Subscribe and Save on Amazon

Are y'all aware of Amazon.com's Subscribe and Save program? - They give you 15% off and free shipping if you sign up to have something delivered every so often (up to every 6 months). Example: Traverse Bay dried cherries or dried cranberries, a 4-pound box, is under $18, less than $5 a pound, through Subscribe and Save. You can sign up and then cancel the subscription tomorrow, if you like; or you can just let it ride, as they email you a few days before the next shipment goes out, to give you a chance to cancel it then if you are not yet ready for more.

Link to the Traverse Bay deals here:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_no...t+traverse+bay

Hurry on in! Sam Walton's Making Craaaaazy Deals [UPDATED]

When apple cider is four bucks a gallon or under, I buy it. We love apple cider all year long. Good stuff.

The other day I was filling a Click and Pull shopping cart at Samsclub.com. Now Click and Pull is a great idea. You fill a shopping cart, place the order, and then the next day you pull your car up to the front door of the warehouse and they have it all waiting for you, ready to load, thus saving you shopping time time and helping you avoid impulse buys. They had Indian Summer apple cider, packs of 4 gallons, for $14.66. A good price. But then I realized it was not for pickup, it was for delivery. And delivery was included.


I didn't figure that could be right, but it was. I placed the order, and a few days later FedEx delivered a very heavy (38 pounds shipping weight) box containing 4 gallons of apple cider. I actually paid $15.69 for it (for some reason they charged sales tax, which I don't think was right). I imagine shipping that 38-pound box took at least $15 of that. I don't know how they did this, and I bet it won't last long, but what a deal it was. I think I may order more.

By the way, a couple of months ago Wal-Mart had what looked like gallon jugs of apple cider (or maybe it was apple juice) for under $4 - probably $3.67 or something like that. I was happy about that until I realized that it may have looked like a gallon jug, but it wasn't, it was a 3 quart jug. Sneaky. But these from Sam's are definitely full gallons.

Also Indian Summer's juices are all made from fruit grown in the USA. The Wal-Mart stuff, we noticed when we returned home, came from China. Hmmm. Maybe it's fine, but it raises my hackles none the less.

LATER:

I really wondered about the sales tax (especially since I went back and ordered more and it added up to a bigger expense). I wrote to Sam's Club and asked about it and the response was, "Please be advised that all online orders that are being delivered are taxed."


That did NOT sound right. So I wrote to the tax offices at Iowa.gov. And I received the fastest response EVER in the history of government email service. Seriously. In fact I got two responses, one a very quick one with a link to a PDF to use to request a refund of the tax paid (!), and then a second a few minutes later with a little more discussion and the link again. I'm completely amazed. Astounded. Yet another reason to love Iowa.


So anyway, if you live in Iowa, and you are charged sales tax on something you shouldn't be, all you have to do is fill out this form and send it in with your receipts and you get the tax refunded. Is that cool, or is that cool? They ask that you save them up and send them in once a quarter. I can do that.

The week is off to an excellent start.

Unusually for a Monday, we all got up on time and in relatively good moods; I made homemade cinnamon rolls for breakfast; I just packed up two Amazon sales from the weekend (one I'm really happy about) and I'm about to pack up two nice decal orders. It's above zero outside. I don't have to go anywhere today. I just finished up a pay period of work in which I think I set a personal production record since starting with Webmedx 5 years ago, and have a fresh start on a new pay period. (Just realized that most of what I'm thinking about this morning is food and money. So what else is new?)

Oh, and yesterday I realized that the Acme Juicerator my parents gave to me (or gave back to me, actually, as I had originally given it to THEM) will work this summer to process tomatoes. I had never even thought of it as a possibility. But I tested it last night with some of last year's tomatoes that had been in the freezer and it very quickly pulled all the seeds and skins out and left me with a nice, un-seedy, smooth sauce or juice that tasted wonderful. So I can stop trying to find a tomato strainer/squeezer. Of course if I find a good deal on one, I'd still like to have one, but I can easily make tomato sauce with just the Juicerator. My goal is to put up 300 quarts* of tomatoes this summer (not all sauce, but mostly). So that's another good thing to know to start the week. (Note: Also about food and money.)

* This is a really unrealistic goal, to be honest. Not only do I not have anywhere near 300 quart canning jars, I don't even have a place to put them if I did.

8 Pounds Plus of Red Sweet Peppers

Marathon shopping trip this morning, starting with taking Bo for his annual shots, so he got to come with me all morning. We went to 3 stores in Onalaska for groceries and a few other odds and ends. I bought a 50-pound sack of baking potatoes for $7.99, and it will last us till probably May. I bought a half bushel crate of sweet red bell peppers off the almost-wilted rack at Woodman's for less than five bucks, and after I sliced and chopped most of them (saving back 6 for eating fresh), I froze 8 pounds. They are all ready to use whenever. Peppers freeze really well that way.

Milk Bottles

We bought organic, raw milk from a nearby farm for a year or so, then could no longer afford the wonderful stuff. We went back to milk from Kwik Trip (a local chain of gas stations with a really nice setup for their convenience stores as well). I bought it in gallon plastic jugs for a long time. Then I got sick of dumping all those big jugs in our recycling, and switched over to their milk in a bag.

The advantage is that these bags have a lot less plastic in them. They are LDPE 4, and I put them in our recycling, though I'm not certain that anything ever comes of it. This picture shows two half-gallon bags.

But you have to either put the whole bag in a pitcher (Kwik Trip has free pitchers that are made especially for their bags) or pour the milk out of the bag into some kind of container.

I'm using half-gallon sized glass milk bottles. I bought one at The Way Station first, imprinted with the logo of a dairy in Missouri somewhere. Then I bought 3 more blank ones from Local Amish Farms by mail order.
Three of them will fit neatly on my fridge door.

The greatest thing is that all of a sudden my kids are drinking just a ton of milk. I'm not sure why, and I'm afraid to show that I noticed by asking. Barry thinks it's because those bottles are so easy to grip, even for small hands. Myself, I think there's something delicious about milk in a glass bottle, but then I'm abysmally old-fashioned and love low-tech solutions, so it's probably not that. Anyway, I'm glad with the result. Their bones will thank them later.

Plastic haters say that milk should always be stored in glass, and I imagine that's so. Our solution does not deal with this issue, really, as who knows how long the milk was in those plastic bags. On the plus side, LDPE 4 is one plastic that does not include bPA. I'm not trying too hard to get that out of my house (yet) but I am trying to be more aware of when we are using it, at least, and I'm using the bPA free canning lids more and more.

Can't wait to slowly accumulate enough 5-gallon buckets?

I found an eBay seller who has very nice, clean used 5-gallon buckets with metal bale handles for sale. His shipping costs are very reasonable, too. The total cost even with shipping was less than it would cost to order new buckets from a plastics company (though these are used, of course, if that matters).

I wrote and asked him about leaving the lids off my order to reduce the shipping weight, since I did not need the lids, and he not only did that, he even reduced the purchase price a bit, which was above and beyond, as I don't know what he would do with the lids alone.

Anyway, check out Jake at StuffForAllSeasons. Good seller, good buckets.

Long-term food storage solutions *

A big part of managing our food budget has been minimizing waste. This family wastes an appalling amount of food. We are doing better than we used to, but still it's not good. Buying in bulk is a waste of time, money and space if you don't even use all the food you buy, and if it isn't stored properly, by the time you DO eat it, it will have lost a lot of its flavor and food value.

We have a medium-sized chest freezer, about 15 cubic feet if I remember right, and if I am careful, it can hold a lot of good stuff. But that means dumping everything out every so often and sorting it and repacking. I should do this about once a month but don't. I usually wait till the lid won't close right and it's getting everything frosty and by that point it's not just  a simple matter of sorting, it means a full-blown defrosting, and that's no fun.

Anyway I was already interested in finding a better way to store bulk flours and grains. Judy Laquidara mentioned offhand "gamma seal" lids numerous times on her blog and I was too embarrassed to ask what they are. I finally checked into them and they are just one of the wonders of the modern world! They are a 2-piece lid that fits nearly any standard 12-inch-diameter plastic pail. You know, the ubiquitous 5-gallon buckets that you can get from bakeries and delis and such? With the horrible lids that rip your fingernails off when you open them? No longer. You put the gamma seal lid on these and you have an airtight seal that is EASY TO OPEN. Amazing. There's a ring that you hammer onto the rim of the lid, and then the other half of the lid is a screw-on seal that is very easy to manage. Airtight storage. No critters are gettin' in there, no sirree. And they stack neatly.

Here's a nifty video that explains it very clearly:

I ordered mine from Baytec Containers, which had the best price I could find for smallish quantities when I figured in shipping (they use 3 carriers and ship the cheapest, which for me was FedEx Ground).

I found when I put mine on my buckets that it worked best to push one part of the seal ring down really hard till it snapped into place, then use a rubber mallet to pound it down from there all the way around, moving a couple of inches at a time. I first tried using the mallet on opposite sides of the ring, but the ring kept popping off the opposite side from where I was hammering. I thought, "Oh no, they say it fits virtually any 12-inch bucket, I must have found the mutant bucket it won't fit!" No, it was just user error.

By the way, I got mine in red. Are you surprised?

And the other thing I wanted to tell you about was that I found an eBay seller who sells 4-1/2-gallon square buckets with lids and handles, food grade plastic (though he doesn't call them that, but they are, I know from the manufacturer's website), that he sells 5 for $19.99 postpaid. Four bucks each. Now the lids are good, though not gamma-seal good; they're decent for sealing packaged foods. What I'm doing with these is I'm sorting the deep freeze into them. So one bucket is vegetables, one is fruits, one is poultry, one's fish, one's red meat, et cetera. They sit down in the bottom of the freezer providing nice vertical dividers to keep everything sorted out. Plus, if I want to search through one, I just grab the bale handle and yank it out of the freezer to look through it without upending myself into the deep-freeze. I am really happy with this idea. And with my particular freezer, I can stack them two high and they fit just right. No more losing stuff in the deeps.

Note that the buckets had glass beads in them originally. The seller cleans them nicely before shipping them, and I washed them again when I got them, but if you have any concerns about them not being food safe, just use them for packaged foods, like I do, rather than, say, filling one up with flour or grain, though honestly they would be such a handy way to store stuff like that in a deep freeze. But that's what the gamma seals are for.

By the way, if you want great tips on food storage, make friends with a Mormon. :o) It's an act of faith for an LDS family to put away food against coming catastrophe, and they have made an art of it, collecting practical ideas for storage and food economy even if you don't have much storage space. I have been offered excellent tips by a friend of mine who is LDS.

Buying in bulk and making it work requires that you find a system that meshes with  your daily life. The gamma seal lids are a good example of this. If it is a huge ordeal to store your flour in a 5-gallon bucket, are you gonna do it? I'm not. Losing fingernails is strong negative reinforcement. But if it's easy? And it even comes in my favorite color?! You betcha I will.

* By the way, when I say "long term storage," I mean, like, a year or two. I googled something related to that and found out that to a good number of people, "long term sotrage" means 20-30 years and/or after the Zombie Apocalypse. So don't take this blog post too seriously if you are really into long, Long, LONG term storage. You'd need to have oxygen absorption packs and Mylar bags and that sort of thing in your packaging if that's what you are doing.

We eat too much around here to store it up for that period of time. I would make a terrible survivalist. I'd eat up 5 years' worth of supplies in about 2 weeks.