Rationing Your Food

Before I talk to you about rationing, I have to tell you that my site was down when I got up yesterday. It told me that the site wasn’t secure. So I contacted my son who is my tech guy. He has it fixed. It had to do with the cert. It needed to be validated again. It is all taken care of and it is safe to come here now.

We started rationing a lot of our food over the past couple of months. I am concerned about a few things that may be in our future: war and empty shelves in the grocery markets. But the most important worry is the escalating food prices. They actually were shocking at the beginning of the week when I shopped. Many things that I wanted had risen so high in price that I won’t buy them. I hope that many of you have stocked up at least a few months worth of food. Hopefully much of it was purchased before the prices started escalating. If not you can start today because prices will be much higher in 2023.

I try my hardest to stick to proper portions on everything especially meat, poultry, and fish. They are the priciest foods that I buy. We try to stick to 3- 4 oz. a day for our daily serving. It has been hard because we are on Keto so we usually eat bacon or sausage with our eggs or Keto pancakes. But we have decided that if we eat meat for breakfast, then we won’t eat it for dinner. We can have pancakes or eggs with avocado. Keto is hard to stay on and it is expensive. Plus I lost a lot of weight the last time I was on it but the minute I went off it I gained much of the weight back.

I am starting to think that we should just eat healthy and count calories instead. We haven’t made that decision yet.

We Americans eat too much food. The portions in restaurants are huge. No one needs that much food. So rationing may help us lose a little weight also. Hubby and I rarely go out to dinner anymore. It is cheaper to eat at home.

We are cutting back on everything we can. When we make meatballs for soup or a recipe, I usually use 1/2 lb. instead of 1 lb. ground beef that the recipe calls for. But I do not cut down the other ingredients. That way we can get two meals from that recipe. I do the same for hamburgers using 1/4 lb. instead of 1/3 lb. for each and put more toppings on like tomato, lettuce, onions and mushrooms.

When you buy your meat, poultry or fish, freeze it in the portions you should have not what you want to have. When you open a frozen veggie, check to see what portion you should be eating. The same goes for anything you eat. I just measure out a portion for us and keep the rest frozen or freeze the rest from a can.

I try to keep my meat purchases under $5.00 a lb. I really like chicken breasts at $2.99 a lb. or drumsticks at $.89-$.99 a lb. We love turkey. We have purchased two: one for Thanksgiving and one for over the winter. However when I put the turkey in the refrigerator to defrost on Sunday, I may buy another one to replace it. That depends on how bad the snow gets here. But at $ .58 a lb, I am tempted. It will be such cheap meat and bone broth. But we were craving the shrimp the other day for $9.99, so I bit the bullet and purchased it. It will make two meals for us. But that price is not happening a lot in this home.

We can use less spaghetti sauce for pasta meals. One half of a jar or can should suffice for us. We can use less of a lot of items to stretch them out and bring the cost of a meal down.

We also try hard to incorporate meatless meals into our weekly menu once sometimes twice a week. Beans, pasta. and salads are cheaper than meat.

I make a lot of soups especially over the winter. They are cheap and delicious. We love turkey, chicken, bean and ham, beef barley, onion, taco, and homemade tomato meatball soup.

So seriously consider rationing your food to make it last longer and cost you less per meal for you and your families. Our ancestors did this and we can too.

Yesterday I pulled all of the whole tomatoes from our garden out of our freezers to thaw. I will be making homemade spaghetti sauce to freeze today. It lays flat in quart freezer bags so it will take up much less room than the whole tomatoes. That leaves room for meats that I find at a great price.

Let me know in the comments if you are doing this and any tips that could help the rest of us defray these costs.