Frugal Friday - Bread Labels

A friend asked me how I manage to buy bread and other baked goods with Miss Pear's allergies seeing as many breads contain nuts or potato, or are made in the same facility making cross contamination a risk. The answer is that I don't ... that is I don't buy baked goods. A loaf of "safe" bread is about $4 - not exactly reasonable when I am working to save on our grocery bill! I an fairly confident that this week I baked Oatmeal bread and cookies for less than $4!

The good news is that I love to bake!

So most days find me baking one thing as if I bake one thing a day, by the end of the week I can have bread, cookies, muffins, a loaf and something else baked! And Miss Pear loves to help. Plus it is good for counting practice too!

I love to have a couple extra loaves of bread, and packages of 6 rolls in the freezer. This gives us some variety rather than having to eat two of the same loaves in a row, and allows for crazy weeks or illness. But the loaves can tend to look alike in the freezer! And bread bags are hard to label in such a way that you can re-use the bags, which, of course, I do.

So I take the twist tie labels from when I buy bulk items (you know, the ones that have a wide end so you can write the bulk bin number!), and write on the other side what kind of bread or rolls are in the bag with a Sharpie marker so it is easy to read, and I reuse the ties until they break or get lost or get destroyed or generally become unusable.

I can easily identify my bread, and I am not just throwing stuff away - like bread bags and ties! And it basically costs me nothing!

Organized, cost effective, and good for my family -- you really cannot beat that!

Click on over to Crystal's for more great money saving ideas!

P.S. I posted an update on how my new goal of saving on our grocery budget is going...