There’s an organism living in my refrigerator.

Believe it or not, this has nothing to do with my house cleaning abilities. Rather, its one of the ways I’m attacking another of the larger slices of my budget pie: groceries.

My grocery budget has come a long way over the years. Once upon a time, our family of two could easily spend $200 on the weekly grocery store trip. Combining our shopping brought that down to $160. Learning to cook however, gradually brought our grocery budget down to a much more manageable $80 a week.

On my current income though, I’m going to have to do considerably better. I started with the usual coupon clipping, buying in bulk, perusing the weekly sales circulars and surprised myself by easily sticking to the $30 a week grocery goal I set. This month my grocery budget goal is $25 a week. I figure I’ll take it down in small increments to give myself a better chance at success.

Beyond the coupon clipping, and in order to eat more whole foods and less chemicals, I’m focusing this month on learning to make a few staples from scratch. I thought I’d start with my favorite – baking! Conveniently, I already had all the ingredients I needed for a batch of peanut butter cookies. The lingering summer weather cooperated this weekend, giving me a nice cool night to heat up the oven. So instead of buying cookies from the store this week, I made some. A tiny bit of effort, but so much more satisfying than cookies out of a box! I’m hoping to make this a habit, though maybe not every week – if I end up needing to buy bigger jeans, my grocery store savings won’t count for much.

I’m also attempting to make a sourdough starter (hence the organism living in my fridge, which by the way is named Fred). Its been a week and so far so good! Fred lived on my counter top at first, but after just a couple days he developed a foamy, bubbly consistency. Time to move into his new apartment… my fridge. Now Fred’s a lot more low maintenance pet. I only have to feed and water him once a week. Eventually, when the weather decides to grace us with another cool day, I’ll try my hand at bread baking. Of course, I’m not sure how my bread baking skills will turn out, or if I can regularly eat bread made without adding baker’s yeast (my health doesn’t react well to baker’s yeast, not sure how it will do with homegrown yeast). If either ends up halfway decent, I’ll be adding monthly bread making to my list of things to do. Might be worth it in the winter months, just to fill the house with the smell of homemade bread, even if I can’t safely eat it.

The last grocery oriented thing I’m trying, for now anyway, is making my own salad dressings. I need to eat more veggies, but I don’t like most veggies by themselves. I’ve also got a delayed food allergy to soy, lemon, and garlic (in theory so far, as I haven’t finished the elimination diet to see if any of my results were false positives). Try finding a salad dressing or vinaigrette without any of those three ingredients & you’ll have a frustrating afternoon in the grocery store! So, I’m going to attempt making my own. I’ve found some basic recipes in books and online, enough to get the general idea of what’s needed and how it works. Tomorrow I’m hoping to mix up my first batch of blue cheese & walnut vinaigrette and see if my green pepper & cucumber slices like it.