken breast and ten bags of cheeto puffs that day we went shopping. They also had cases and cases of mayo they were giving away, If you have chickens this is great for the Winter months to add some fat to their diets, that’s if you don’t eat Mayo yourself. We got some extra to share with our neighbors on our street.
Not food but another discount store next to the grocery store. They had really nice coats here today for $15 and men’s long sleeve thermal pajama sets for $6. Picked up some sweaters, and two pajama sets for Our Little Red House up north. It snows in the Winter up north.

Anyway, it’s fun organizing the pantry. I think so. I love how nice everything looks after cleaning. It doesn’t stay that way of course but for awhile it is nice having a clean home. I had my daughter write pretty labels on our empty pickle jars. The Dollar stores had six large tags for $1. I didn’t have enough for all my jars, so I found some at the store I do trades with and used smaller tags as well.

Happy frugal shopping everyone. Stay safe and may God bless you all in your prepping adventures.

With some of our ripe tomatoes before blending them to be made into sauces we removed their seeds first. Sometimes if you are lucky you can still come across seeds from your fruit and veggies that will produce. We have had better luck with our garden harvesting seeds this way, then the packets we have bought over the years in big chain stores.
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