Save money Eat organic part 1

So, a few of you have asked me how it is we can afford to eat organic, and how we got started on this crazy kick, and if I have really noticed any difference - so I thought I would blog about how we have SAVED money by eating organic foods, and with three growing boys - we need to make our food dollars stretch farther than ever!

For dinner tonight we are having chicken nuggets =)  YUM!  I can buy a bag of chicken nuggets, ready made, processed garbage, for about $13.00 - this would be the big 60-70, 67oz  nugget bag.  OR

I can buy a bag of organic flour, organic butter, and antibiotic/hormone free chicken tenders.
The flour, which I will also use for a thousand other things, costs $4 for a 5 pound bag, and the chicken $5.79 a pound, and organic butter - $3 per pound, I use about 2 tbsp.  

Their cost  = $13.00
My cost = $ 0.40 for the flour, $0.20 for the butter,  and 11.58 for the chicken (2 lbs) TOTAL - $12.19- it was actually cheaper for my family to eat organic!

Now, you are probably thinking - the big nugget bag was 67oz and she only made 32 oz ?? How does that work out to savings? 

It works out in 2 ways
First - for some odd reason, I can make 60 good sized nuggets from 2 lbs of chicken, without it weighing 67 oz - and my kids are full. 

Second - my kids are full!  The other nuggets are gone in 30 seconds and then the kids are begging for more food - you just ate 15 chicken nuggets, how can you be hungry??? 

The answer to this conundrum is simple - my nuggets have a very light coating of flour, they are not fried in grease, they are baked in the oven, they are juicy, and all chicken.  The other nuggets are pressed into a roundish shape by a machine, they were precooked shredded chicken, combined with corn, flour, and other fillers to make the chicken go farther, then pressed into a shape, covered in more bread, and fried.  One meal is mostly fried bread, the other is mostly baked chicken. 

 VS.

How to save by eating organic tip #1 - Buying organic usually means you have to buy the ingredients to make dinner - there really aren't a whole lot of prepackaged, ready made foods that are organic - this method of cooking lends itself to being much less expensive than buying prefab food.

This inevitably leads to the 'but I don't have time to make everything from scratch' statement.  Well, I can't blog about everything - but I have a fellow blogger who is doing some experiements in this area - like timing herself making brownies from a box vs brownies from scratch - and SHE can make them both in almost the same amount of time =)  Here is her blog, she is also a wonderful resource for recipes.
 http://heavenlyhomemakers.com/the-brownie-experiment-which-takes-longer-to-make-boxed-or-homemade
Happy Shopping and Cooking =)
Amanda