Reply #34: We use almost no paper towels and quit buying napkins. [View All]

My wife cut up some old sheets and other fabric she had around, hemmed the edges on the sewing machine, and we have a big pile of cloth napkins... probably 100+ of them. So we use them at every meal. Rather than toss paper napkins in the trash, we toss cloth napkins in the laundry. She made them smaller than typical cloth napkins (which are huge), so they take up almost no room in the wash. The motivation to do that was more an environmental thing than cost-cutting, but it probably saves a little.

We prepare almost all of our food from scratch. Tonight we made a cheese-based/chicken/mushroom soup (a thick creamy soup we dreamed up). We had fresh sliced apples, and homemade Italian bread - hot out of the oven. We use real butter; no margarine has crossed our threshold in over 20 years. We also made an apple pie from scratch. Last night we had pot-roast, cooked with potatoes, carrots, and onions - and lots of brown gravy. So this is pretty typical fare for us.

So basically, we eat whatever we want. At this location (Iowa) we did that for $95/week over the course of the past 52 weeks. The difference between our shopping cart, and many we see, is that our shopping cart has almost no boxes, cans, or processed food... zero soda, zero beer, and no frozen processed stuff whatsoever; we buy zero convenience food. Almost everything we buy is raw, fresh, or as close to its original form as possible.