Cut Your Own Cheese Sticks

One of Andyroo's favorite snacks is cheese sticks. Not the cheesy bread stick things, but sticks of cheese. I tried buying string cheese instead, but he doesn't like them as much. Neither do I, so I can't blame the kid.

So I started buying these cheese sticks.

There's nothing wrong with them. They're yummy and satisfying...but they're expensive. The cheapest I found them was at Macey's for about $3.99 (with a $1.00 off coupon) for a 10oz package. Wal-Mart had them at an okay price (better per ounce) at $5.49 (without any coupons, though I did use them there too) for a 13.3oz package.

Quite frankly, I was tired of shelling out $4-$5 for less than a pound of cheese! It didn't make any sense to me anymore. And I don't know why I did it for so long. Convenience, apparently!

And then a couple weeks ago I decided to just do it myself. Smith's (a local Kroger-owned grocery store) had their 2lb blocks of cheese on sale for $5.99. Here in Utah (and also in Idaho, I believe), we get a coupon for $1.00 off 2lbs of cheese on Coupons.com, so I printed that baby off and bought me some cheese for cheese sticks!

That's half of the 2lb block. I cut off chunks that were a little less than 1/2 wide.

Then cut those up into sticks, put them in a Ziploc, then back in the fridge. I got about 4 sticks out of each of those chunks for a total of about 52 cheese sticks. They were a little smaller than the Precious cheese sticks, but that's okay.

Andyroo couldn't tell a difference, but my wallet sure did! The 2lbs of cheese sticks lasted us about 2 1/2 weeks. That was with all 3 of us eating them though. And even still, I can handle that price tag much better!