They’re based in Chicago but they ship - and big bonus, they have a “flat pack” option (bags of about half a cup of spices) that are always free shipping.
I find they’re good quality, both individual spices and their blends (Pilsen and Lake Shore Drive are household staples for us). Not sure how they compare cost-wise with Penzey’s.
Also, if you are ever in Chicago, visiting their IRL store(s) is super fun!
Oh, I happen to also be based in Chicago
Penzys Spice Co is doing 2 - $25 gift cards for $35. Accompanied by this email, for those who are unaware of the kerfluffle.
Ty!
I thought it would be fun to review some of the random foods I’ve been buying during my convenience/fun grocery spree from the last two weeks.
Bag salads continue to be the perfect no effort meal, except the caesar salad one because it’s all romaine and it’s super boring/not that good. Also the poppy seed dressing is too sweet.
Bugles are even more delicious than I remembered and everyone should eat them.
Buying an entire box of pop tarts seems like a good idea at first and is really fun until you are like 4 pastries in and then you realize you’ve made a huge mistake but you’ve already committed and so that’s how I ate a whole box of pop tarts in a week.
French dressing is disgusting and not at all french. I think the french would be outraged by it, frankly. IDK what I expected, but it was not maraschino cherry sweet dressing. Salad should not be sweeter than ice cream and why is it radioactive red?
Plain unsweetened cherry juice is awesome when mixed with seltzer. 10/10 will buy again.
Frozen tater tots are amazing in the air fryer and everyone should eat them.
Brioche buns from Aldi are pretty good but not great.
Skyr icelandic yogurt from Aldi is 100% not icelandic yogurt in any fashion, but it is slightly better than their attempt at greek yogurt. I will stick to non-Aldi name brands for yogurt because I’m a fussy b.
Those candies that look like skittles at Aldi do not taste like skittles, or anything really, other than sugar.
The fruit snacks from Aldi are good and pretty close to Welch’s brand IMO. Will buy again.
Frozen jalapeno poppers are always a good idea and it’s criminal they don’t come in family size.
Frozen waffles are stupid. You can’t heat them in the microwave so I had to do it in the oven which made the cooking process longer than if I’d made eggs. Also they taste like air and lies and I was hungry like .5 seconds later.
Store bought salsa is acceptable provided you add a minimum of two raw jalapeños to it (seeds included) otherwise it is basically a jar of tomatoes.
In summation, my skin has never been dryer, I’ve never been thirstier, and I’ve never pooped so little in my entire life. It was a super fun experiment though! I highly recommend it if you’ve never done it before!
I just made the mistake of buying the sweet kale salad kit with the poppyseed and had to toss the dressing because I think I just don’t like sweet salads
I love this idea of convenience/fun grocery shopping. I might give it a try one of these weeks! Also yes to tator tots in the air fryer! So good.
Ooo, yes you should totally do it! Yeah that dressing is really intense. I sometimes use my own dressing and just take the greens/toppings from the bags because there was another one like that (I think the dressing was called “sweet onion”) and I just couldn’t get through it, so now I taste the dressing first, lol.
I haven’t bought frozen waffles in a million years, but I used to heat them up in the toaster and that worked perfectly. Then I’d top them with peanut butter so it was more of an actual meal.
“Taste like air and lies” 
I also don’t like the dressings that come with bagged salads. Gonna need to find some cherry juice.
I’ve never seen a French dressing like the one you described, the one sold here in bottles labelled “French dressing” is quite different. The French would probably still be disgusted, though
I bought $126.06 worth of groceries at our coop. After my senior discount, bag credit, ecoupon, and $4.76 worth of “points” used, my out of pocket was $120.31 .
I also bought lemons, limes, raisins, cider, bulk cornmeal and cocoa, coffee beans canned cat food, 2 frozen burritos, 2 frozen tamales, 6 pot stickers (.75 each), antispot liquid for the dishwasher, and a small pkg. of caramels to munch on.
The antispotting stuff I usually can’t find the brand I like. I use 1 squirt a week and it lasts about a year. I consider it a luxury, as no one but us sees the dishes and we don’t use glasses at all.
The caramels were also a mistake, organic goat caramels $5.69 for 6, sigh. They were good, but I won’t do that again!
I bought ground beef, chicken thighs, chicken bones for soup and stews, bacon, and Canadian bacon (instead of ham). Everything except the bacons were under my “budget” limit of $8/lb. The bacons were an indulgence. We obviously can live without them.
My “normal” for this usually bi-monthly buy is 1 package/5 lbs chicken thighs/bone in, 1-3 whole chickens, no soup bones, no pork. The soup bones are the cheapest available form of chicken. There’s enough meat on them to easily make soup or stew. I bought the bones to compensate a bit for the pork indulgence, rather than buying the whole chickens I normally do. It didn’t cover the difference of course. But it does also have the happy consequence that it takes up less space in the freezer.
This was a combination shop: long-term bulk buying: meat, bulk dry pantry goods (cornmeal and cocoa) and day to day groceries.
The coffee is part of our the coffee hunt. We’re trying to find the cheapest, always available, deluxe coffee we like. There’s a roaster in the same town as the coop. The coop sells their coffee in 5 and 10 lb bulk bags. It’s cheaper, but we have to find the coffee/roast we like and make sure that we like it enough to drink it for 3 months straight.
Coffee from the localish farm we use is about $13/lb. That’s the cheapest we can find the roast we like from the local college town roaster. We can buy bulk coffee at 2 places, the small grocery and the small health food store for $10.99/lb, not from the same roaster.
The coffee I bought yesterday was fair-trade and on sale, $8.99/lb.
There’s three roasters near here. The closest is 10 miles away, sells to the public, and I haven’t looked there yet. We use about 2.5 lbs monthly. I’d like to buy coffee at $10/lb, for $25 a month, or less. Assuming I have the freezer space, I’d be happy to buy 10 lbs or more of coffee at once, if it was cheaper. I’d have to time it so that we didn’t do this in the spring - early summer when the big freezer isn’t available. Also, I’d have to find out when they stock things, so we’d get it as fresh as possible.
We spend much more when I’m shopping because I do things like buy 8 cans of sockeye salmon because it is on sale. Even the person at checkout mentioned we must love salmon.
40.74 paid, 33.50 saved.
I made the jump to ordering groceries again from what was once a CSA model, then a social enterprise and now I’m not sure what they have grown into but they do good stuff.
We used to get a mixed box years ago but when I tried that the other week it didn’t work so well. I’m not sure if that is fussy kids or be our oven is broken or both. This week I just picked and chose what we wanted which works out more expensive but also we will eat it all and it is 
food.
Hard to see are the grapes and olive and rosemary sourdough.
$135
We will still get pasta and bread for the kids elsewhere.
Well crud. The four year old is into the olive sourdough and the croissants that I ordered to qualify for free delivery are really really delicious.
I’ve been doing lots of small grocery shops recently, but had a big shop today (three stores!) so here’s my haul:
Harris Teeter:
Aldi:
Global food store:
Receipts:
Total: $57.54
I had Hubby run the numbers in Quicken. So far this month we’ve spent $143 on groceries. So today I renewed my Costco membership ($69 CAD) and put in an order for $227 worth of food and cleaners. $40 is a year’s worth of laundry detergent, so that will be subtracted. So that’s approximately $400 spent of our $500 budget. We only need perishables for the rest of this month. We should be okay.
somehow we have spent 460 on groceries thus far. I know it’s a double birthday month (accounting for ~85), but we still have two weekends.
We had a lot in our freezers and cupboards and have been working our way gradually through them.
We spent $36 on perishables yesterday. So…$436 spent so far. $64 CAD left in the budget.
