This is my little place for my creativity.

UPDATE: THE SITE IS MOVING AS OF FEBRUARY 10, 2014 TO:

http://www.emilylikestomakestuff.com
http://www.emilylikestomakestuff.com
http://www.emilylikestomakestuff.com
http://www.emilylikestomakestuff.com
http://www.emilylikestomakestuff.com


It's time to move on to a place that is more DIY for this DIY-er. Please come on over to see what is up, comment, make suggestions, stalk, or just say hello.
The links are all the same--I have trouble clicking on tiny stuff on my phone so I thought that having it over a few lines of text might make it easier for folks like me.

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This is more or less a record of my crafty pursuits. I'll use this space to keep track of promising ideas and my own successes or "learning opportunities" for future reference.

Comments are welcome, but will be removed if they don't actually contribute to the content. In other words, comments should have all meat and no time-sucking fillers.

As I complete the projects/ideas on the right, I'll move them to the left so you can see how well it worked out.

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Baby food and Adult food - Turkey dinner cost versus savings

Wow! 2014 already? Yeah.  Incredible.

To celebrate the new year, and, of course, to save some dinero, we bought a couple of sale turkeys and a ham along with the other traditional goodies after Christmas.  After cooking, I divied everything up into other usable parts.  Here is the savings breakdown:

$9.00  1  turkey 
$2.00  2 packages of sweet potatoes (camotes)
$ .30   2 taters (papas)
$ .30   2/3 package of cranberries
$ .88   box of stuffing mix
$1.00  bread made from butter, egg, yeast, sale flour, sugar, milk
$ .20   small part of fresh cabbage
$ .20  added sugar, salt, pepper, flour, etc (guesstimate)
$2.00 electricity to cook this stuff (guesstimate)
$15.88

Dinner was: Turkey, dressing, gravy, dinner rolls, sweet potatoes, pureed taters, cranberry sauce, and cabbage.  Approximately 16$ for 2 hungry adults and a baby to eat is a pretty decent price.

I then took the items and made:
$10.00  10 turkey dinner baby food packs.  Tupperware with an ounce +/- each of: meat, veggie, camote, and dressing. Prepared Gerber on sale at my local supermarket runs about 1$ for 5 ounces of plain veggies.  I am conservatively guesstimating each of these to have a prepared value of 1$
$ 8.00  Chopped dark meat for Baby in recycled baby food containers equaling around 10 ounces.  These run about $.88 each for a single jar of meat with other stuff mixed in.  Mine is made at 3-4 ounces at a whack with some cranberry sauce stirred in and some water to make it a little juicier.
$10.00   Chopped dark meat separated into snack-sized Baggies for tossing into stir-fry, soup, chicken salad, whatever.  I am lazily conservatively guessing that each is worth a dollar. 
$ 8.00  Sliced and sectioned white turkey meat for sandwiches and munching.Again, this is very conservative.  When we have bought ready-to-eat chicken fajita in half that amount, it is usually 6-8$.
$ 1.00  Fresh cranberry sauce. This is so simple to make that I am horrified that I bought it all these years.  When I can get the cranberries on sale, I don't plan to ever buy it at all. 
$ 2.00  Leftover fresh baked dinner rolls
$ 1.00  Leftover turkey drippings.  I'll use this when I make some bread later.  It is rather exquisite.

Extras:  more sweet potatoes, taters, cabbage, and gravy than I cared to bother sectioning but the value would probably be 2$ or 3$ more.  I didn't like the gravy this time so I tossed it.  Total time after dinner was maybe 2 hours.  I make baby food every few days so that part was negligible.  Removing the meat from the turkey was the time-consuming part.  There is a bonus to this, though:  My normally-dry hands feel moisturized from the turkey oils that were rubbed in while removing the meat.

I debated about saving the turkey carcass to make stock with and the chewable parts to make doggie snacks with but laziness took over at this point.  We do have another turkey in the freezer.
Now for the nitty gritty: 
From 16$ worth of original dinner, we ended up with 40$ worth of extras.  That is FORTY DOLLARS of convenience foods that I know exactly what went into them. Yeah.  I do feel victorious!


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