Breeder Grocery Shopping

I ran out to the store tonite to pick up a few items. I had a few rainchecks that were about to expire, and some coupons for items that were on sale this week. As I shoppped, for some reason I was drawn to the breeder shoppers with brats in tow and was shocked at the amount of crap they buy. I am not going to lie and say I only buy 100% healthy food all the time. I do buy diet soda, chips and salsa sometimes, and whatever else. But I also balance that out with fresh vegetables, fresh meat, and all kids of other "real food."

This one breeder in particular was horrifying. She had 2 carts of stuff, one cart of soda, chips, junky cereal and assorted crappy snacks, and one of frozen foods. That's it. She may have also had some cans of chef barf-ar-dee in there. I saw her kid throw 5 full size frozen pizzas into the cart. The rest of it was chicken nuggets, french fries, pizza roll type things, ice creams, tv dinners, and instant breakfasts. Do people eat this junk all the time? It made me queasy just thinking of it.

Most of the breeders in the store had similar carts stuffed with junk. One brat was wailing that he wanted ice pops. Its frickin 16 degrees outside! The moo gave in and let him have it.

You can tell the non-breeder shoppers by looking at their carts. They have real food! Meats, vegetables, things that have to be cooked. Nice bakery items, also toiletries and cleaning products. I did not see any breeders with any type of cleaning detergents despite the fact that the store had almost the whole lysol line on sale for $1.88 and many shoppers were stocking up. They are like zombies walking right past the good items and going right to the crap.

I'm tired of these breeders crying about how they have no time to cook and its so haaaard! I usually cook on weekends or when I have more time and make big enough batches of things that can be frozen for later. Tonite I'm having stuffed pepper soup with brown rice. It took all of 5 minutes to prepare because the soup was from my freezer stash. All I had to do was make the rice. Quicker and a hell of a lot healthier then frozen junk or crap from a can.

OMG I ate brown rice with my lunch today. Are all CF people into brown rice? I buy mine from the local health food store and cook it in a mild chicken broth to add some flavor. Comes out really good! I wish I could cook some for my fellow brown rice fans.

Yep, these are the same breeders who complain about fatty society, suing McDonalds because the they sell fat food like Burgers. Also like to outlaw fast food in schools.

The problem is not the societys' fault. It is the moos'/breeders' fault because there are the one who stuff the kids with junk. Of couse, they can't say "NO" to kids because it hurts their feelings, so they give in to it and fatten their kids up instead.

AACK....went to the stupid market this morning and saw some brat licking the bakery case. I pointed it out to the bakery clerk and she hosed the area down with some bleach and wiped it off. Pardon me while I go bathe in Clorox.....

I LOVE brown rice! AND I just happened to have had it for lunch today, too! Haha! I visited a friend last night and we went to this yummy yummy vegan place. I had the yellow curry and eggplant dish and it came with a lovely pyramid shaped pile 'o brown rice. It was so very delicious and I got to have to leftovers today for lunch.

I have also noticed the way breeders shop. It's disgusting. My parents only let me have limited junk food. They NEVER let me have those nasty sugary cereals, either.

I'm so glad I only have me and the hubby to worry about. I'm trying to eat healthier, more fruits and veggies...it's nice to shop at Trader Joes, as there aren't a bunch of moos around there.

What I do when I cook my brown rice is to add 2 chicken boullion cubes (1 cube for each 1 1/2 cups of water, sorry to those of you in the UK who use metric) to the water when I boil it. My mother did that and I remember the first time I ate brown rice not cooked in it it tasted so bland LOL!

I like Worcestershire Sauce but not to make rice in. I make my hamburgers in that to give it a little extra zing. When I make tenderloin steak tips, I pour some of that sauce in the skillet to add the zing, then add the pan drippings to the gravy to give that a similar zing. Sometimes, that gravy ends up on different rice not made like that I described above so I guess I do end up with Worcestershire Sauce on it after all?

I love brown rice too! Lots of it in the cupboard. I also have white, sushi, and Arborio rice ooh, fancy-pants in there but brown is the most common one I like to make by far. I cook it in chicken stock (usually made from a few bouillon cubes when I'm out of real stock). Yum!

I will never understand why people claim they have no time to cook. I cooked every day even when I worked full time. As another poster mentioned, the freezer is your friend! Also your crockpot. We also eat lots of grains and legumes. Aside from the rice, I have lots of barley, cracked wheat, red and brown lentils, split peas, and several kinds of beans. They cost almost nothing and are full of fiber and flavor and couldn't be easier to cook. Split pea soup in a crock pot is the easiest thing to make ever; soak peas over night, turn on in the morning. Add some sausage/ham hock & bay leaf. Eat in evening. That's it. Dunno how anyone can't have time to do that.

I always cook from scratch because I enjoy it and we buy zero processed stuff whatsoever. I just don't like it. Tonight's dinner was cream of celery soup because I had lots of celery. Sweet potato boats and cheesy potato boats (I had 1 sweet and 2 regular taters lying around), sausage, and a cucumber salad, with apple slices with honey and cinnamon for dessert. I always make enough for a lunch for DH the next day, too, so he eats good food instead of running out and spending money on lunch. Anyways, cooking is not rocket surgery...I sure don't want to eat mushy peas from a can or something that's been sitting in a warehouse for 6 months (fun fact: all of the apple juice in the country is made and stored in immense vats in October every year...the juice you buy for the rest of the year comes from those same vats).

I do not understand how these people who live on junk food 24/7/365 can function. Every year when I travel the ten hour trip to visit my famblee, we always end up eating Mcdonald's and other junk food just because it's easy, fast, and cheap. Then we consume a lot of salty and sugary snacks, cokes, etc.... for a total of about 2-3 weeks during the holiday musical chairs that we play from relatives' house to house. While my junk food fest is "fun" at first, by the end of it I FEEL AWFUL, tired, overly sleepy, bloated, gassy, alternately constipated and the opposite, and just plain nasty. I almost ALWAYS get stomach upset, nausea, and a skin eruption or two as well due to my system being literally FILLED with toxins. I can't wait to fast, guzzle water, eat properly afterwards, get some fresh air and exercise, and to start feeling GOOD again. This year I was imagining what it would be like to eat that way ALL of the time and then to do nothing but lounge around. I honestly believe that I would die within a short period of time (or become seriously ill) as my system just couldn't take it. I have NEVER been a junk food junkie OR lazy, even as a teen.


I shudder to think how unhealthy these kyds will be in the future and what a HUGE strain it will put on the tax payers. We already have over 2/3 of American kyds who are considered overweight and plenty of TLC (and like) documentaries to back up the urgency of this epidemic with shows including, "The Half a Ton Teen", and whatnot. Can't they see what they are doing to their kyds? Many of these kyds think that a fruit roll up, Juicy Juice, or a strawberry poptart is a "fruit", and that frozen french fries, jalapeno poppers, and fried mushrooms are "vegetables". They need to learn that hot fudge, ranch dip, and cheese whiz are NOT major food groups.

Mmmmmm.... Lysol.

Seriously, I don't eat white rice, only brown rice. I should eat it more often.

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"I have learned that pleasing everyone is impossible, but pissing everyone off is easy and fun as hell"

:eatu

OOOh Theresa, that sounds scrumptious! Could I talk you into sharing the recipe? I love to cook and I think that DH would enjoy something like that.

When I was still working as a cashier, I noticed that breeders were majorly heavy on the junk food. I don't get these people but then I don't have !breeder brain".

I wish the breeders would just admit to laziness. There are so many healhier options out there that are quick, easy, and cheap to put together. Just in the frozen vegetable aisle, there are a million options. All kinds of vegetable blends that if you add in some chicken or shrimp, and little sauce and rice, you have a quick nice meal. The supermarkets even sell chickens already roasted for $5 or so. There are always nice meats on sale. This week london broil and boneless chicken were $1.79 a lb. For fresh vegetables and fruit, the farm stands cannot be beat. Last week I left with 2 bags bursting with nice things for $8.

I'm tired of this "we're too poooooooor to eat well." I call bullshit. I'm poor too and don't eat garbage every night. I use coupons, scan the sales ads every week, and watch my pennies. It works, but it takes time.

I like rice in general a lot. My favorites are brown, basmati and jasmine. I like to cook the brown rice in my own homemade chicken stock from my freezer, and add in some mixed vegetables and sprinkle with parmesan cheese.

I'd be happy to give anyone who wants it the recipie for stuffed pepper soup. Its easy, cheap, and freezes well!

I agree with Theresa in that being "poor" and eating shitty junk food because of it is pure nonsense. I have had breeders strike back at me on this subject before with crap like, "Mac and cheese is cheap, hot dogs are cheaper than fresh meat, veggies and fruits are expensive...", etc......Well, I came back with my most current shopping list with prices from our local Kroger and blew that myth right out of the water. For less than TEN DOLLARS, if they don't catch a sale, they can buy a bag of potatos and an economy size box of rice that can sub for mac and cheese and chef barf-o-dee crap and it would be enough for a week. A whole chicken costs about $4 and there are NUMEROUS fresh meats on sale (every single day) for $5-7 that could feed a famblee of 5 for two different meals for each meat, so THAT leaves lunch left overs. An apple, orange, or pear is generally the same cost or less than a candy bar, and canned veggies are DIRT cheap as is canned tuna. When I see one of those big assed packs of hamburger meat marked down to $6-7 (which is nearly every day at our Kroger) I am thinking, "Meatloaf, spaghetti, and hamburgers". A pack of rolls is less than a dollar, a box of cake mix with the can of frosing can be bought for less than $2, so THERE'S their dessert, if they must have it.


Of course the opposition to my theory that these particular hogs who were pictured in the Lexington Herald whining about having a hard time losing weight due to their poverty and the lowly amount of their SIX HUNDRED DOLLAR monthly WELFARE food debit card for the two cows (they weighed about 500 lbs each) was that "...most poor people are uneducated in proper nutrition and how to cook balanced meals, they can't help it.."So, I decided that no matter what I said, that bleeding heart liberals were going to take their sides and blame anything and anyone else on these two cow's circumstances AND their obesity. The older of the two was quoted as saying, "The cost of food has gotten so high, but we are'nt getting a food allowance raise. There's lots of days that we can't even buy icecream or sodas, but we have gotten used to not having any of the extras", or something like that. That whole spread they did last year on the welfare debit card customers, some getting 4, 5,6, and 7+ hundred a month, claimed that they couldn't eat on that amount. WHY not? I spend less than $300 on actual food each month, but none of those mother fuckers would believe me. True, it might take $100 up front to stock staple items like flour, cooking oil, butter, salt, pepper, seasonings, cornmeal, dried beans, condiments, syrup, sugar, tea, koolaid, coffee, cereals, grits, oatmeal, etc......but after that, $600 SHOULD be enough to feed two people for a month in the Lexington, Ky area and they SHOULD eat quite well and nutritionally on that amount, IMO.

I'm in college and on the typical college student's budget and I can afford to eat healthy (but I sometimes don't get fresh veggies and fruit because it tends to get rotten before I get to eat it). So if my poor ass can afford a fresh or frozen bag of veggies, than so can these Moos who try to buy lobster with food stamps. If you get generic brands and shop when stuff is on sale (like meats), you can easily feed a family and have leftovers for probably $20 and have it be something relatively healthy (salad greens, canned veggies, a main dish like a casserole, and boxed brownies or cake mix or slice and bake cookies for dessert. Or fruit if you're really daring *gasp*). Breeders buy the frozen and processed shit because they're too fucking lazy to boil some potatoes or bake some chicken. I'm the laziest person I know and I manage to feed myself food that isn't shit. It is not hard to boil some pasta, throw sauce and garlic powder on it and fry some meatballs.

Am I the only one here who likes white rice? Personally I love just boiling it in water, waiting for it to cool and rolling it into balls and eating them with chopsticks and sweet and sour sauce.

I like white rice too, as well as brown. White rice is yummy in chicken soup or just plain with a pat of butter. Num.

Kidless Kim: Six or seven HUNDRED dollars a month for 2 people?! That's crazy! Like you we spend less than $300 on groceries per month, and to me even that is kind of lavish. After you get your basic set of staples set up, as you said, then it's just a game of looking for sale items, snagging meat and fresh veg on sale, and working with that. Fresh veggies go on sale all the time, and useful tasty basics like carrots and taters are cheap. Our local rec center offers a series of inexpensive basic cooking classes aimed at those without much cooking background. There is also of course tons of info online about basic cooking techniques (http://www.reluctantgourmet.com/technic.htm).

As you said, whole chickens can really be economical. Not to toot my own horn, but I got 5 meals out of a $5 whole chicken last week. 1. Roasted bird for Sunday dinner, 2. 2 legs for DH lunch next day, then chicken salad made from trimming the carcass meat for 3. evening snack and 4. another DH lunch, and finally I made 5. delicious stock from the picked and crushed carcass, with saved vegetable scraps. The smell of the stock simmering for hours was just divine.

We also like econo family packs of cheap bone-in chicken thighs or legs. One whole pack of 8 thigh pieces can be made to stretch out over a full week if you parcel it out 1 or 2 pieces at a time in simple creamy chicken sauce over noodles, chicken stir fry, chicken soup, &c. Save the bones in a tub in the freezer and you can make more delicious stock.

I'm preaching to the choir here so I'll shut up already with this obvious stuff...but that $700 for groceries did kind of floor me.

The organic stuff (Lundberg farms?) really rocks.

I make white rice, too, when the meat portion of my meal takes little time to prepare and I want everything to be done at about the same time. Tenderloin steak tips over a bed of white rice comes out really good!

I find it amazing that all or nearly all of us share a passion for brown rice, even if the rest of out diets are not the same. If we ever meet at someone's place, they better have a really BIG kitchen so we can all prepare our own meals while one of us (me?) makes a HUGE vat of brown rice we can all dig into LOL!

I agree that it should not cost one person $300 a month for food. For me, my costs are about half of that, consistent with another poster's opinion. I make (boneless) breaded chicken cutlets a lot (they come out yummy) and I wait for them to be on sale at the supermarket so I can load up on them. For example, just two days ago I bought four 3-pound packages at $3 a pound (compared to a more typical $5-$6 per pound) and froze it all. After I make some, I refrigerate the excess ones to eat during the week. Now that I don't have to buy more costly lunches while I was working, my food costs will be even lower (and healthier than BK I'd go to now and then).

I am not into straight junk food or candy. I will eat stuff like potato chips once in a while if I am out and they are being served. But, I don't buy them myself any more. I bake brownies from scratch a few times a year. My ladyfriend cooks a lot, too, especially with a crockpot. I used to eat ice cream more often but after too many times having it "freeze" my teeth and send shooting pains into my eyes I have pretty much given up on it (except for the rare hot fudge sundae where I can use the fudge's heat to help "protect" my teeth).

Yes, Lundberg is the brand of rice I buy from the health food store.

And all this talk of brown rice reminds me of a good line from Woody Allen's 1973 movie, "Sleeper":

Allen plays a man who wakes up 200 years in the future after a botched operation. He owned a health food store in Greenwich Village (NY) and is told that all his friends have been dead for nearly 200 years. He responds, "But they all ate organic rice!" LMAO!

All that processed shit and sugar really does contribute to behavioral problems. How can these women do this to their families?

They bleat, moan and carry on about PROTECT THE CHILDREN AT ALL COSTS but that's only when THEY want to make the rules. Cooking healthy meals for their kids is too inconvenient.

They're poor because, in addition to buying cheap, processed microwavable crap to feed their families, they're also buying Lunchables, mini pizzas, Hot Pockets, and snack packs of cookies and chips (all of which are far more expensive than leftovers or a sandwich and chips or carrot sticks in a Ziploc) because they are too lazy to fix the kids lunch for school or get off the couch to fix them a healthy snack. Better that the little angels can run to the pantry and get his own Cheetoes or Cosmic Brownie without having to interrupt Moomy's favorite program.

But cooking real food requires standing up, and that's soooo haaaaard.

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"The death of creativity is a pram in the hallway"
- Cyril Connolly

OOOOHHH!!! Lundberg Wehani???? I LOVE that stuff!!!!!

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Rose Red
The organic stuff (Lundberg farms?) really rocks.

Cam, I love white rice too. Well... I love ALL rice (especially Jasmine! Mmm...). My favourite kitchen appliance is my rice/vegetable steamer - it cooks rice perfectly, and gets quite a work out too, lol.

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clematis
I like white rice too, as well as brown. White rice is yummy in chicken soup or just plain with a pat of butter. Num.

Kidless Kim: Six or seven HUNDRED dollars a month for 2 people?! That's crazy! Like you we spend less than $300 on groceries per month, and to me even that is kind of lavish. After you get your basic set of staples set up, as you said, then it's just a game of looking for sale items, snagging meat and fresh veg on sale, and working with that. Fresh veggies go on sale all the time, and useful tasty basics like carrots and taters are cheap. Our local rec center offers a series of inexpensive basic cooking classes aimed at those without much cooking background. There is also of course tons of info online about basic cooking techniques (http://www.reluctantgourmet.com/technic.htm).

As you said, whole chickens can really be economical. Not to toot my own horn, but I got 5 meals out of a $5 whole chicken last week. 1. Roasted bird for Sunday dinner, 2. 2 legs for DH lunch next day, then chicken salad made from trimming the carcass meat for 3. evening snack and 4. another DH lunch, and finally I made 5. delicious stock from the picked and crushed carcass, with saved vegetable scraps. The smell of the stock simmering for hours was just divine.

We also like econo family packs of cheap bone-in chicken thighs or legs. One whole pack of 8 thigh pieces can be made to stretch out over a full week if you parcel it out 1 or 2 pieces at a time in simple creamy chicken sauce over noodles, chicken stir fry, chicken soup, &c. Save the bones in a tub in the freezer and you can make more delicious stock.

I'm preaching to the choir here so I'll shut up already with this obvious stuff...but that $700 for groceries did kind of floor me.

Yes, and in addition to that, their rent was controlled at a max $100 a month, their utilities were on a sliding scale which was based on their income, and of course they got free medical. It mentioned that the older moomare was disabled (and got a monthly check for that) because of a back injury sustained in a car wreck some 20 years prior. I forget what was wrong with the 19 y/o daughter, but they were both as big as the side of a barn. I don't think the daughter was getting a disability check because it mentioned that she had been working at a fast food restaurant, but could no longer afford the gas to get to work. Then their car broke down and they didn't have the money to fix it and it was costing her $5 a trip to catch rides with other residents to the local grocery store, which I couldn't help but notice that the grocery store's marquee was visible in the not too far away distance in the picture. I suppose that walking would have been out of the question for the 19 y/o. At the very least she could have walked TO the store and got a ride back, thus saving half her fare money.


I guess that I can't apply my own ways of thinking to people like this because it's apples and oranges. I couldn't help but wonder why the reporter couldn't have chosen a normal weight welfare famblee to feature in his "Foodstamp money isn't enough to eat on", article, but sadly these two were probably representative of the whole lot of them in this particular area. Either they have no shame or they are stupid, or perhaps a combination of both. What really got to me was that the 19 y/o hog was quoted as having said that most of her relatives (who were also on welfare and living in that same complex) had told her to have a baybee so she could get more welfare money, but she didn't want to do that. It was written in a way that was congratulatory and that Petunia Pig was admirable somehow, or deserved accolades and eternal awe because she wouldn't pop out a baybee. The whole time I was reading that and glancing at her heinously ugly mug and her breasts that visibly were resting in massive mounds of blubber atop one of her lower stomach rolls, I was thinking WHO could she get to mount her anyway?

KK, there's a thread about hospitals having to WIDEN the doors of their maternity wards to accommodate super-obese women, as well as MANY stories of chicks so fat they didn't know they were pregnant -- sad to say, I don't think she'd have that much of a problem finding someone.

As a Registered Dietitian (RD), I can tell you that is MUCH cheaper and MUCH healthier to cook from scratch than to buy processed food.
One of our assignments when I was working on my Bachelor of Science degree in Nutrition was to create a one-pot meal that had an average cost of less than 75 cents per serving, but still had the Recommended Dietary Allowances of essential vitamins and minerals such as Vitamin C, Vitamin A, iron, etc. AND could be prepared in under 30 minutes. What was REALLY cool was that we got a cookbook of everyone's recipes to hang onto after the class. The recipes were DELICIOUS and I still use the cookbook to this day!

To all these people who say it's too hard to put a hot meal from scratch on the table when they have kids, I call BS on that one! My mom raised my brother and I on her own in the 1970s-1980s while working one full-time job and one part-time job AND working on a Master's Degree AND still managed to put a hot, nutritious meal on the table every night. How? My brother and I were responsible for helping her out! She made it VERY clear to us that we ALL had to contribute by doing chores and helping to cook and grocery shop. Consequently, my brother and I turned out to be very self-reliant and healthy adults. It's AMAZING how many of these kids DO NOT help around the house and pitch a fit when they are asked to do chores. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?!

I must give my mom kudos for straightening out my little 6 year old second cousin recently. Evidently the family had a get-together for two of my cousins' birthdays and my mom asked my second cousin, Cate, to clear the dishes from the table so that everyone could have birthday cake. Cate foolishly replied, "I don't feel like it." My mom, who uses a wheelchair and was right at her level, grabbed her by the arm and did the 6-inches from your face Gunney Sergeant approach (like she did with me and my brother) and in a low, slow voice informed her, "You clear the dishes right NOW little girl." Cate cleared the table in 2 minutes flat! Old-school parenting once again works like a charm!