Hey Friend!
I was pretty excited to only spend $73 on groceries last month-especially with the food prices right now!
I am so grateful that my family hunts and fishes,  we grow and preserve our own food, and have chickens for meat and fresh eggs_especially with the price of eggs right now! I used to advise people to eat eggs for an evening meal at least once per week to save money, but now they aren’t going to save a whole lot on that!!  
My first week of the challenge, I ended up spending $30 because I hadn’t been grocery shopping for a few weeks and I need to buy some extra fruit as we were running low and in our area of the country, we aren’t able to grow fresh fruit for months due to below freezing temps, so that seems to be our biggest expense because I like to buy organic as much as possible and I don’t can very much fruit because we like fresh fruit. I do freeze some fruits, but my frozen apples are gone, but we do still have strawberries.  The rest of the week, we ate egg meals for breakfast because I was running low on milk, venison, potatoes and corn, I made a large pot of chicken wild rice soup because I had most of the supplies on hand and we make our own broth, we had a potato, burger and cheese hash, tacos, roast,potatoes, green beans.
The second week I made a huge pan of hash to last us most of the week.  That is shredded hashbrowns, pork sausage, and eggs-sometimes I put peppers in this, but we didn’t have those on hand.  I like to make alot because we like heating it up during the week for breakfast or lunch.  I always make large batches of everything whenever I cook  because then I have to cook alot less often. Our breakfast  can be something as simple as yogurt, smoothies, sourdough dishes, eggs, oatmeal and then we can use leftovers for lunches so I only concentrate on a quick dinner meal. 
I have not had enough ingredients to make double the meals to freeze like I usually do, but I’m sure I will get back to that when I am done trying to eat mostly out of the pantry and freezer.  I had alot of cubed zucchini in the freezer and made some zuchinni lasagna with our canned spaghetti sauce, burger and cheese that we had-it is one of our favorite meals-so much flavor and it is really quick to make. I also made some chicken tacos with chicken in the freezer, venison sloppy joes and french fries, sourdough pizza crust pizza, and chilli.  Of course we always have sourdough bread and treats throughout the week as well! So week 2 I only spent $26 because we still had fruit from the week before, but we did have to buy some raw milk to make our greek yogurt and also to have on hand as we ran out the first week along with a few other items..
The 3rd week I spent nothing and we had stroganoff with our homemade sour cream,and venison, one meal was chicken, potatoes, and corn, another was chicken fettuccine with our homemade noodles and homegrown chickens, venison burgers and our homemade french fries we freeze in the fall with the potato crop, , potato soup, omlets and spaghetti squash spaghetti and meatballs, canned pickles, and sourdough garlic bread.  I’m being very intentional about what I buy at the store and I am not buying any extra food to stock the cupboards like I normally do when it is on sale.  
And week 4. I only spent $17. Sourdough pizza, sourdough skillet, eggbake, roast and potatoes, burrito bowls, chicken and sweet potatoes, and fish and french fries. We also ate similar breakfasts to the weeks above and usually leftovers for lunches. The biggest expense we have saved on was not buying snacks and making them all homemade because my kids found some recipes using ingredients we already had, so that was another win from our challenge.


Even though I have only been buying the few items for the meals we need week by week, I have not felt deprived at all.  It is so nice to have so many nutrient dense foods from our garden,chickens, hunting, and fishing. We will eventually need to buy more groceries just for th