Great Depression Cooking

I recently came across this wonderful collection of video's starring Clara Cannucciar, a 93 year old Great Grandmother who shares recipes she remembers from her life during the Great Depression of the 1930's. Her video's have inspired me to focus on our food consumption and try to find really cheap and healthy ways to feed our family of 5.



Find all of Clara's video's by clicking here. http://www.youtube.com/DepressionCooking

Since we have had to find ways to cut back in this recession, I have noticed how much of a struggle it has been to come up with recipes that truly cost next to nothing to make. I guess I thought it would be easy to cut back but over the last few months of trying to stick to a budget, we have found ourselves at the grocery store picking through our cart and removing items we were used to buying in order to keep from overspending. Of course, this was very frustrating to have to put back items that I had planned meals for but what a great lesson!

We have learned that we do not need half of the food that we were buying. We have cut down our consumption of meat and have added other types of vegetable protein to our diet which costs much less than animal protein. We replaced regular milk with evaporated milk because we found it is cheaper even then powdered milk and have started to make bread instead of buying it. We try to only buy snack foods (chips, pop, sweets, etc.) once a month. Snack foods are not necessary but I have learned it is best not to eliminate them all together. We have also limited our consumption of food to actual serving sizes instead of eating until the entire box of whatever it might be is gone.

I challenge you to find ways to cut back on your grocery budget, too. Share your experiences with me and leave a comment below. I would love to hear how you have changed your grocery habits.

Thanks for tuning in!