Category: Every Day

Finally, Top’s put some turkeys on sale starting today. They put Jennie-O and Honeysuckle White turkeys on sale for $ .48 a lb. with a $ 25. purchase.

We hate Jennie-O turkeys because a few years ago we got a turkey breast one and it was the toughest turkey we have ever had. We had to throw it out after cooking it.

So this morning I went to the store a little after it got light out about 7:07am. Knowing that Top’s might run out of the Honeysuckle White, I wanted to make sure that we got one. First place I headed was to get the turkey. They only had 10 of them when I was there. I grabbed this one which was $ 15.02 lbs. I spent $ 15.99 on 20 rolls of Scott TP and 2 lbs. of Oscar Mayer bacon for $ 11.99 which gave me over the $25. I needed to spend. The turkey was $ 7.21.

We now have 3 turkeys: 1 Butterball($ .97 a lb.), 1 ShadyBrook( $ .84 a lb.), and 1 Honeysuckle White( $ .48 a lb). I will cook the largest one which is the Butterball for Thanksgiving.

Once I put the Butterball in the refrigerator to thaw, I will try to replace it with another turkey if there are any left. I prefer to replace it with a Butterball which are $ .97 a lb. at my Walmart and Aldi’s. If there are none, I will get another Shadybrook or a Honeysuckle White if Top’s gets more in. I really like to have 4 turkeys each year. One to eat for Thanksgiving season and 3 for the rest of the year when it is cold out. Some will get canned after it is cooked and some will get frozen. All of this meat for under $1.00 a lb. is making me very happy. I will also make turkey broth from all of these turkey carcasses and skin and then can it for future use.

Our entertainment today will be watching our Buffalo Bills play Tampa Bay here at home. Our team has had a rough time because of so many injuries this year. But it looks like a lot of players will be back today.

Our beef barley soup last night was delicious. We will be having it again for dinner tonight and tomorrow night. When we are tired of eating it over and over again, I will freeze it for a future meal.

Are any of you buying more than one turkey?

One way that we have discussed to save money on groceries in 2026 is to start the year off with a month without the grocery store. If we do it, it will depend on how depleted our stockpile looks the end of December. Looking at the inventory now, I am 90% sure that we will do it. We will see how the month of January goes and if it goes well, we may carry it into February.

The idea is to use up what we have so that it does not go bad and to save our grocery money those months. Wasting food is a NO NO in this home.

Here are some ideas on how we are going to survive when our fresh items in the refrigerator are gone:

Milk: We use both shelf stable and powdered. Our back up also includes evaporated milk that can be diluted with 1/2 water.

Half and Half: We will use jarred creamer like Coffemate or use Nestle Crema.

Fresh Veggies: We have multi colored peppers, onions, carrots, and blanched potatoes in the freezer. I prepared all of these myself. I also have a supply of potatoes in my garage that should last through the winter. We have plenty of veggies that are frozen, freeze dried, and canned.

Fruit: We have frozen mixed berries, peaches, cranberries, strawberries, blueberries, tart pie cherries, and pineapple. We have canned apples, pears, peaches, cranberry sauce, pineapple, and pumpkin. We have many pie fillings on the shelf.

Dairy: We have plenty of butter, cream cheese, and shredded cheeses in the freezer. I also have canned butter. We have butter powder, powdered cream, and powdered sour cream.

Jams and Jellies: We have some homemade peach jam in the freezer. We have many different kinds on the shelf.

Eggs: We always have 6-7 dozen in the fridge. But if they run out, we have many dozen frozen. I also have powdered eggs.

If we run out of meat in the freezer, we have canned ground beef, BS chicken breasts, pork shreds and chunks, turkey, beef chunks, corned beef and hams. Many of them I canned and many are store bought.

If we run out of fish and seafood in the freezer, we have canned tuna fish, salmon, and shrimp.

The pictures are just of things that you might use that you are not aware that you can purchase. Sorry about the blurry one.

We are having homemade beef barley soup for dinner tonight. We had a tomahawk steak left in the freezer that Hubby did not like. So I cut it up into beef chunks for the soup. I added diced celery, cut up onions, and cut up carrots. That is what you see here in the picture. Then I added the beef broth. Two hours before we eat, I will add pearled barley to the pot. This is one of Hubby’s favorite soups. He keeps asking me when it will be done. We will eat it with crackers and butter.

Important Information: Yesterday, the Trump administration took the tariffs off of coffee, beef, and tropical fruits coming into the U.S. from South America. This is great for all of us. This means those prices should go down within the next few weeks. How much remains to be seen. The prices still rise because of the inflation and gouging. I did stock a lot of coffee before the prices went up as I am sure many of you did. After all, we can’t go without our coffee. Bananas should go down in price. But the beef is what I am most excited about. It will go down a bit but not much because it was high before the tariffs. Plus we have a shortage right here in America. But it should be cheaper than it has been! Hallelujah!

Any one want to join me on the January Challenge: A Month Without The Grocery Store?

I hope(know) I am preaching to the choir. The more I read about the economy right now, I am realizing how much debt people have in the U.S. As of the 3rd quarter of 2025, the average household debt is $105,056. Mortgages dominate the household debt. Average credit card debt is next at $ 6523. Then there are car loans which many people have defaulted on. These cars are being repossessed as fast as they can find them.

People are using their credit cards to buy food and then don’t pay the bill. They just charge and charge and charge. A lot of snap recipients were complaining about not getting their EBT cards refilled but they were going to the hair salon, nail salon and dining out. Does this make any sense to you? It certainly doesn’t to me.

All you have to do is spend 20 minutes on You Tube or Tic Toc and you will see that people are just wasting money, not paying their debts, and saying they don’t care. You can also see that people could not pay their rent and got evicted or didn’t pay their mortgage and lost their homes. They are living in their cars. Sadly, some of them are seniors who didn’t save for retirement and thought they could live on Social Security alone. Social Security was never meant to be 100% of your income in retirement. Then there are those who did save for retirement but squandered their money on things they can’t even remember now. Within a few years, they were relying on SS.

There have always been people who have spent their income faster than they brought it home. They live paycheck to paycheck. They live on borrowed money. They take out home equity loans on their homes to pay off their credit card debt and then charge the cards back up. They keep buying new cars every couple of years and are upside down on the loan of the car they trade in. They just keep digging the hole bigger and bigger. They have no emergency funds. No money in savings. And they wonder why they are always broke.

But I honestly don’t think it has ever been as bad as it is now with the exception of interest rates. Back in the 1970’s in the Carter administration, it got so bad that mortgages had interest rates from 12.5% to 16% by the end of the decade. One of my best friends had a mortgage rate of 16%. UGH! Inflation was so bad that it took a decade for those rates to come down but of course, they never came back down to what they were.

Food was expensive and gasoline prices skyrocketed. There were shortages of gas and I used to drive around with my baby in the car to try to fill up the car for Hubby. He carpooled with another person so on the days the other one drove, I would look to fill up the car for Hubby. When you found a gas station that actually had some gasoline, you could wait in line for hours. Many times I would just get 2-3 cars from the pumps and the station would run out of gas. It was so very frustrating. But we all survived.

That was the first time I purchased TVP ground beef because the price was a lot lower than ground beef. Let me tell you, it tasted terrible and you had to doctor it with a sauce to make it tolerable. It probably was worse than the plant based beef today. I had to cut where I could. In those days we had 2 kids and it was a struggle to feed them healthy food on a tight budget. But we made it work. I washed diapers and hung them to dry so that I didn’t have to waste money on Pampers which were $.99 for a box of 12 if I remember correctly. That freed up money to buy more food.

You can blame what you are going through now on the Clinton Administration. They agreed to a Global Economy. You are seeing now in real time how that has worked out. It was the worst thing that has ever happened. Taking manufacturing out of the hands of America and handing it over to China and other countries was a very bad idea. We are paying for that now.

President Trump can try to get prices down but I don’t know how with a Global Economy. He is trying to bring manufacturers back to our country but that will be a long process. Fed Chairman Powell is bucking him every step of the way also. Perhaps when he leaves next year, things will get better. I know no one wants to hear it but there really isn’t much that Trump can do except give out tariff checks to the people. But then again, if the Supreme Court says he can’t charge other countries tariffs, he will have to pay it all back. It actually looks like they are leaning that way. There will be no money for rebate checks. So don’t count on it. I don’t understand why other countries can charge us tariffs but we can’t charge them. It doesn’t make sense to me and I graduated from college with an accounting degree.

Now President Trump could go after the large grocery stores that I believe are gouging us. Of course that would be hard to prove. The prices just keep going up and up. I know it is supply and demand but I am seeing a lot of people who are refusing to buy anything except necessary food. The demand has to be down the past few months but the prices sure aren’t. I also believe that this Christmas buying season will be a dud. People have no money and their credit cards are maxed out. I know that I have bought less and less. If it isn’t a necessity, it doesn’t get purchased.

There is something really wrong when the top 10% of earners in this country make more money combined than the other 90%.

The biggest thing you can do right now is what I have always said. Pay off your debt if you have any. With your debt paid off you will be in a better position to ride out this storm that is coming. I just know that there are some people who come here who need to hear this.

That said I think things are just going to keep going up in price. It is my belief that the radical leftist elitists don’t want us to have any money. They want the power to control us. Hence, we will see prices continue to rise on food and anything else we need. You have seen your utility bills rise a lot whether it be gas and electric or water. Our garbage prices have gone up. Our car and homeowner’s insurances have taken a steep increase. I know my property taxes have increased immensely over the past 4 years. They are becoming more and more unaffordable. Our telephone, cable TV, and internet package has gone up about $50. just in the past couple of years. Our private health insurance has gone up as a result of Obamacare. Everything is on the rise!

So pay off that debt and start building your savings. You are going to need that money sooner rather than later. Save money every way you can!

What really scares me is that I believe and have for a long time that we will turn into Venezuela. They were one of the richest countries in the world and now they are one of the poorest. First it was inflation then they were on a roller coaster all the way up to hyper inflation. Now people can’t afford to eat. The people are fed up but this is what happens when a country turns Communist. Beware people it is starting here with the latest election of Mamdani as Mayor of NYC and now another communist Mayor in Seattle.

I hope I am wrong but after living almost 80 years, I have seen a lot and learned a lot and I don’t like what I see at all.

According to the USDA on the thrifty plan for August(latest data), I should be paying $ 517.10 on groceries for the two of us. We are not spending anywhere near that while we are eating from the pantries so my grocery money is building up. That way when my freezers are empty except for turkeys, I can do a big shop for meat as I see rock bottom prices. I will keep my eyes wide open when that happens. The Camillo Sloan Market that I talked about in a prior post will be where I will get most of my meat. Their prices for prime meat are less than any other place where I can buy it. My stock of beef is really down so that will be the first thing I buy.

The thing I like the best about this market besides their prices is the fact that they are family owned. I don’t know about you but I am tired of lining the pockets of places like Walmart whose profits are just soaring year after year. I truly believe that we are being gouged. Last week as I took a walk through both Walmart and Top’s, many, many prices were up $.75 to $1.00 from the week before. Walmart and my Top’s tries to tell us it is because of the tariffs. 80% of Walmart’s food products are American made. So we are being lied to. I would expect that Top’s percentage is probably even higher.

On Sunday while I was listening to the football game, I cleaned out the two freezer drawers in my refrigerator. They seem to get messy very easily. I found a package of strip steaks that I bought on sale last July that only cost me $12.76 for both of them. I was thrilled to thaw them and have them for dinner Monday night. I made baked potatoes with butter, sour cream and bacon bits and broccoli to go with them. It has been snowing here since Sunday so there was no grilling them outside but Hubby grilled them inside. They were delicious. There were leftovers for a steak sandwich yesterday. It just felt good to eat such a bargain when strip steaks are so high in price in my area now.

I did get to Aldi’s the other day. I got celery for $.95, 2 packages of brown gravy mix for $ .29 each, and 2 bags of cranberries for $ .99 each. They had no potatoes and their onions had gone up to $ 1.65 instead of $ .99. My fault that I didn’t get there on time. But I really appreciate Belinda letting me know. I also had to pick up a prescription at Walmart so I got 4 more of the heavy cream on rollback.

So I went to my family owned, Niagara Produce, and got a 5 lb. bag of russet potatoes for $1.99 and a 10 lb. bag of onions for $ 3.99. This is another store that I will frequent in 2026. Some of the onions I will be dicing up and freezing in portions. The rest we will use up within a couple of weeks. We will use the potatoes for baking and mashed. It won’t take long to use them up.

It has been snowing here since Sunday. We have a lot for our area so early in the season. But that does put a damper on my shopping. I did brave the snow to go to the dentist on Monday. But I am not braving it today to go to my hair salon. However, Hubby says he will drop me off there and come back to get me when I am done. It is only a couple of miles away.

Let’s go back to the USDA food plans. For the low cost plan, groceries for the two of us should cost $ 548.60. For the moderate plan, it should cost $674.50. For the liberal plan, it would be $ 817.30. We are trying to set our budget for 2026. The liberal plan seems extremely high. I don’t think we will spend that. I could use some help here. Does the government plans really mean anything? Don’t forget these plans are for August 2025 so they do not take into account the prices that have gone up month after month. UGH! What do you guys spend per person per month for food now that prices are so high? Would you mind sharing the amount per month and the number of people that you feed? Meanwhile Hubby and I will look at what we have spent over the past two years and try to figure this out. One thing is for sure, with all the price hikes, it won’t be the $200. per month that we used to spend. Thanks in advance for your help.