My default is toaster-oven quesadillas.
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I’m in! I have a few separate goals:
- Keep track of what we’re spending day-to-day on lots of items, including food. How I’ll address it: share our food spending at the end of the month. Maybe more often if I can do it!
- Keep eating down our freezer and pantry stash. How I’ll address it: start meal planning by looking at what we have to eat down, and share it here. Prepare to be thrilled
- Be more intentional about where we buy meat and eggs. I feel much better when I’m eating meat, and I’d like to find a way to get happier-raised meat, ideally in bulk. This might just be buying the happier stuff from Costco, or we might get fancier. How I’ll address it: I’ll keep it on my list of house stuff I want to do eventually. There may be updates here or there may not.
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I’m in too! My goals are:
- use up what’s in freezer/fridge,
- analyze grocery receipts monthly by dividing food into categories,
- look at every item over $5 CAD and brainstorm ways to acquire it cheaper, make it, replace it with something else or drop it out of our diet altogether,
- try to stay under $500 CAD/month for food only,
- meal plan monthly.
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I am in for a few reasons:
- I really fell off the wagon in terms of tracking last year.
- One of my bingo items is to use my food tracker/waste thing again. I made a form for myself and it works wonderfully, but only if I use it. (Odd, isn’t it?)
- I really need to empty the big freezer by the end of April, as the only CSA I plan to join this year runs March to May. (Revised.)
- With DH possibly retiring in July, I may need to have cut my food expenditures to the bone. I do NOT want to do them all at once. We’ve been talking about how to reduce our expenses all around, including the food budget, for a while now.
- I hope that with public accountability, I’ll be less likely to drop the ball on the tracking!
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What’s a small step we can take towards that?
I started by making a list of meals I really, really like to eat. One of them was “cereal.” Another was “grilled cheese.” I’m pretty sure a third was “casserole, nom nom.” Truly nothing fancy.
Then you have the building blocks of what to start making shopping lists for. And from shopping lists come meal plans.
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I am in 
Goal:
Tracking in a more detailed way, especially snack food
Getting spending on bakery goods (cake etc.) and chips down
Categories
Produce & fruit
Meat & processed meat
Dairy & cheese
Bakery
Snacks
Chips
Dry goods
Beverage (incl. Coffee)
Eating Out
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One of my categories I’m having difficulty with right now is water. Seems simple enough in general. However, I don’t, and a lot of folks in Phoenix area don’t, drink the tap water. There are water kiosks all around, which can happen when in a place that doesn’t get hard freezes. They used to be $.25 per gallon at the kiosks to refill a container. There is one place that was $.15. I copped out of that one when they built a nice new one a half block away and splurged on the $.10 each gallon.
A couple of weeks ago the newer ones went to $.30/gal. OMG! I protested. But I need water for coffee, etc. So, I went to the machine up in Payson when I visited Mom. It’s still $.25. However, I’ve forgotten to get water the last couple of times I was up there, and my 6 gal is gone. Enter a 40 pack of bottle water. I drink more water when I have the bottled water, but I may get thrown out of OMD for admitting that.
Now I’m down to the last bottle. I need to get water. I’ll check the formerly cheap place. If it’s still below a quarter I’ll start going there. In the meantime I’ll go to Walmart and get a new bottled gallon of water for $.83, unless it has gone up as well.
And this is why I have an eating disorder.
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Ugh, that sounds hard. I assume this isn’t a situation that could be fixed with a water filter? Our building’s water recently tested positive for high lead levels (due to lead pipes throughout Chicago) and the city actually provided a free Zero Water pitcher/filter, which filters out lead - I guess most filters do not, YIKES, didn’t know that. The replacement filters aren’t cheap, but, well, the lead here was REALLY bad, so, worth it for us.
But if it’s a case of the water there tasting awful even when filtered, or something being in it that can’t be filtered out, then, never mind. 
Just sharing because I’d never heard of Zero Water before.
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The filters don’t really do much. It has a lot of minerals and such and I don’t know what the real issue is. When I first moved here I tried filters because I was used to them working back East. Actually, at $.25/gal it is cheaper to buy it at the kiosks. I may have to do a new evaluation if prices keep rising, though.
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My son is leaving January 22nd for 3 months. Right now for the two of us we spend around 350-400/month. My goal is to spend 150/month for myself. Now that I am older I just don’t eat as much as when younger. It will be interesting to see if that’s accurate.
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I am in. Despite getting most of my food from free sources, I need to pay more attention to what I do spend each month. And also how I manage food generally. For example, I cooked veggies with the new slow cooker overnight last night, and it didn’t work out too well. Which means I not only wasted most of the veggies sadly, but I also wasted about three hours on food prep and clearup last evening. And was genuinely deflated with the results this morning. Not good. So I definitely need to get smarter and wiser, and calmer, in all positive ways with food…
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I would also like to join in, as one of those folks tracking grocery subcategories:
Meat
Dairy
Grains
Veggies
Fruits
Snacc
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I’m trying to reduce my spending on work snacks. Goal is zero but I’ll give myself one emergency snack purchase, just in case of starvingness. I think I’m going to work from home more so that will help, but I’ll probably drive more often when I do work from the office which means I will be tempted to get breakfast on the way in. Work snacks are totally my kryptonite not sure why even if I’ve properly fed myself on my way out, chai and a donut totally call to me.
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I have the exact same thing. Otherwise whenever I go to meal plan for dinners I’m like…what do I eat that’s not pasta??
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I’m in. My goal is to spend no more than $200 on food this month. I’m going to aim for $150 on groceries and $50 on restaurants/takeout. I plan on eating down the pantry and freezer as much as I can. I’ve also recently been impulse buying groceries, so part of my goal is to not deviate from my grocery list.
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I’m in!
My goals are:
- Continue to stay below my $250 grocery budget
- Find at least three new ways to incorperate veggies into my lazy/regular meals
- Use my beef stock ice cubes up
- Try one simple instapot recipe
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I want to do this for sure! I focused on groceries for budgetober and it went great.
I’m also struggling to figure out how to cut costs because my partner makes more than I do and has never needed to live on a super low income, so he likes to just buy whatever he wants and doesn’t understand why I would be super restrictive since we are able to be relaxed about it. Our costs definitely creep up, and I worry about a rug getting pulled from under us someday and not remembering how to live on creatively cooked potatoes and ramen!
And I know myself and even if I decide to divide up the groceries more granularly instead of just splitting them, I WILL NOT be able to resist it when he makes a frozen pizza or brings home takeout and I’d planned to eat something more fiscally responsible but less delicious.
Meal planning in October helped a lot, so I’m hoping we can get that habit back in the new year. It fell away during the holidays. Gotta stick to the grocery list again!
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So, the Walmart, a large one, nearest me was totally out of gallons of water. I ended up getting 2 40-bottle cases of 500 ml bottled water. I got 2 as they seemed low on stock and I worried it might get difficult to find. The American way, hey something might be on low supply so I need to buy twice what I need just in case.
Those and a gallon of sweet tea were $11.83.
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This made me so sad to read! So much work down the drain! I don’t know if this is helpful or not, but almost all slow cooker recipes can either be done 8 hours on low, or 4 hours on high. I’m always more happy with the turnout when I do 4 hours on high instead. I’ve never cooked veggies alone for that long though. That’s long enough to cook a thick piece of meat to the shredding stage. Did the veggies end up just totally hammered and soft/gooey?
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I was wondering if you could purée this to make a soup (add cream, or coconut milk, and/or broth, and/or cheese).
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