Fred lives on...

I realized today that I never explained how Fred the turkey came to grace our table this year... I was browsing through the ads in my paper one day (a new habit since starting GG) and saw that SaveMart was giving away a 15lb turkey to every customer who spent $99.99 in one shopping trip. Now this used to be easy for me, pre-GG, but now the thought of spending $100 (leaving me $50 in my budget for food for the next 2 weeks) in one go made me cringe... So I decided that I would just buy things that we needed that would not hit our list (ie:eggs, meat, and milk) to last us the 2 weeks... So Toby and I hit the store, Coupon Binder in hand (yeah, it's a little OCD, but it keeps me organized) and went straight to the meat section... Lucky for us, the butcher was at that moment starting to do markdowns, so we followed her down the aisle tossing stuff she had just marked down into our basket... We ended up with 3 small whole chickens, 3 pkgs of Half Chicken Breasts, 3 pkgs of 90% lean Ground Sirloin, a rack of Pork spare ribs, and a beef chuck roast! We also got 5 dozen eggs, some juice, a 10lb. bag of potatoes, and some fresh fruit and salad. All for $100! On top of the score, we got Fred, our 18 lb. friend for $5 (just paid the overage for the extra 3 lbs.)... We ate from him just about every day this week... His final performance was in a Turkey Pot Pie...



I got the idea from $5 Dinners and the pie crust recipe was my family's (same one used for the Pumpkin Pie)... Next time I will use half butter and fresh shortening (I did this on a whim today)... But what made it taste so great was rather than using straight white sauce, I mixed in the rest of my white turkey gravy and a lot of the juice I had saved from Fred as well as some cream cheese (which I used in my gravy this year after KT did it last year...) made it taste great! I think next time I will add in some chopped mushrooms (maybe canned ones) and some diced potatoes... Yum...