Budget Stretching with Cheap Bastid

If you’re like me, you’ve been scratching your head for a couple of years wondering how long it’s going to be before you wake up one day to discover that you are now a vegetarian.  Not because you happen to prefer vegetables over meat but because you can no longer afford meat.

Isn’t that kind of scary!  So today, I’m going to invite you to do some budget stretching with Cheap Bastid.

You have to shop like crazy anymore to find ground beef for as low as $3 a pound.  Bacon has gone from $1.99 a pound to $5 a pound or more in a lot of places

We find ourselves eating smaller portions of meat and cooking meals where a chunk-o-beef isn’t the star but rather where meat is a part of a dish.  Kind of like Clara Peller in the old Wendy’s commercial saying “Where’s the beef?”

And before some goodie two-shoe out there says something like, “you’re better off not eating meat” I just want to say that we are dedicated, life-long carnivores who would rather gnaw cooked flesh than raw carrots or yummy tofu.

For a while now we’ve been buying our pepperoni supply at Smart and Final.  I can get 3 lbs. of pepperoni, already sliced for about $10.  Now that’s not too bad for pepperoni.  And, I use about a quarter pound of pepperoni on a full size pizza.

So we went on a pepperoni run today at Smart and Final.  We cruised down the prepared meat refrigerator case and I saw something that made me put on the brakes.  They had a 3 lb. package of bacon ends and pieces for $6.  That’s $2 a pound.  When’s the last time you saw bacon for $2 a pound?  Even ends and pieces.  I remember about 3 years ago when the meat manager at our local Stater Brothers told me that he only buys ends and pieces because the “good stuff” was just too pricey.  And it was $2 a pound then!

So I grabbed a package of it.  And we instantly changed our dinner plans from plain old “Sketti” to Mrs. CB’s favorite “Spaghetti AbbaZabba” (what the rest of us call Spaghetti Carbonara).

I spent $16 on 6 pounds of meat.  And, as I have done many times in the past, when I got home I spent about 10 minutes  breaking it down into smaller packages that I can put into the freezer until we need it.

I got 3 bags, 12 ounces each of bacon slices and 2 bags 6 ounces each of pieces (that’s what you need for Spaghetti AbbaZabba is pieces).   That’s a total of 5 bags.  Plus I got a dozen 4 ounce bags of sliced pepperoni for pizza, salads or however else we want to use it—that’s about 4 dozen slices per bag.

So I had to shell out $16 but we’ve got plenty of pepperoni and bacon for a while.  I’m looking forward to BLT’s and bacon and eggs.  And all we had to do was 2 things—a bit of shopping and a few minutes to re-package into serving size freezer bags.

That’s the Cheap Bastid Way:  Eat Good. Eat Cheap. Be Grateful!