Eating is a must

At this point in our adventure, we were starting to see real benefits to living smaller. By now much of our baked goods were coming from our oven, not the bakers oven. Yet our grocery bill was still bigger than we expected it to be. In looking through our receipts we discovered that the raw materials were actually costing more than buying pre-made goods.

Being new to the idea of reducing the size of our lives we thought that we should look at our entire food bill, not just the baking supplies, and see what our options were. One area that stood out to us was the cost of chicken, beef, pork, and fish. Living in a semi-rural area, OK, the area is really rural we just live in a village, it dawned on me that at least one the beef farms just might be willing to sell beef directly to me. A few questions to the neighbors and it turns out I had a very local supply of beef. From my neighbors brother. The farm is 5 miles from my house. Not only was I able to get a killer price, but now I was actually supporting my neighbor.

This was a huge boost. Black angus, from a farm that I could visit to ensure quality, from a neighbor who I knew all while saving money and time at the store. We still had a problem with the baked goods though and couldn't figure out a reasonable way to solve it. Places that could sell quality and quantity wanted minimum buys commitments that we didn't feel we could commit to. Then we went on a car trip for a day at a state park.

There is a large Amish/Mennonite population about an hour from our home. It turns out that there are a number of stores in that area that sell supplies in large quantity without requiring a minimum buy. We bought a 50 lb. bag of flour, a pound of yeast, and a few specialty flours for less than we were spending for a 10 lb bag of flower and 4 oz of yeast at our regular grocery store. For the cost of our regular week supply we were set for a month! Now we make regular trips to the Amish bulk food supply stores and buy in quantity. It isn't uncommon for us to buy 100-150 lbs of flour, 25-50 lbs of high gluten bread flours, 10 lbs chocolate chips, and all our other baking supplies for a quarter in one trip.

At this point we buy meat one time a year (unless we supply others, then we might buy twice). We shop for baking supplies once a quarter. Our weekly shopping consists of fruit, fresh veggies, some paper products (we don't buy these in bulk which I will explain later), products we don't want to, or are unable to make at home and dairy products. And our bill is less than $100/week for a family of four about 60% of that bill is fresh produce. Not great, but right in the range that we targeted.