This morning I planned to spend the whole day stitching. I got up, did what needs to be done. Vince was outside working and I went out to see what he was doing and visit with him before I started stitching. He told me the sleep people had called and they had all the info to change some settings on his CPap so he needed to bring it back in when he had time. He asked if I wanted to ride over with him. He was going just there and back but it was up in the middle of Joplin so I said yes and, knowing Vince, I figured we’d stop somewhere else so I put on a bit of makeup, straightened out a few frizzy spots in the hair, changed to a T-shirt without holes and off we went.
On the way back home, we passed by Food 4 Less. That’s a store I always thought was kinda . . I don’t know. It’s an older store and I guess we may have gone in there once when we lived here before. I wasn’t impressed. It wasn’t bad but back then, Joplin had Dillon’s, which is in the Kroger family and I liked it but the tornado took it out and they didn’t rebuild. Anyway, I doubt I would ever have gone back to Food 4 Less but a friend told me last year about the great sales they have and they do have amazing sales. So, this morning Vince said “Want to stop by Food 4 Less?” I told him we really didn’t need anything and I didn’t have a list and walking up and down every aisle didn’t seem like fun.” He said “Let’s just check the sales and if there’s something we want that’s on sale, we’ll get it and go.” OK . . I’ll do that.
They do post their sales on Facebook but I don’t often check them, mainly because it’s clear across Joplin and unless we guy a lot, it isn’t worth the cost of the gas plus there are times of day when traffic in that area is horrendous and we try to avoid that whole area. But . . we were there so we stopped.
They were having a huge meat sale. They do this twice a year and we lucked out to just happen in there at the time of the meat sale. People were filling several carts. They do have good meat.
Walmart hasn’t been having bottom round roast. Sam’s has them and currently, they’re $4.88 per pound. On that one piece of meat, we saved almost $30. This has become one of my favorite roasts. I cut it onto 4 pieces. For the steak, I will use the sous vide and cook it at 131 degrees for about 60 hours. Yes – 2-1/2 days. Then I will heat up the hot plate outside and sear the outside edges and slice it for steak. Delicious! Each piece will give us each a good size steak for two different meals (4 steaks) and I’ll use the slicer to slice the rest of that hunk. It will give us enough to make lettuce wraps where we put ham, cheese, and pickles in a big piece of lettuce and roll it up and eat it cold. Great for a hot summer day.
At Walmart, a boneless pork loin is about $8/pound per pound but I can’t believe that’s right. We ended up going back to Aldi this afternoon and they had pork loin for $2.29/pound so based on that price, we saved about $5.
At Walmart a pork butt is $2.47/pound so we saved about $13 on this.
The other thing was bacon! It’s Bar-S brand, which we’ve used before and it’s fine. Vince picks through it all and finds the packages that don’t have so much fat. Chad picks through the packages and gets the one that has the most fat! Our Walmart doesn’t have it but some in the area do and it’s $4.12 for a 12 oz. package. Food 4 Less had one pound packages for .99. We bought 15 packages so that was a huge savings.
The man putting out the bacon, at about noon, said he had two pallets left. Each pallet held about 200 boxes and each box held 24 packages of bacon. He said it would all be sold out by the end of the day. Several people, including the one checking out in front of us and the one behind us had bought whole boxes. Vince wanted to pick through and at that point, I was getting concerned about where we were going to put everything.
They also had this ham. I think it was $2.30 or close to that per pound. I hadn’t seen it but the guy in front of us checking out had some and I asked him about it. He said he loves it and eats it a lot so Vince ran back and got us a package of smoked and a package of honey ham.
Then . . the real fun began.
I cut it all up into whatever size pieces would be most useful/economical for us. I don’t want to cook a 10 pound pork loin at once. I cut some of it into pork chops, some into chunks to make sweet & sour pork, some into about 3 pound packages for pork and gravy. For the pork butt, I left one whole with the bone in. I’ll cook it in the sous vide, then smoke it. The other one I removed the bone and cut it into about 2-1/2 to 3 pound packages. I will make carnitas with some of those and smoke some of them.
I seasoned one of the smaller portions of the pork butt, vacuum sealed it, will start cooking it with the sous vide tomorrow, then smoke it on Saturday.
Who would have thought that at 9 p.m., I had not made one stitch yet today?
vivoaks says
When life happens, you need to take advantage of it, and you did, so you did good!! 🙂
Ginny says
You are fortunate that you have the space to store all of that. All I could think of that will be a lot of Swissed steak, Pot Roast and beef stew. All of which are staples in my house.