Thursday, October 20, 2011

31 Days: Day 19 - Good for a Cold & Good for Your Budget

If this is your first visit I welcome you to my little corner of the world!  You might want to start at the introduction of this series.  It explains what 31 Days of Change is, and has links to each day's post as they occur.  Just click on the 31 Days to Slash Your Budget Painlessly button at the top of my sidebar on the right.


While the jury is still out on whether chicken soup can help a cold, it definitely can help your budget! Actually many types of soup are very frugal. Soup can stretch a pound of meat out for two meals or more. A pound of meat will barely feed our family for one meal.

Considering that meat is usually the most expensive part of a meal, it only makes sense to stretch it as far as you can. Of course you can stretch it in many casseroles too, but for my family, casseroles, lasagne, basically meat mixed in with noodles or vegetables doesn't fly. I love them, and my husband likes some of them, but my kids are the worlds pickiest eaters. That's a whole other story. We tried everything...don't even want to go there!

My kids don't like many soups either, but chicken soup is good for 4 out of 5 of us. Other soups that my hubby and I like are chili and Spanish hamburger soup (carrots, onions, mushrooms in a tomato sauce base).


Chicken soup is super economical for us. Just tonight we had it for supper. I boiled the bones, with bits of meat still on them from when I cut a 10 lb. bag of chicken breasts off the bones. I had frozen the bones until I was ready to make soup. There was enough meat from that to fill an 8 ounce cool whip container. It all went back in the soup, but I made a nice big pot of it. That meat would have been thrown out with the bones otherwise, so really the meat was a freebie. (I actually used to throw that out!) The chicken broth was also free, compliments of the bones.

Even if you bought boneless chicken breasts, cooked it and chopped it up, you could use about half the meat you usually would eat. And for vegetable lovers, go meatless. The amount you save just depends on your families tastes and whether you use the bones or not.

Making a frugal soup 4 times a month will help with your bottom line. Since I spend about $2.79 per pound for hamburger, and $0.99 per pound for bone-in chicken breasts (I would need about 2 pounds of this chicken to feed my family if I just baked it), I estimate I would save $9.60 per month or $115.20 per year.

If you are benefiting from this series, I’d love it if you would grab my button from the top of my sidebar.  I will be back with another money saving tip tomorrow.  I will keep up a running tally of my savings at the bottom of each new post. Just scroll down to the bottom to see.  Thanks for stopping by. I hope you'll be back!

My tally so far:
$2084/year
$173.67/month



3 comments:

  1. this is too gud!!!i never thought of it this way...this series is sooo helpful

    ReplyDelete
  2. We have soup at least once a week in the winter months. It really does save money!

    ReplyDelete
  3. We love chicken soup and have it a couple of times a week, even in the summer.

    ReplyDelete

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