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Home > Restarting the Coin Jar and No Take Out and Grocery Shopping

Restarting the Coin Jar and No Take Out and Grocery Shopping

February 20th, 2010 at 02:58 am

I didn't really feel like dumping out my bank today, so I don't know how much is in there at the moment, but I did empty my purse today and gathered up all the loose change and one dollar bills.

$ 8.00 in ones
+ 8.59 in coins
--------
$16.59 in the coin jar

Tomorrow I'll take the time to shake out the bank and see what's in there and add it to the total. I know there's some loose change floating around on my dresser and night stand, too, so when I declutter those I'll add that amount in as well.

The kids have been wanting pizza really badly the last couple of days and have been begging for Round Table pizza and I almost gave in to them today because it was payday and hey, it would be easy. Plus it's one of the few restaurants my son can eat at with his food allergies.

The thing was that there was plenty of time before dinner to start mixing dough in the bread machine and we had two unopened packages of pepperoni and Canadian bacon and a 2 pound brick of mozzarella. I had herbs and tomato sauce. The pizza pan was even clean. There was absolutely no reason to go out for pizza when I could make a perfectly good one that they would like better at home. The only thing stopping me was lazinesss. I got over it. *laughs* Just one of the things I need to do in readjusting my thinking back to a better way of doing things for financial gain.

So it was 3:45 and I popped the five ingredients I needed into the bread machine, set it on the dough cycle, which takes 63 minutes, and had enough time to run to the bank drive-thru and pay the credit card bill (take that evil empire!) then stop at the grocery store for milk.

They happened to have broccoli (crowns for 69 cents a pound!) and asparagus (for 99 cents a pound) and cauliflower (79 per pound) and a head of cabbage (33 per pound) on really good sales so I picked up those and glanced at the fruit. Nothing really looked good despite the prices and we still had apples and oranges and frozen bell peppers at home, so no need to buy anything even if the green bananas were 29 cents a pound.

I made my way over to the fish counter to see if they had anything on sale. They had wild Keta salmon $4 per pound if you buy the whole fish. They filet it for you right there and since the counter was devoid of customers I didn't feel guilty about taking the time to do it. I ended up with four pounds of usable fish for $20 which works out to $5 per pound after all the discards are taken out of the original five pound fish. Not bad for what will amount to six meals worth of salmon.

Nothing else was on sale and I have plenty of meat in the freezer so that was all I bought. Between the milk, veg (I bought a lot of veg, we eat a lot) and milk (organic), I spent $48.74.

I got back home to my mother saying the bread machine had just dinged (ha, timing!) So while my son and I divided the dough and put two balls in the fridge for later this week and started stretching out the other one, my daughter preheated the oven and shredded the cheese. We added the sauce to the dough, sprinkled on basil, oregano, and thyme, added cheese and the meats and by the time we were done the oven was warm.

With everyone pitching in it didn't feel like a huge production making it, we all had fun and instead of paying $30 for a large pizza, we'll end up with three pizzas for the same price of on hand ingredients we would have paid for the other. I used to do this all the time. I used to be good at it. It's coming back slowly but surely.

2 Responses to “Restarting the Coin Jar and No Take Out and Grocery Shopping”

  1. nance Says:
    1266683331

    I'd love the recipe for your pizza dough. I also use my bread machine, but can only get two pizzas out of the amount of dough in my recipe. When I make a pizza, I par bake the dough for another pizza and then wrap it well and freeze it. The next pizza is very easy to make since the dough is the hardest part.

  2. LuckyRobin Says:
    1266750394

    1 Tbsp active dry yeast
    1 and 1/8 cups lukewarm water
    1 Tbsp olive oil
    1 tsp salt
    3 cups of flour

    Mix in bread machine. Divide into balls. Makes three thin crust 12 inch pizzas or two thick crust ones. I push mine out very thin. Amount of time you bake it depends on the thickness and whether you have an electric or gas stove. I bake at 450 in an electric stove and 425 in a gas stove. I don't remember how long in the electric but gas was 20 minutes for the thin crust one. Electric was longer, maybe...30 minutes. But we were at a higher elevation then and that messes with stuff, too You'd have to check until you knew what your oven was going to do. I also have a very good pizza pan with tiny holes in the bottom that cooks much better than the standard pizza pan.

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