How we eat on $100 a week (and eat healty, organic food)

I don’t need to tell you that times are tough, we all know this. My husband and I have taught ourselves how to eat on $100 a week. I calculated this and that averages out to less than $3 a meal each!

I wanted to share our strategies with you in hopes that you find tips you can implement in your own life.

Step 1 – Meal Planning

Before we head to the market, I sit down with an ongoing list of dinners I plan out for the week. It helps for me to see what we’ve had in the previous weeks so hopefully I don’t have to think too hard about it. Of course, they change with the seasons: we eat much lighter in the summertime and have lots of soup and heartier dishes in the winter. I also bring out my bag-o-recipes to see if there’s anything we want to change up for the week. Yes, this can be time consuming and tedious, but it’s the first step to staying within our budget. Once I jot them down. I post the list on our fridge. Mike never has to ask me “What’s for dinner?” Those of you with kids I’m sure will appreciate this!

My meal list. Please don't judge how much we eat fried chicken.

We really only plan dinners as our breakfast stays pretty much the same: whole wheat toast, fruit and either orange juice or coffee during the week.  Pancakes or French Toast, eggs and coffee on the weekends.

Lunch is either leftovers from the night before or I’ll have a baked potato and Mike will scavenge something at his office.

During the meal planning, I also go through our refrigerator and cupboards to see what we need to stock up on.  How many of you think, “Oh, I’m out of ________, I’d better pick up more” only to discover it was in the back of your fridge the whole time? And now you have two (or more). This ends up being a waste of space and money! I’m in my kitchen a lot and have intimate knowledge of what’s in there and what isn’t.

I also refill my small decanters of items such as olive oil, Balsamic vinegar, salt, flour, etc. which I buy in bulk to save money and packaging.

Yep, that's my main cupboard. My spices are on a three-tiered spice shelf I picked up from the Container Store.

When I meal plan, the dinners that call for a lot of fresh ingredients get made earlier in the week and the items with heartier ingredients (like soup) get made later. I love winter time because I’m able to make one-pot meals that last over a few days, which saves money and saves me from having to cook every day (yay!). Every once in a while I’ll have to stop into the store again during the week to pick up a few fresh things like baguette…no big deal as long as I plan for it ahead of time.

Step 2 – Making the List

After I write down the dinners we plan for the week and take stock of my kitchen arsenal, I gather my recipes and make my list. This might sound crazy, but I write my list in the order of our path through our market. It saves time as we aren’t back-tracking our steps and saves money because there is a set list with little room for impulse buys.

This is the order I go in but it of course will change for you depending on where you shop (Mike and I shop at Diablo Foods, a family owned grocery store in Lafayette, CA)

•           Produce
•           Dairy
•           Household items (cleaners and whatnot)
•          Frozen goods
•           Canned/dried goods
•           Meat

Step 3 – Calculating As We Go

This works well when you have two people shopping, but it can be done if you are by yourself, it’ll just take longer. As we go through the store, I pick the items and Mike pushes the cart while adding them up on his Blackberry. Sometimes this can be tricky when you’re dealing with produce, say if you just need one red pepper and they’re $1.99/lb, we just guess that it’s about a half a pound. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it’s just so you have a good idea of how much you’re spending as you go so when you get to the checkout counter you aren’t struck with sticker shock. 

This strategy is also helpful because meat is our last stop before checkout. If we’re getting too close to our limit, we make a quick adjustment and substitute a nice inexpensive spaghetti dinner rather than something with meat in it.   

Here are some things we don’t include in our calculations:

•           Household cleaners
•           Staples that we buy in bulk (as listed above) since these items are relatively inexpensive and are used over a long period of time
•           Any special items that a recipe calls for e.g.: cheesecloth
•           Spices

Doing this leaves room on our budget for fresh food.

I have to get on my soapbox for a second here: Mike and I stay away from processed foods. Oh sure every once in a while we’ll have mac and cheese out of the box (Annie’s!) and we’ll even have a fast food meal here and there. But for the most part, we try to buy all organic produce and grass fed meats. After watching the movie “Food Inc.”, I realized how we eat not only affects our health, it affects the health of the planet. And guess what, on our toast we have real butter (not nasty processed “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter), in our coffee we have real half and half (rather than crappy Coffee Mate that’s full of sugar). Who needs that processed stuff that’s supposed to be better for you? I know the obesity problem in this country stems from all this processed crap…so we just stay away from it as much as we can. 

I Can't Believe It's Not Butter! But I can believe that it's shit.

So that’s basically how Mike and I shop for groceries. When we get home, I unpack everything and separate out the refrigerated goods from the cupboard goods before opening the fridge to put it away, just so I don’t have to keep opening and shutting the fridge door to save energy. That’s just my crazy eco-mind though.

I will say that with holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, we don’t worry about staying within $100 because that’s impossible, this is more for everyday shopping. 

I hope this helps you on your next trip to the grocery store!

Holiday Decorating

This past weekend my husband and I decorated our apartment for the holidays. Having both grown up in households where Christmas decorations were very colorful, mismatched, and sometimes kitschy (sorry, mom and dad) when we started collecting our bits and bobs six years ago we wanted them to be chic, streamlined and modern. We use only white lights, and silver and glass (clear and frosted) for ornaments. With these few guidelines our Christmas decor always matches wherever we live.

This is kind of embarrassing, but when it's time to throw out the Christmas tree, I always get very upset. (Complete with tears for days...seriously) But I would never get an artificial tree because I believe they are actually worse for the environment that cutting down a real tree. Oh, all that PVC that will never biodegrade! So this year we thought of a compromise that instead of a full-grown 10+ year old tree we'd get a younger, much smaller tree. This comes with two added bonuses: kitties will not climb it and it's super easy to water. So we went down to the lot and picked out this cute little 3' tall tree. Mind you, we live in the suburbs where people have BIG houses and want BIG trees to go in them so it must be rare to have residents of Lafayette buying a baby tree!

Anyway, after getting it into the tree stand, we propped it up an a large square basket with a lid (this basket holds all my husband's technology clutter) and moved it into the corner of our place that faces the windows. Our poor kitties have lost their corner view for a month, but they don't seem too upset about it. With the tree skirt you can barely see the basket below and I like the way it sort of hangs down rather than flat on the ground.  

We lined the two windows with more white lights and strung long strands of mirrored garland hanging down. We hung leftover snowflake ornaments from the garland giving the impression of floating glittery snowflakes hanging in the window.

On the picture rail behind the sofa, we hung another couple of strands of mirror garland. And on our coffee table I filled a decorative red bowl with sliver glittery pine cones bringing even more sparkle into the room.

In the dining room, I took a small square vessel and added the rest of our leftover ornaments for a simple everyday centerpiece. Do those place mats look familiar? I used them for Thanksgiving, too.

The result is clean, understated Christmas decorating. Other than the tree, we reuse our decor every year resulting in less waste during a notoriously wasteful time of year. And having the same items takes the guess work out of decorating. The way I see it, the holidays are stressful and complicated enough, why not keep your home holiday decor as simple as possible?

The Giving of Thanks

I hope you all had as wonderful Thanksgiving as we did. Thanksgiving is my one of my favorite holidays (Halloween is #1) and my husband and I have hosted 5 of the 7 years that we've lived in the Bay Area, this being our first one as a married couple! This year, we kept it small, only 7 people total and I'd like to share my turkey day decor and food with you.


A few weeks ago, our coffee table finally gave out on it's last legs (literally) so Mike and I bought a new one large enough to fit 8 people around. (Hooray for double-duty furniture!) This meant that we all sat on pillows on the floor, but for our casual group of friends this worked out great and was perfect for an after dinner game of Apples to Apples.

Each place setting was outfitted with new place mats and napkins from my favorite store, Crate and Barrel, and we used our existing everyday dinnerware, drinkware and flatware. For the centerpiece, I simply collected colorful fall leaves and placed gorgeous birch candles from Pottery Barn on top. The place cards  were yellow leaves picked from our backyard with each guests name written and tucked into our new napkin rings.

Since our coffee table wasn't large enough to hold 8 people and the food, we set up a buffet station on our small, existing dining table so our guests could serve themselves.

The Menu:

Appetizers
- Mushrooms stuffed with spinach and Grueyre
- Carmelized onion dip with crudite

Cocktail
- Warm apple cider spiked with Rob's cinnamon infused vodka (served in brown sugar rimmed margarita glasses and cinnamon stick stirrers)

Main Course
- Turkey stuffed with orange and lemon slices, rosemary and thyme
- Dressing with apples, celery and onion
- Sweet potatoes baked in an sweet orange liqueur sauce
- Johanna's cheesy potatoes 
- Classic green bean casserole (Dennis' favorite)
- Homemade cranberry sauce sauteed with apples and an orange liquer
- Crescent rolls (a staple of mine since childhood)

Desert
- Pumpkin pie (but, of course!)
- Michelle's chocolate mousse cookies and peanut butter chocolate drop cookies


Adjacent to the living room in our office, we set up our bar with wine, our signature cocktail and appetizers and later desert. We lined the underside of our frosted glass desk with white Christmas lights to give a little extra glow to the room.

I forgot to nab a photo before everyone started digging in!

All in all I think this year's celebration was a success. I have so much to be thankful for this year and was happy to share the day with friends that I think of as family.

Hello world! My name's Rhea but I'm also known as Chaos Tamer.

So I have to admit that I'm new to blogging. Of course I look at great blogs all day, but this might be my first blog post...ever.

Let me start telling you a little about how Chaos Tamer came to be.

I came to San Francisco almost 7 years ago to study interior design. After working for a residential designer and later a large architecture firm I realized that while I love design, that path was just not right for me. When the economy tanked, I was left unemployed just four months before my wedding. Of course I felt a bit of panic at first (as anyone who's been laid off will tell you) but it ended up being a really great thing for me. I spent those four months planning our wedding to a tee, I started doing Pilates about four times a week and just mentally prepared myself for this next phase of life. During this time, the thought of Chaos Tamer literally came to me in my sleep, even the name. The next morning I bought the domain name and started hashing out a plan. The general idea was to become a professional organizer and help people reclaim their homes from the clutter that's taken over.

My new husband and I

The wedding came and went (and was the very best day of my life) and the honeymoon also came and went. And when I finally returned back to Earth from spending all of October on cloud 9 it was time to get to work on making this dream my reality.

The view from our over water bungalow (!)

So here we are. This business is in the VERY early stages, we just got the website live yesterday and I don't even have business cards yet! (Although they are designed...just need to get them printed)

I also have my VERY fist Chaos Tamer client meeting tomorrow, redesigning the product display case at my Pilates studio.

I hope to blog about this journey of starting my own business, but I also hope to share things that catch my fancy. I love fashion and food and really almost anything domestic. My friends will tell you that I'm so organized it's almost to a fault. Here is to hoping I can teach other people how to adopt some of those skills!

P.S. Since I don't have any photos yet of project related stuff, I thought I share a wedding photo and what is now the desktop image of my computer.