I did a post earlier this week about Michigan.gov’s new assistance referral site, Helping Hand. I saw the link on Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s Twitter.

But here’s a detail I overlooked – until the formal press release got forwarded to my desk this morning. In conjunction with the launch for this new web page, the state of Michigan now has the option for residents to apply for Michigan food assistance on line. Although you still can take care of the application in person at the Department of Human Services offices, online will be a really convenient option for parents of young children, caregivers and others who find it difficult to schedule appointments during business hours.

You probably know you can use the food assistance benefits on Michigan Bridge Card to purchase groceries from a supermarket, Angel Food Ministries, Great Food for All, or participating farmers markets such as Ciolino Fruit and Vegetable Market in Monroe and Temperance. You can also use those benefits to purchase seeds and food-producing plants.

But receiving food assistance via a Michigan Bridge Card also opens up other financial assistance possibilities for your family, including:

• Reduced rates for annual pass at Michigan State Parks.
• Automatic enrollment in free school lunches for your children.
• Possible reduction in pay-to-participate school sports fees for Monroe County students, because some of those discounts are based on whether the students get free or reduced-cost school lunches.

Are you eligible for food assistance? Find out here.

I paid $30 for the signature box. Here’s what was in that box. That boxed dessert is a pumpkin pie. I also found a pound of ground beef, a quart of boxed milk, sliced ham, eggs and fixin’s for chicken fajitas.

I paid $22 for the produce box. The stuff in that box included onions, potatoes, garlic, a watermelon, the apples and grapes.

I’ve already cut up one of the melons and will cut up the carrots and celery this afternoon. I know how to make applesauce so I’ll be doing that with the apples today. I had some of the grapes and a plum with a dish of leftover pasta for lunch.

Dinner will probably be cheeseburgers, corn on the cob and fresh fruit.

Local readers: there are three delivery sites in Monroe County, Mich., for Angel Food Ministries, and one delivery site in Dundee for a similar program called Great Food for All. I usually buy from Angel Food because one of the delivery sites is nearby, but I have also bought two months of boxes from Great Food.

I like the grocery-by-the-box programs because they provide a lot of the basics such as meats. That means I can afford to be picky about what I buy at the grocery stores and when.

I love using coupons (I’ve been couponing for 20+ years), but it’s easy to get frustrated with the grocery bills if coupons are your only trick.

The agency cited the report, “Hunger Doesn’t Take a Vacation,” produced by the Food Research and Action Center. On an average day in July 2008, there were 42,244 low-income children in Michigan getting a free lunch at one of the participating sites.

Some of those kids live right here in Monroe County.

In the past couple of years, there have been two summer lunch sites open in the city of Monroe. One is at the Salvation Army of Monroe County, 815 E. First St.; and the other, which is run by the Monroe Housing Commission, is at Speckled Frog Learning Center, 900 Greenwood Ave.

For information, call the Salvation Army at (734) 241-0440 or the housing commission at (734) 242-5880.

If you’ve ever wondered why my grocery store brags seem a bit lopsided as compared to your weekly grocery runs, here’s why: I buy a good portion of my groceries once a month. Since we get a lot of basics from the grocery-by-the-box programs, I can afford to focus on just the best deals at the retail stores.

I picked up my Angel Food Ministries June basic box today from Monroe Church of the Nazarene, and here’s what I got for the $30 order I placed a few weeks ago.

There’s chicken, ground hamburger, eggs, cheese, peanut butter, steaks, rice, beans, butter, broccoli, frozen burritos and frozen potatoes. That white box to the bottom left is a bakery pie. I’ll mix that stuff up with the deals I find at the grocery stores, and even my husband will tell you that we eat very well on a budget.

You can’t pick and choose what goes in a basic box. One of the reasons the cost is so low on these grocery-by-the-box programs is that the basic box is the main selection. But you do have a pretty good idea by the time orders are placed of what’s expected to go in the basic box.

If you don’t like what’s on the menu, you can skip a month or switch to the other service for that month. Depending on the size of your family and your eating preferences, one or the other service will end up being your favorite. The delivery schedules also are different. In southeast Michigan / northwest Ohio, Angel Food normally delivers on fourth Saturday and Great Food normally delivers on second Saturday.

This is a different approach than picking exactly what you want at the grocery store. But we learned to get resourceful with what is in the grocery boxes.

For example, we prefer crunchy peanut butter to creamy peanut butter for sandwiches. Creamy peanut butter, however, is well suited for use in recipes. So it’s no big deal that we have a “different” peanut butter on the pantry shelf.

And the self-stable milk quarts confused us at first. Now I just put the milk quarts on my pantry shelf when they arrive. There is normally some point during the month when the gallon milk I normally purchase is running out and it’s not convenient to make a store run. Solution: get one of the milk quarts off the shelf, and we have another day before a grocery stop is necessary.

In addition, there usually are one or two alternate options for both Great Food and Angel Food services to the basic box, and then you can get as many add-ons as you like. Some families pair up with a partner who purchases the basic box and then they purchase the add-ons on the same order.

My July order will be the basic box and the produce box from Angel Food.

I just got a question from a reader asking whether there was Angel Food Ministries site in Temperance. Yes. In fact, Bedford Church of the Nazarene was the first location in the Monroe County, Mich., area to offer this service.

Angel Food Ministries is a low-cost grocery purchase program that is open to anyone, of any income level. Here is a list of some of the regional sites currently in the Angel Food Ministries network:

• Ann Arbor, Mich.: Calvary Presbyterian Church.
• Belleville, Mich.: Sevenfold Coalition Addressing Neighborhood Needs.
• Detroit, Mich.: Several locations.
• Dundee, Mich.: Dundee Assembly of God.
• Lambertville, Mich.: Bedford Church of the Nazarene.
• Monroe, Mich.: Monroe Church of the Nazarene.
• Taylor, Mich.: New Hope Assembly of God.
• Ypsilanti, Mich.: Beautiful Gate Church.
• Toledo, Ohio: Several locations.
• Sylvania, Ohio: King of Glory Lutheran Church.
• Maumee, Ohio: Cass Road Baptist Church.

Great Food for All is a similar program with a different menu, a different delivery schedule and a different network of sites. The southeast Michigan / northwest Ohio sites include:

• Adrian, Mich.: Adrian Nazarene.
• Dundee, Mich.: Dundee Baptist Church.
• Toledo, Ohio: Several sites.
• Maumee, Ohio: Maumee Senior Center.
• Monclova, Ohio: Freedom Point.
• Oregon, Ohio: Ashland Avenue Baptist, Hope Community Nazarene and Solid Rock Assembly of God.
• Perrysburg, Ohio: Cedar Creek Church and Zoar Lutheran Church.
• Sylvania, Ohio: Olivet Lutheran Church.
• Fremont, Ohio: Victory Christian Fellowship.

If you are looking for ways to cut your grocery bill, both Angel Food and Great Food programs are well worth looking into. Go to the home sites (follow the hotlinks) and see what’s on the menu for this month. It’s perfectly OK to swap from one to the other, or skip a month, depending on when you want deliveries and what’s going in the grocery boxes.

I have used both of these services during the past year, and found them to be a very good compliment to the coupon / rebate / sales tricks I can do at the grocery and drug stores.

One of the search phrases this week was “Great Food for All vs. Angel Food Ministries.” These are two of the several low-cost “groceries by the box” programs that can be found across the country.

Follow the links for more details – but the bottom line is you get groceries at a very big discount. There are no applications and no income requirements. Working families are welcome and encouraged to use these services.

Great Food and Angel Food are both available in southeast Michigan, and I’ve used them both.

Whether you prefer one over the other depends on the following details:

• Which service has a delivery site closer to you. In my case, that’s Angel Food.
• Which service has the delivery date that works better for you. In my area, Great Food delivers mid-month and Angel Food delivers end of the month.
• Which grocery selections you prefer. Both services post their menus in advance. Maybe you like what’s scheduled to go in the box that month, and maybe you don’t. We prefer Angel Food because the serving sizes and packages were a better fit for our family, but there was some tasty stuff in the Great Food boxes.

If you need to cut back on expenses, give one or both of these programs a try. After about two or three months, you’ll see a difference in what you can cook for dinner even though you are spending less money.

We’re pretty much sold on the convenience and value.

I still follow up on the drugstore and supermarket store deals of the week on things like cereal, milk and toothpaste.

But the grocery box programs take some of the shopping hassle away.

A snippet:

The demand for Grace Groceries, a discount grocery program, has forced its organizers to limit the number of people who can sign up to receive May groceries to 150 after nearly 300 people signed up for April’s food distribution, one of the organizers says.

Grace Groceries, a collaborative effort between Ward Presbyterian Church in Northville Township and Southfield-based Hiller’s Markets, featured in a Free Press article this month, offers fresh vegetables, meats and other grocery items for $30 — about 50% less than the items would cost in a store.

I don’t know what the alternatives are in Northville, but most of my readers who live in southeast Michigan and northwest Ohio do have access to other programs that work on the same concept: Angel Food Ministries and Great Food For All. Click on the links to go the national pages and find locations near you.

Great Food For All is a low-cost grocery purchase program that is open to anyone, of any income level. The basic grocery box costs $30 and contains food worth about twice that amount. There also are other menu options.

Dundee Baptist Church is the Dundee, Mich., Great Food for All affiliate.

The order deadline for the May deliveries is May 6.

For information, call (734) 529-2717 or e-mail Robert Richards at dbcoffice@verizon.net.

Last month, I started doing public appearances in Monroe County as the Monroe on a Budget blogger. My presentation is called “Grocery Shopping on a Budget” and it is based on my sidebar with the same theme.

We did a feature story in the March 8 Sunday edition of The Monroe Evening News to promote my appearances, and I had some follow-ups on the budget blog.

In the meantime, Monroe Publishing Co. was running into Internet issues. Several of our sites were crashing on a frequent basis, including the budget blog. It took time for our I.T. staff to deal with that situation.

The server upgrades are done and everything is working. I don’t have to worry about crashing the network now by posting a video!

Here is the slide show. It’s just under 10 minutes.

This presentation focuses on Monroe, Mich., details, so you’ll need to think through your local circumstances if you live elsewhere.

I am available to give this presentation live in the Monroe County, Mich., area., and already have some local appearances scheduled this spring. When I gave the program at Dorsch Memorial Branch Library on March 10, it ran about 50 minutes with questions, answers and some show-and-tell.

(Update: The Walgreens EasySaver rebate program that I mention in this program was discontinued in April 2009.)

If you, or a family you know in Michigan, is receiving food assistance (aka food stamps) via the Michigan Bridge card, the monthly allotment amount for that program is scheduled to increase on April 1.

The increase will be 13.6 percent as compared to what the families have been receiving.

The Center for Civil Justice in Saginaw, which is part of the Michigan Food Stamp Partnership, sent that announcement this week to the media. Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm also has an announcement posted at michigan.gov regarding the increase.

This additional funding was made possible by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as the president’s economic stimulus package.

In the meantime, the Center for Civil Justice reports many working poor families who are eligible for food stamps are still not yet using the service. Last fall, there there was a change in how the day care expenses were calculated in the eligibility formula – making it much easier for working parents to meet the requirements.

“Families who were told their income was too high to receive help – even though much of it was going to child care – may now be able to qualify for the program,” said Demetrice Smart, project coordinator for the Michigan Food and Nutrition Program Helpline.

If you need help figuring out whether you or a loved one is eligible, call the Food and Nutrition Helpline at (800) 481-4989 or go to www.foodstamphelp.org.

Now, how can the food stamp program help Michigan families beyond the obvious use of buying groceries at the grocery store?

• A Michigan Bridge Card means your school children are automatically eligible for free lunches at school.
• You can get food and nutrition information services from the Michigan State University cooperative extension service. (They’ll explain the best value for your small budget at the grocery store.)
• You can use food stamps / Michigan Bridge Card to purchase groceries from Angel Food Ministries, which has monthly deliveries in Monroe, Dundee and Lambertville.
• You can use food stamps / Michigan Bridge Card to purchase groceries from Great Food for All, which has monthly deliveries in Dundee.
• You can use your Bridge Card to get a discounted yearly pass to Michigan state parks such as Sterling State Park in Frenchtown Township. (If you don’t have a state park pass for 2009 yet, you might want to wait to see how the proposal for free admission for Michigan residents works out.)

I have other resources and links at my food assistance sidebar and my grocery shopping on a budget sidebar.