What a week...

We have so many leftovers, we are just eating them constantly. :-) I am starting to think the $20 a week plan could work out for a family of 4. Its insane how much food we have leftover.

Nick and I got home at 10pm tonight (I literally walked in and wrote this). We are too exhausted to cook and someone (...me..) forgot to put on a fresh slow cooked meal. It worked out well though. Far to many leftovers!

Its just one of those days....

Yesterday was one of those 5AM-11PM days. Let me give you a run down of both of our schedules..

Nick: 5AM wake up
5:30AM- Out the door to work
6:00AM-3:00PM work
3:00PM-5:00PM nap
5:00PM-10PM School

11PM- Sleep...

Katie:
5AM Wake up
5:30AM- Complain about waking up
6AM Breakfast
6:30AM out the door
7-8AM Training
8:45AM-5PM Work
6:00PM-9PM School
9PM-10PM- Pack Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner for Nick and myself, prepare all school work

11PM- Sleep


Today we are making the vegetarian chili. This time I shall take photos as it should be finished in around 4 hours. :-) We have so much food leftover, we are never hungry. There is a lot of leftovers for lunch.




As for surviving $20 a week on gas...This week I filled up last friday with $20, after 2 long journeys I had to finally fill up again today.  :-( I was doing so well..

Tip of the week to save money on gas= SHOP AROUND FOR THE BEST PRICE

I cant stress enough how much of a difference that makes. Every penny counts. :)

I will update later with a more coherent entry once I have had more coffee.

Time to get next weeks shopping done :)

Here is the copy of our shopping list for this week, the red checks beside the item means its something we have in our fridge. Or we can substitute it.

Check out the size of that :). Hopefully we should be spending a lot less than $20 this week, due to the huge amount of leftover barley soup we have, as well as the one with beans in.

We are having a feast tonight as its Nicks cousins last night before he leaves for Army boot camp.... We shall take plenty of photos and get back to updating later today.

End of vacation mode

Nick here, Katie's cooking so I'll do today's update.
We got lucky with the first couple days of the month, since the 1st was on Saturday. We went out for our 1st anniversary on New Year's Eve and that pretty much culminated the end of the "Spend whatever we want on food" year. We accumulated a lot of leftovers and ran on those for the weekend, but it finally hit a point where we need to buy food and had to follow our new rules.

Tonight we made the Easy Italian Chicken Dinner from our little Slow Cooker Cookbook. We posted the recipe last week. The only thing we added to the recipe was some leftover raw carrots, and instead of pasta sauce we used tinned tomato. One can of stewed, diced and tomato sauce. It looks awesome.

As you can see, we started prepping later in the day so we did not slow cook. We are cooking it on high for around a hour, and baking the chicken separate.

We added the carrots we had in the fridge as extras.

We also did the shopping today and spent 20.73. The reason for that silly .73 is due to the fact that Katie was not sure of which kind of barley to get. I didn't even know there were more than one type of Barley. We also had to get 2 canned soups for emergency lunch situations.


Other than this, we are having some leftover bread, and then packing 4 servings of spaghetti (Old...In the pantry), sauce and chicken in to leftover containers for the rest of the week. Along with some leftover chocolate cookie bars. Yeah... We will be running later this week. Trust me!

Good morning fellow twentybuckers :)

After a unsuccessful trip to a local farmers market, we have decided to stock up on the food at a local wholesale place.
The only highlight to driving out there was eating breakfast with Nick, Askim and Jackson (Nicks cousin). We will be doing another pasta tutorial later today, along with a bread tutorial.

It really is the key to eating cheap!

Off to film the bread tutorial now.

Happy New Year.

We just came home from our one year anniversary celebration. We are ready to rock and roll for the $20 a week journey. We have the food (Going shopping tomorrow), and we now have a pasta machine!
No more expensive pasta in the store, we can now make our own. Its our little anniversary present.

Pretty cool eh? :-)


Look at the size of the pasta we made (pre run!)

Please remember to get your "essential grocery" list tomorrow. The one labeled in the post below as "BJ's list". This will hopefully last you 6months through the winter and spring, so you can eat cheap and good.

As I said before...We are working towards finishing a short sale purchase on a house, and each week we will be putting the money we saved from buying food, towards an item we want.

This week we will be ordering the...
To go with our amazing pasta maker...Hopefully it will hold our long linguini.

If all turns out well, we may end up selling some at a farmers market on weekends!

Wishing you all a happy new year!

Happy Thanksgiving.

Getting ready to take the blog world by storm, coming up with a few more posting ideas. :)

A lot of people have expressed interest in this blog, and we seem to have a lot of non believers!

Today we are having a feast, and running it off later. Yesterday I (K) ran 4 miles and did 30 mins on the elliptical...As well as some free weights. 900kcal total, just to get ready for today. Hopefully tonight I can get in some Plyometrics and cross training.

The key to this $20 a week journey is planning. At the start of the week we will show you what we are buying, what our plan was, and our food shopping trip. We will do a blog, youtube video, and a podcast. So every week you can follow along. Its going to be fun, and a great way to save money.

People are wondering what exactly we are going to do with the money, firstly, we are going to put some in to a 401K. Secondly, we are going to be improving the house we are hopefully buying, and working on our goal to have it paid in 9 years.

Eventually, I would like to get health insurance too. As a sufferer from Crohn's disease, it would be great to eventually be insured.

We are very lucky to have family and friends supporting us through this journey, and people have to realize we cannot eat out anymore. We are going to be the most annoying people for the entire year! But hey! We got a point to prove in todays economy.

What else was there..... This is a very unplanned blog post!

Oh yes! We are kicking the soda habbit. Only teas and water for a year. :) I wonder how that will feel... Another thing is that we will be working on 3 books on eating cheap and cooking. There are so many cookbooks, but none address the cost factor.

So this weeks goal for my reader:
Get your spice cabinet organized. Spices are the key to "Spicing it up!" Haha! They are essential to making food interesting.

Ask for a slow cooker for Christmas, and also some food storage containers.

Think of 10 goals you would like to accomplish next year. Write them down, and stick to them. Put them on the mirror. Put them on the fridge, and put them on your door!

Find your local farmers marker too. This is essential to eating cheap.
We will also start planing vegetables once we are in the new house.

That's it for now!

What are we doing in the run up to new year?

After a huge freak-out about a car insurance payment last night, we have decided to start a little bit early. Just trying to get in to some better habits.

We are currently going through gas/petrol like crazy. With 2 jobs each and college it’s almost at $40 a week for both of us. Which I know is great compared to some large truck's gas... But these cars are tiny!
 

So, how do I lower the amount I spend on Gas?

1. Take out any extra weight in the car. I know I am the worst at this... I carry round a set of kettlebells for my job!
2. Use cruise control. It’s easy to flick on and off again, and it actually saves a lot of Gas. I love CC!
3. Turn of the engine when waiting. Especially if Nick is late out of class. If its hot or cold, open a window or wrap up!
4. Stop revving your engine... Especially young boys. Its just not cool.
5. Use higher octane gasoline if your engine allows it.
6. Take good care of your car. Do a once weekly check on your engine, tires and clean it out! This is something I do every Sunday morning. I also do a lot of repairs myself. There are so many good videos on you tube to watch about fixing cars. 
7. Make sure you have some good tires, and that they are replaced when they need to be. The pressure in the tire needs to be kept at the recommended limit too.
8. Drive at the speed limit. This helps us out a lot with the Gas limit. It also helps us to be safe.
9. Turn off the A/C when you don't need it.
10. Buy half a tank instead of a whole tank. That weight adds up eventually!

I hope this helps some people. We will be starting up a podcast soon. 

 (Hopefully next year our insurance is lower...)