Margret Sloan

With everyone tightening up their budgets and looking for ways to cut costs and save money to offset the huge increase in the cost of gas - its right at $4 a gallon most places around here now - I have had to cut my grocery shopping budget. My fresh vegetables from the garden help a little, but to be honest I need to save about $40 a week from my grocery bill.

So today I decided to shop at Aldis and see if they had any bargains worth picking up to stock the pantry. I was pleasantly surprised to see what a nice variety they have. However, most foods are not a recognizable name brand - they are probably house brands that Aldi has arranged to buy in quantity. the best cost savings seemed to be in canned vegetables and boxed bake goods. So we’ll give a few of them a try and if they are good enough to pass my family’s taste test, I will shop there again soon.

We tried a small vegetable garden this year and I must say that it is a great success. We have so many tomatoes off of just 2 tomato plants that we are already giving tomatoes away to friends at work. The jalepeno pepper plant is putting out all the hot peppers I’ll need for the rest of the year. My green pepper plants are very slow to bear but they are strong and healthy and there will be an abundance of actual peppers in just a couple weeks.

We are thrilled at how well these basic vegetables have done and I think next year we’ll go ahead and have a full garden. I have plans to put in a raised bed over in the side yard and I want to grow a bigger variety of vegetables. I found a great site for organic seeds and sprouting supplies, so I can plan the whole thing and set up a schedule and make a serious effort at growing my own healthy foods. Years ago I had great success with a huge garden in Virginia. Everything I planted was from seed or sprout - no cheating with mature plants bought at the hardware store!

Maybe you already know about the Handy Pantry web site for organic seeds and supplies. If you’ve got any gardening tips - especially for raised beds - please share them with me in a comment. I would love to hear them.

OK - I’m willing to admit that we cheated a little on the tomato plants this year. We bought two plants at the Publix grocery store when they had some seasonal plants out front of the store. Each plant was only $12 and they both looked very healthy, so we brought them home and had a nice head start on tomatoes this year.

My goal has always been to have fresh homegrown tomatoes on the vine ready to pick by the Fourth of July each summer. Well, believe it or not, we’ve been picking ripe tomatoes for two weeks already! They are not really big tomatoes, but they are sweet and meaty and we are very pleased with ourselves!

Maybe this abundance of fresh tomatoes will encourage hubby to eat more fresh garden salads this summer. He eats them in restaurants when salad comes with the meal - no cucumbers, no fancy lettuce - just iceburg - ranch dressing is the only dressing choice - but salads at home are always disdained. If I was a completely confident cook I’d be offended, but it’s not me - it’s him.

This morning’s newspaper came with a nice surprise - two free boxes of breakfast cereal were in the special plastic bag that holds the paper. There was a small box of Honey Nut Cheerios and a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, along with coupons to save 75 cents at the grocery store on a full size box if you like the cereals.

It is always nice to get something free to try - it surely must open the minds of a good percentage of people who might not otherwise try a particular food or drink but soon discover that they actually like the product. Part of this is due to favoring brands or flavor with which you grew up or are accustomed to eating and drinking. Part of it is due to a natural resistance to try new things without some incentive. And part of it, in my household anyway, is that the person doing the grocery shopping is a creature of habit and only searches out the brands and items that we know we like or prefer so they can get finished with the chore of shopping and get back home as quickly as possible.

In our house, when presented at the dinner table with a new or unfamiliar food, the household rule is that you are expected to (at the very least) try one bite. If you don’t like it, you force yourself to swallow it without a lot of drama or facial contortions and politely say, “I’m sorry, but I don’t care for that.” You are to always respect the fact that Mother made a huge effort to shop for, prepare, cook and serve a variety of wholesome and tasty foods, day after day after day just for our benefit and enjoyment. And Mother respected that fact that trying to please the tastebuds of seven people every night was a daunting task, especially when little sister announced out of the blue that from here forward she would be a vegetarian and refused to eat meat, poultry or fish. But I do appreciate the fact that my parents exposed us to a variety of foods at the family dinner table and it not only enriched our lives but taught us to appreciate and respect each other, as well.