Bread and Butter = Make a Living
Example sentence – Singing is just a hobby. I earn my bread and butter as a sales representative.
Meaning – this idiom means to make enough money for daily life
Other Idioms and sayings with the same meaning – to make to a living / to earn a livelihood / to bring home the bacon
Earn Your Bread and Butter Examples:
1. I live in a town called Chastlecombe, where I create expensive hand-knitted sweaters to sell to tourists. It’s the way I earn my bread and butter.
2. Most polling companies earn their bread and butter from market research.
3. We went into it blindly, just hoping that we could earn our bread and butter.
4. A better government would tackle more effectively the major bread and butter issues which trouble our people.
5. …and move the agenda to bread and butter issues such as jobs for the people….
The examples above are extracted from the BNC Corpus.