Organic Milk on a Budget

My kids drink a ton of milk. Well, two of them do, so we go through about 3-4 gallons of milk a week. My oldest will come into the kitchen and just want a drink, pour himself a tall glass of milk and just chug it down. Ugh! I could not imagine doing that. Don't get me wrong, I like milk...with a big piece of chocolate cake or a handful of chocolate chip cookies. Uh, Oh! I'm not sure how much milk I will be drinking in the future :)

So, in trying to move to clean eating, I checked into organic milk. I could not believe it was over $6 a gallon at Meijer, my local grocery store. That would be an extra $40-$50 a month for milk. Yeah, there's no way we can afford that. So, after doing some research about how bad the hormones and things that are in milk are for girls, my husband and I decided to buy organic milk only for Jazlyn, our daugher.

Then I read more about milk here. Towards the end of her post, she talks a bit about 2% & skim milk and how they may not be great choices, even worse than I thought! Then I remembered a conversation I had with a close friend, Brooke. She's frugal like me :) You can check out her Frugal Friday blog posts here. Anyway, she read a book where a mom bought whole milk, poured half in a separate jug and added half water to both to make skim milk. Ah, you probably see where I'm going with this! So, I thought, why not buy organic whole milk, add a little water and make it 2%. It should taste like their normal 2% they like without having the processing done to it to get it that way.

When I went to Earth Fare yesterday, I decided to check out their organic milk. Imagine my surprise when it was only $5.48 a gallon! That was cheaper than Meijer & Walmart! So I bought one gallon, poured half of it (2 quarts) into another gallon I had on hand. I then added about 1 1/2 quarts of water to each gallon and presto! 2% milk. My husband and I both tasted it and felt it tasted extremely close to what we were buying in the past.

So, I buy 2 gallons of organic whole milk to get almost 3 gallons of 2%. That's only $3.65 a gallon which is less than a dollar more than what we were paying for our old milk! So, an extra $12-$15 a month for my kids to be so much healthier. Totally worth it!

Newbie tips:
1. Be sure to save your old milk gallons so you have something to pour the new gallons into. Just rinse with very hot water when they're empty!
2. Invest in an inexpensive funnel to keep in your kitchen. This will help the entire process go so much easier and keep milk from getting all over the counter (not that I know from experience or anything).
3. You can freeze milk! So, if you're like me and are not going to be making weekly trips to the Health Food store, then buy enough milk for several weeks and freeze the extra!