thepowerofme

Hello husbands and wives, another great day of posting coming at you live from the desk of Dragon29.  As many of you know I have been married for close to six years now.  It has been a joyous time of discoveries, rants, and just plain fun.  We also live in a small town in Wyoming that currently is 120 miles from the nearest grocery store, round trip that is.  Growing up here I learned very quickly that you buy enough food and supplies to last some time as you never know what the weather will bring.  While living in Wyoming I have had the pleasure of seeing a blizzard strike any time of the year, that’s right folks, I have seen snow while shooting off fireworks on the fourth of July.  But for some odd reason my lovely wife has taken it upon herself to hoard enough food to be able to feed the whole town.

Let me explain, for six years now I have seen the power of the sale ads pull her into stores to drop more and more money than humanly possible for the preparation of our dining adventures.  Where most people buy what they need to survive she purchases whether we need it or not just because it is on sale.  While I can not complain due to the fact of the large amounts of money we save this way it still strikes me odd as to the need.  See we have two very very large deep-freezes that sit in my garage.  One is full of meat that we use to feed our giant dogs, as well as hides that I am getting ready to tan for all sorts of crafting projects.  The other one is where we store our much desired foods of choice.  At any time you should be able to find forty or more pounds of frozen vegetables, fifty to sixty pounds of meat, and what ever else that is readily edible for human consumption.  That is my point, why in the world do we need to have forty pounds of vegetables at any given time.  With the fact that I commute those distances each and every day to be able to purchase what we need.  To me it is all most a staggering addiction of sorts to hoard so much food that the house is about to burst.  All ready I have had to reinforce the cupboard due to the excessive weight of canned foods she has acquired.  When she learned that she was no longer able to enjoy any foods that had dairy in them, we gave some food to the Boy Scouts for the annual food drive.  Wow, should of seen their faces when they arrived to pick up the goods and there were four banana boxes of non perishable delights.

When this hoarding effect first started I just shook my head as to why some one would worry this much about food.  For there has never been a time in her life where she had to wonder if she was going to get something to eat, and even now that is never a question.  Then I began to see how she shops to get the best bang for our money.  That is why she does it, folks if you want to be frugal you need to buy a big deep freeze, no matter what.  No matter where you live they make them small enough for apartment buildings, just get one.  The reason for this is simple, buy what you need to get by when things are high priced.  But when things go on sale, you hoard and hoard some more.  See, when we have forty pounds of vegetables out there, she never spent more than thirty dollars on them.  The assorted meats we own, the average price for pound is less than $2.00.  See if you buy when it is on sale, make smaller packages and freeze, your budget for groceries has finally become something to be proud of.

Like this little tip that she loves to do to the poor butchers in Safeway.  We wait for roasts like london broils to go on sale, a good chuck, round steaks and the such then go in and have the poor butcher grind it up for us.  Just be sure that they do what is called a double grind, many of them bitch about this and if you say just grind it they do just that.  You get a bunch of fat and other stuff in the package that is not even close to mixed.  If you do this trick you can get 85-90% lean for around $1.29-$1.49 a pound.  The other great way to get a good meal for a whole week, is the day after thanksgiving sales, when turkeys go on sale and buy four or five of them at a time.  Get your hams after Christmas and so forth.  And finally the perfect tip for the hoarders in world, if you can do your shopping at 7:30-8:00 AM, this is when the prices for older meat gets marked down even more.  We were able to get family size portions of chicken quarters and drumsticks for as low as $.29 a pound instead of the normal $2.29.  While I may feel that hoarding is a state of mind that one has to enter in, it is one that my limited funds can really prosper from.