About $300 on a huge grocery stock up
$129 Iqbal foods (meat, milk, produce, tea)
$32 health food store (yum)
$150 no frills (why is everything cheaper if I get 2 or 3)
I feel like we shouldn’t need anything for a while, but we will need a bunch of stuff next weekend. We were also shopping for MIL which was probably $80ish of our total.
March is also starting out with quite a lot of eating out. And the shadowy one then sees me eating out, and would also like to eat out. And I don’t want to say they can’t eat out because they are doing it solo.
So I need to balance things out to be fair and budget reasonable. I will probably move out one of my lunches for this week as part of that.
ETA: finished the big bag of potatoes (10lb for 2.50?) before they sprouted too badly, which was my goal. Not picking up the flashfood boxes today because I’m not feeling all the immediate prep required - which I guess is also evidence I’m not completely driven by scarcity mindset. Plus I still have cabbage and a couple of avocados. I believe more boxes will come when the fridge is barer.
I spent $73 on Aldi grocery pickup for tomorrow!
We also spent about $80 on restaurants, one was worth it and the other was not, but I don’t think we’ll eat out again for another couple weeks at least.
we are at $316 for the month, with $116 eating out across 4 meals (3 mine, 1 for the shadowy one as previously noted). Two of the meals were good food worth the price. All of the time spent with people at the meals was great. There are two more meals scheduled for this month.
Flashfood $5 boxes continue to be the saving grace of our grocery budget.
Thus far we’ve used this in
I can’t believe how great your flash food hauls are!!!
Does anyone have an app they use for tracking what’s in their pantry? For the past couple of weeks, I’ve either bought extra of something that was in my pantry thinking I didn’t have any or not buy something I needed for a recipe because I assumed I already had it, ugh.
I just started a notion page for my freezer, but still at the experimental stage.
I am working under the assumption I’m going to have to make an air table, but was hoping to not have to venture down that rabbithole
I just do a quick assessment right before I make my grocery list!
And this morning the shadowy one discovered in their backpack a package of bacon that was purchased several days ago, so that was binned. Plus I only spent $8 at the bulk store near us, so they wouldn’t take a credit card and so the shadowy one payed with debit, and I think that will hit us with a $1 fee at the end of the month.
Trying to stave off the scarcity mindset. $6 does not break our budget. I’ll probably spend that starbucks tomorrow because that is where we’re meeting up before going to the out of town yarn event. I just dislike losing money because we were inattentive.
I don’t know if this helps, but I STILL randomly have jags of shame about a bag of groceries containing a whole chicken that got left out when we were first married, 7 years ago. 
so, idk. At least it’s not just you?
It’s so funny how those things stick with us. The bacon wasn’t my mistake, so it’s annoying, but not really a feeling of shame. I did a similar thing with organic chicken breasts over 15 years ago, and I wonder if that has reduced the odds of me doing it in the future - because it bugged me so much.
I am trying to find the balance of not making the shadowy one too stressed about money / my reactions to spending money, while also continuing to actually being conscious about money because it is so easy for me to lifestyle inflate with no increased life joy. And it I’m being careful on grocery spending and then less careful on other things I’m not being predictable/consistent, which is stressful for them.
It would be so easy to spend another $300 - $500 a month on food and barely notice any difference in what we’re eating.
I spent $99 today at Walmart! Not bad since I needed a few pantry items like molasses, I also bought more cheese than usual since we’re out of everything.
$52 for 6 items at superstore 
and a $6 flashfood pickup, plus tomorrow or Sunday we can get the rest at food basics.
If we stick to no frills/food basics/ethnic/iqbal foods and the health food store we are doing well on budget. But my toilet paper and oat milk had been delayed 3 days, plus apples, bread, cereal and bananas for morning.
My store brand eggs are back down to $2.29 a dozen. Still feels too high but better than the double that it was.
I somehow managed to have a $229 Costco trip even though most of the cart was taken up by the cuckoo’s car seat! It was mostly food but I also got 2 cartons of baby formula, a box of wipes and I finally found the reusable zip top bags @Economista was talking about weeks ago.
I count all that as “groceries” but not everyone would!
Cuckoo is loving baby food which is pricey for what it is, but I have also been throwing miscellaneous canned goods that we have lying around (LB’s high poverty school works with a food charity that sends everyone food) into the Vitamix to become baby food!
If you get glass baby food containers they can be washed and reused as home made baby foods containers. We did that for quite a while.
I just splurged to the tune of $100 for grocery delivery. I don’t know if I should really consider it groceries since it’s mostly premade food, it’s more like restaurant alternative, lol.
Works out so much cheaper though! It is my new system for when things are not great.
We just did a $40 top up, avoiding higher because if everyone is healthy we want a night away, and if not, we could need convenience foods
