As for gender roles...I believe that both people should learn to both kinds of things. I hate that my husband resorts to the year 1954 when it comes to doing dishes, cleaning up after himself, shopping for his clothes, etc. I'm not his "mommy," nor am I a "hausfrau." These chores take away from my time to do other productive things when he doesn't help out...not to mention hurting my dignity.

He probably hates me asking him to work on my car, chop the wood, or make home repairs. (I do know how to do many of these things, but he always takes all of my tools. What mine is his and what's his is his.) He feels like I'm working him to death and that I don't care about him. (I really do care about him.)

As for money...both should always know what's going on with the finances. There should probably be one person to keep the books, but no one should be kept in the dark about anything. No hidden bank accounts, no overblown spending sprees, everyone should be in agreement about where the money goes for major purchases, retirement, etc. Talking about money is hard, but it might be one of the best ways to save a marriage down the road. A good accountant isn't a bad idea either.

I bought a chuck roast today and it was $21.28. Big enough to fit in crock pot. I bought the same size roast in June and it was $13.45. Almost double in price. Six more months it could possibly be $40. I'm thankful my husband and son in law hunts deer, turkey, duck, and catches fish.

As a widow I agree with this 110%. We always paid bills together, when my husband was in the hospital with a stroke for 2 weeks, I was able to take care of things. Don't want to do finances? If you become a widow, and I hope you don't, you will have to do finances. So why not learn now?

I know how to do finances and exactly what needs to be done if my husband can't do it. As long as he is able he will do it as I don't want to he will. He doesn't mind doing it. As for household chores I never started the wife chores from husband chores from day one. We both worked full time so if he wanted clean clothes he washed them same with clean dishes to eat out of. We did equal chores in the house and hired the yard work done as my husband does not like to do yardwork and I didn't want to do as much as needed to be done.

tropit- I told you before you need to get your husband out of "Ozzie and Harriet" hahaha!!! Your post cracked me up :)

I am single so I get to do it all. Still in my own house. Considering an apartment or senior living but...holding off because I do like my yard and quilting space.
Oh, to get back to recipes. I made tacos tonight. Pretty sad tacos, but they actually tasted OK and I used up leftovers. Chopped some cooked chicken, grated some cheese, put on some hard shells and nuked. OK, not a feast but it worked! I do a lot of simple things like that. That is one of the perks of being single. I get to be lazy with the cooking sometimes.

DH and I grew up in "thrifty" households. I think he may have eaten squirrels and rabbits. I have not.

It seems like once prices go up, they never go back down - even if the supply chains return to "normal".

On Thanksgiving it was just the hubby and I and we made up a bit pot of beef stew instead of a turkey. Since he switched to a primarily meat based keto diet, I've had to get pretty creative with my budget to keep cooking meat instead of beans and pasta...

Pre-covid I would go to the stores daily and pick up the marked down meat. As supply chain and safety issues came up, that didn't work so well. We will be getting a freezer but currently just have the one fridge/freezer unit. But one of the ways I'm saving money is buying larger amounts/cuts at Costco or restaurant supply houses. I'm paying typically about half of the single meal sized grocery store packs.

Yes, you have to cut down and repackage (yay! dollar store gallon freezer bags) Sure, it chokes a bit to spend over $100 on a single package of meat, but what I get is a lot more than at my local Safeway and is several meals. Likewise, I was looking at cooking a leg of lamb and realized I could buy a whole portioned frozen lamb at Costco for the same price as two legs. (It does not take up the entire freezer either, but then cooking one leg was a priority anyway) OK, so now I'm cooking cuts I'm not so familiar with but that's not a bad thing. We believe in the "nose to tail" sort of thing.

The stew was made from "Special Trim" which is a very tough, very lean cut of meat but if you can slow cook it, it can be great! I made a bbq-sauced batch and the big pot of stew and still have about 5 pound chunk for later.

This is the current ad for my area of US Chef -- in my state you don't need any sort of membership or business license to shop at the restaurant supply stores, don't know about other areas.
https://www.chefstore.com/content/hotsheet/30/2845/4/0/

Oh yeah, we did get one of the super chubs of ground beef too...

I grew up eating what was grown or killed. We had chickens and the swapped eggs for milk. We had freezer full of venison, duck, squirrel. fish, quail, and turkey. The garden was large and we grew everything . We had apple and peach trees, wild plums and berries patches were plentiful. It was a lot of hard work for the adults . The only thing needed from the grocery store were the basics. Most of my friends at school grew up this way too. I remember one teacher in high school told another teacher she could pick out all the rural kids by how healthy and energetic we were compared to the city kids.

I know!!! He grew up in a family like that. I don't think that there is much hope in saving him now.

I didn't grow up like that. I grew up in a suburb of L.A. But, once I left home at 17 and moved to the country, I learned to raise animals, plant an orchard and grow our own veggies. I love that our food is fresh, our water is clean and that we have control over how our animals are raised. However, I do hate butchering. We're getting ready to kill some young roosters and I think that I've talked my son-in-law to help, so I don't have to do much this time. Fingers crossed.

BTW...the 2022 seed catalogs just came out! That's a happy day at our house. :)

General Mills makes 2.1 Billion dollars a year in profit. CEO makes 16 Million dollars a year. They are raising their cereal prices by 20% and blaming it on inflation.

gotta keep the share holders and the CEO happy. Do they eat cereal for breakfast?

I want to buy a roasting chicken for Boxing Day dinner. $24.00 for a decent sized one for 5 people. Needless to say, I left the store without a chicken. You wouldn't pay that for boneless breast, why am I paying it for a whole chicken?

Watson

yep. It is getting harder to budget. I had a 1.8 pound roast for the past few days. I was thinking as I was eating the last piece that maybe I should start eating half of the portion I really do to make it go further. Thinking of adding in more pinto beans and the like in. It is not just the food, but property taxes, mine are going up 35% in one year. I know the tax cuts meant less aid to the states. yep. I sure did not benefit from those tax cuts on the federal level. I have been retired for 10 plus years and thought after working 40 some years in good paying job and being careful with my money, that I would be fine in retirement. But it is getting a bit tougher as prices of everything have increased so much.
On an up note, I was able to grow a rather impressive stash during my working years including thread and sewing machines. So I am good there and am finding it was a really good investment as most of the fabric was good quality at half the price it is now.

I rarely go grocery shopping because I hate it and my husband loves it so he goes. However, today we went to Costco. I couldn't believe how expensive things are getting. Yikes! Seems like everything was high.

Our gas bill was over $250 this last month and it hasn't been very cold at all! Husband said the price of natural gas has gone up Our electric and water bill went down a little though.

I know...I might be beating a dead horse here, but try going meatless. It's much cheaper and still pretty tasty.

We used to call Costco the "$200 store" because we could never get out of there for under that. Now, I think that it's more like the, "$500 store." However, I did use my dau's card yesterday to buy gas. I saved 10 cents/gallon. I didn't go into the store, though...too financially dangerous!

We live close enough and go often enough that our thing is $100. Since Covid they've put in some self checkout and express checkers and it makes it easier to zip in and out.

But we plan to go at off times, like 3:00 pm mid-week. There is no just running in and out on weekends!

We have a growing list of things for this week. Laundry soap is a big one. We do have paper towels, TP, and dog food, but there are a lot of little things on the list -- expecting to be in the $200 range.

I'm a big believer in the Rotisserie Chicken and the hot dog at the food court on the way out as being great cheap deals... I'm still missing the kraut, but I'm glad the condiments are back out.

I eat partially meatless because of my food sensitivities. I'm not a fan and have a lot of trouble getting in enough protein. I'm not a fan of beans and neither is my body so it's tough to get enough protein without meat. My nutritionist wanted me to get off dairy too. At that point, I just wasn't getting enough protein which at 69 is not a good thing. I limit meat, eat more fish than I'd like and just try to keep costs down and still get enough nutrients. I do miss meat in my dishes though :(

I make a smoothie using protein powder, 30 gram per serving when I don't eat much protein for the day. Keeps me full a long time. Protein powder is great to mix with lots of blendable foods.

we have a safe in the house & DH wanted me to open it. He was annoyed with me when I said open it yourself. I say what if I was laying in the hospital. He got a new attitude and opens it himself now.

Tropit...I have a Costco rule...no cart. If I can't carry it, I don't get it. Keeps the bill down and I only get essentials.

Watson

Great idea Watson. But....I would really love to be a fly on the wall when you need toilet paper, paper towels and dog food! :shock: The mind boggles!

I used to do that. Unfortunately, with my food sensitivties, I haven't found a protein powder I can tolerate. I wish I could. It would make things much easier.

Unfortunately, with my food sensitivties, I haven't found a protein powder I can tolerate.

Vital Performance Protein powder is lactose free. It may work for you. I buy it at Walmart.

https://www.vitalproteins.com/blogs/...protein-powder

It's not lactose that bothers me.The nutritionist wanted me off dairy because it's inflammatory. It's mostly the processing and fillers that bother me. I tried Vital Proteins. They make a very good product, but my body doesn't like it very well.

So true! To be honest Paull likes going there a lot more than I do. My brother told me that Beatles book I wanted was 60.00 at Costco. It's 100.00 everywhere else. But it was gone. Boo hoo !!

Oooohhh...good idea! I'm going to have to tell my dau that one.

In my frugal/cheap cooking, I try to have basic ingredients that I know how to use. I buy in bulk so typically have a lot of things made from the same things, and am always looking for something different to do with my regular ingredients.

In this case, pork loin. We buy the big "baseball bats of meat" and cut them down into typically about 3 pound portions. I know a lot of things to do with pork loin! The other day my PBS Creates channel was on and I watched and then made this recipe from Kimball's Milk Street:
https://www.177milkstreet.com/recipe...ffed-pork-loin
Sorry, you have to create an account/sign in to actually get the recipe.

Basically you butterfly a pork loin and make a chimichurri sauce, spread it over the pork loin and and roll it all back up with (peeled of course) hard boiled eggs. A chimichurri is much like a pesto, but using parsley and cilantro.

Butterflying isn't that big a deal, I often will "open" the loin a bit to season the meat which starts the same. Anyway, I did the first cut correctly but then the second cut was my "open" at the wrong angle and so my spiral didn't go around as much as it should. We liked the addition of the eggs, but we like Scotch Eggs too (sausage wrapped hard boiled eggs, being keto we skip the breadcrumbs but can use other things).

Iceblossom...that sounds good! I'll bet it makes great sandwiches the next day too.

It holds up much better for slicing than you'd think when you tie up the roast. Usually I will just "open" it and put in a bunch of the big jar of minced garlic from Costco or maybe some herbs. For pantry ingredients, again, I will often have the big jar of Pesto from Costco and this would work well with that too.

But this sliced beautifully even with the egg. The meat was tad overcooked, it was fine when fresh but a bit dry the next day. The egg was still lovely, I had cooked them to normal eating hard boiled status. Hubby heated his up in some bacon drippings and said it was delightful. Mine was fine with just the microwave.

In another thread, I mentioned Salsa Verde from the big Costco Jar of Hatch Chilis -- that was another way of using pork loin, cubed and essentially stewed. 2 very different ways of the same economical cut.

Iceblossom- that looks delish!