A Month of Cheap Eats

My husband challenged me to live on the food stamp budget for groceries. That meant taking my usual grocery budget of about $600 down to $250. And for the month of July, I came in at a grand total of $308. We still got a weekly organic CSA box, ate all organic fruits and veggies, as much local/organic everything else as possible, and paid $10 a gallon for local, raw, organic milk.

I cheated in tons of ways, though. That figure doesn't include any eating out or any of the stuff I already had on hand or got from my garden. Plus we were out of town until 4 July. So that's like four free days. We didn't have to skimp anywhere near what we would have if we were really living on food stamps. We're still shooting for a low grocery bill in August, so I'll let you know how it goes.

A few notes on how I cut my grocery bill in half:
We eat vegetarian most nights, and when we do have meat it almost never takes center stage.
I make bread, granola and yogurt at home, and we didn't buy snacky food like crackers, chips or granola bars.
Beans and rice.

My Google Calendar has all of the meals we ate (and some other random life events).