Fig Jam and Lime Cordial

As I mentioned three years ago, we didn’t start on our make it, grow it, source it path with the intention of saving money.  Our  goal then, as it is now, was simply to eat and live better.

But it is absolutely without question that we have saved an enormous amount of money in the process, with our food costs still about half of what they used to be, even allowing for the improved quality of ingredients we now buy compared to three years ago.

Sometimes it’s good to stop and take stock.  Here are some of the items that have made a significant impact on our balance sheet…

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Meat

I have two highly carnivorous sons – Small Man is now a strapping sixteen year old and Big Boy will be twenty-one this year. And whilst Big Boy has finished his growth spurts, Small Man is currently an eating machine.  One night last week, he ate two pizzas and most of a chicken for dinner.

We now buy most of our meat from Haverick Meats in Banksmeadow. I first discovered them through Lorraine’s blogpost, and subsequently wrote about them here.  They supply a large number of Sydney’s fine dining establishments, and are open to the public on Saturdays only.  We still buy value added meats (schnitzels, marinated free range chickens, sausages) from our local butcher, but for all our bulk meats, it’s impossible to beat the quality and pricing offered at Havericks.

Here’s a good example of why the system works. Haverick Meats sell pre-sliced grassfed eye fillet to the restaurant trade – the pieces are cut to 200g each. The tail of the fillets are too narrow to use for these cuts, and are therefore sold off at their Saturday store – for just $20/kg.  I’ve seen exactly the same meat retailing online for over $70/kg. A one kilo tray is ample for two dinners at our place, and we end up paying just $2.50 per person for absolutely amazing beef.

On our last visit, we also came home with a 5.8kg grassfed rump, which we cut, trimmed and minced. The resultant homemade mince filled nine 500g freezer bags, costing us just $6.45 per meal.  We started mincing our own meat as a way to ensure quality, and whilst it’s not a real saving over prepared mince, it’s certainly far better than anything we could buy for the price.

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Groceries

These days, we only go to the supermarket once every five or six weeks. And that’s to stock up on bulk staples – cereal, butter, sugar and so forth. We continue to buy UHT milk at Aldi – no-one here drinks milk by the glass, so we buy it for breakfast cereals, tea and yoghurt making.

Breaking the “twice a week visit to the supermarket” loop has saved us both time and money. More significantly, it means that we now have almost no highly processed foods in our daily diets.  It’s interesting to look back and see the insidious damage regular supermarket shopping did to our budget – we would always come back with “treats” or other impulse buys that we didn’t need, and it was nearly impossible to pop into the store without spending at least $50!

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Bread

I blag on about bread ad nauseam, but it’s really the lynchpin to our lifestyle.

We spend just $20 a month (if that) on flour and salt, which is enough to produce all of Small Man’s school lunches plus an average of twelves loaves of ciabatta a week for eating and sharing.  My original sourdough loaves cost us 65c each, but my ciabattas work out at just 37c a loaf. That’s a substantial saving compared to Italian woodfired bread at $5 a loaf – if we were to buy twelve ciabatta loaves a week, we would be saving over $2,500 a year by baking our own!  In practice though, we would stretch out four purchased loaves, so our savings are probably closer to $800 a year.

Again though, the bread making has never been about saving dollars (and these costs certainly don’t take electricity into account), but the difference to our bottom line has been both noticeable and significant.  And, like buying UHT milk, baking our own bread frees us from the supermarket.

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Specialist Suppliers

What is perhaps the most surprising outcome of our lifestyle is that because of all the other savings we make, we’re able to accommodate some very expensive foodie habits.  We indulge in Pepe Saya butter for spreading (we probably go through one wheel a month), I pay extra for both fair trade and origin chocolates, and we buy San Daniele prosciutto and Jamon at premium prices.  Even with these items included in our calculations, our food costs are still far less than they were five years ago.

It’s a lovely thing – we live very frugally compared to our peers,  but we never ever feel like we’re being deprived. And it’s nice to know there’s still room to move in our food budget – if we needed to cut our expenses even further, we could easily reduce our consumption of these “specialty” items.

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Shopping at markets and growing our own

Five years ago, we started shopping at Flemington Markets in Sydney. These are an offshoot of the commercial Growers Markets that operate very early on weekday mornings.  Every item there is a bargain – apples are just $20 for a 16kg box, large free range eggs are $7 for 30.  For a couple of years, this made a big impact on our budget.

And then we started our garden, and we no longer needed to buy eggs, or green vegetables. Now we go just once a month or so, to stock up on potatoes, onions, tomatoes and fruit.  If you don’t have a garden, markets of this ilk are a great resource – the produce will be weeks fresher than what’s available at retail outlets, and the prices are unbeatable. By contrast, organic farmer’s markets are a lovely place to wander, but most of the ones in Sydney are too rich for my pocket.

If you have space to grow your own herbs and vegetables, you’ll be amazed at how creative you’ll become at using homegrown produce. We will often go into the garden to see what we can pick, and then decide what we’re going to have for dinner.  And at the moment our yard is full of self-sown broccoli rabé, which will happily feed us a couple of meals a week over the coming months!

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Homemade foods

The list of things we make from scratch continues to grow, with each new food being painlessly integrated into our routine.  Some items have been dropped – for example, we no longer make our own passata, as we can’t seem to grow tomatoes in bulk, and we’ve now sourced a very reasonably priced bottled alternative.  Nor do we always make pasta at home, although we’re now confident of being able to do so quite easily – it just makes such a mess to clean up afterwards!

However, we make all our bread, Greek yoghurt, stock, vanilla extract, ice cream, pastry, cakes and jams.  Pete puts together his custom muesli blend once a month, and almost all our meals are homemade. It’s become a mindset – “how can we make this?” becomes the question asked, rather than “where can we buy it?”  And it’s very rewarding on all fronts – emotionally, physically and financially.

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Sorry for such a longwinded post – once I started, it was hard to stop.  But there you have it, a review of the past few years of our journey. Thanks for sharing it with us!