Meals.planned and groceries bought. $74.93
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Week 2 check in. Groceries this week were only $24!
- Groceries: $396.87 / $800
- Eating Out: $35.34 / $250
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Week 2:
- Kale salad once this week
- Rice and bean game going strong.
- Dry January got a temporary hold during the snowstorm. No regrets.
- Spent: $49 at the international grocery store (olive oil, cheese, phyllo dough, cardamom) plus $30 snowstorm takeout courtesy of our neighbors with good snow driving skills
Total for the month so far: groceries $305.71 restaurant/eating out $30
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So, bad news - last year when our freezer was on the outs we thought stuff had stayed frozen. But we ate some food we saved from the freezer and it didn’t agree with us. No one is deathly ill, but if sweet potato fries from that freezer almost made GM keel over we are pessimistic about anything like, meat or whatever.
So now I need to go through and get rid of anything I’m not sure is post-trunk-freezer.
I guess that’s one way to clear out the freezer but it’s not a good way of saving money.
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Week 2: I didn’t get take out at all this week! A truly incredible achievement for me. (I’d like to thank my pantry and my mom’s lasagna.) I spent about $74 dollars on groceries and ate down a bunch of cans of soup I had hanging around.
Tracking my food expenses is going well. I keep my excel sheet with the grocery tracker open on my laptop, so I see it at least once per day. It’s so nice to see how much I’m spending.
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Week 2:
$66 groceries: Fresh supplies to make avocado/sweet potato/black bean tacos for lunch, and butternut squash/lentil stew for dinners…we haven’t restarted cooking club for 2024 so doing two options because the same thing for 8-10 straight meals would be a little much even for me (things like stock, dried beans, lentils are all out of the freezer/pantry). Also eggs and cheese for breakfasts, cream for tea and hot chocolate given upcoming cold streak, and a little bit of wine stock-up since they were having a sale and I used up the couple bottles of red I had on mulled wine at the end of last year. I’m hosting cooking club this week to restart, but aside from more fresh vegetables (asparagus) everything for that will come from the pantry/freezer since it’s good weather for risotto.
$6: Spiced cider while out running errands
I think I also owe ~$30 for my portion of happy hour+friend’s birthday dinner, but the person who paid the tab and said we should Venmo them hasn’t given us a total yet
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second check-in:
Delivery: $0/ $20 
Drink more tea: 8/15
Eat vegetables: 13/15
Check food stashes: working on this! started going through my work stash
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Second check in: menu plan tweaked a bit as we moved some things up to eat sooner but fridge looking good. Plus i froze a bunch of things before they went bad! Need to menu plan for next week (usually go Wednesday to Wednesday).
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Week 2:
Trader Joe’s: $120
King Soopers: $22
Take out sushi: $90
Credit from Factor, the meal prep service I was using last month, for meals that were tossed for food safety : +$30
Total: $192
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- Takeout 2x per week - check!
- Grocery shop 2 days per week - went technically 3 days, but one of those was just stuff I had forgotten the previous day, so eh
- Meal plan - check!
- No stocking up - check! Cleared out even more spices and excess tea.
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Check-in 2:
Overall goal is to streamline food storage and get the items we already have into the rotation. Subgoals:
Defrost and inventory freezers
Inventory pantry food
Incorporate inventoried food into meal planning
I checked roughly half the pantry storage last week, the other half and the basement freezer will be done next weekend
Things used up in meals: Some eggs slightly past their best before date turned into son-in-law eggs, two pieces of cod I had for a while and two dried limes used up in a middle eastern fish stew and I made some sweet potato spinach dal to use up some lentils.
Things that I would like to cook with next:
Miso paste
Bonito flakes
Rice noodles
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I continued my slow development of my price book by checking prices for Cascade pods. We run the dishwasher 2-3 times a day, 7 days a week, so this matters! Costco is better than Subscribe and Save or Target.
I also checked Cheerios (also best at Costco) and Celestial Seasonings (Subscribe abd Save is not cheaper than Sprouts).
Cost is only relevant for items that keep a while that the Boy won’t buy if I already bought them, so… fairly limited categories.
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Update…
Oh, #3 should be NOT use as much processed foods. Doh. My broken foot is mostly healed so I am cooking more. My husband doesn’t cook from scratch as much as I do.
#5, I suck at checking in. Still getting used to doing this.
New one!
6. I saw a youtuber (Becoming a Farm Girl) talk about setting up a price book. Basically track the cost of like 10 or however many items you want to track the price of for the year. The idea is twofold, to track how much you spend and also to help you spot the trend of when certain groceries go on sale.
A good example is how pork used to go on sale in November or April because that’s when farmers used to slaughter them. Now its not quite as seasonal, but there is a trend. It’s also why McRibs show up in the fall and spring and also partially how ham became an Easter staple. Surplus of pork at cheaper prices.
Its really interesting, at least to me.
- I might get back into using Imperfect Produce, not sure. It used to be a great deal but truthfully, last year it wasn’t as great of a deal. I’m going to investigate.
So, Ta-Da, I did a check in!
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3rd check-in:
- About $58 was spent on groceries this week. That puts us at a total of $371 for the month. I do not think we will stay below $400 as there is plenty of January left.
- I did, however, cook a lot–at least three dinners, plus a loaf of bread!
- We are in the PNW and we were in a bit of a panic-shop mode before the bad weather hit. I am blaming that for being over-budget.
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Week 3 from the freezer: bag of pepper and onion mix for hot sandwiches before the storm hit on Sunday
I ate weird freezer leftovers for lunch a couple times.
More peppers in some homemade pasta sauce.
Um … there was something else, but I didn’t keep up this post all week like I did last week, and so I can’t remember.
I packed the freezers both full of frozen bottles of water, and moved pretty much everything from the fridge freezer to the deep freeze in preparation for the power loss we didn’t have with the ice, so it was really hard to get to things in the freezer and we ate more from the pantry. Ok, cool.
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We’ve spent $300 thus far. We’d probably have spent more except that it’s very cold and so we have been focused on the pantry rather than going for walks to the store. This is why we’ll need a longer run of data.
condiments: 76
produce: 59
carb: 54 (I decided the shredded coconut goes here because it will be used to make granola, and if I were buying granola, it would obviously be a carb)
dairy: 46 (butter is here)
protein: 38 (we’ve been eating down the freezer, this is arguably artificially low)
beverage: 27
I have learned I do not like spam, so that was a good experiment to make and clarify for me. Laksa paste is on the menu for this week, though we probably won’t finish it. The fava beans will only be eaten by me, and I don’t think I want to do it a week I’m also eating legumes for lunch, so undecided when I’ll open up the can.
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- Takeout 2x per week - honestly have no idea this week was a blur lol. But I think check?
- Grocery shop 2x per week - shopped 3 times, whomp whomp
- Meal plan - check
- No stocking up - check
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Week 3:
-Kale/new vegetarian recipe twofer! I harvested a bunch of chard and kale before the ice storm and made a spanikopita-adjacent recipe that was very tasty (the cookbook calls it “chard utopia” in the slantiest of slant rhymes).
-spent $0 on groceries and ate almost exclusively from the pantry/freezer due to aforementioned ice storm.
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Week 3 update:
$27: My portion of happy hour+combined birthday dinner (this was from last week, got total to Venmo at this week’s happy hour)
$10: This week’s happy hour
$30 (ish, Simplifi seems to be having a bad day at the moment so I don’t have the exact total): Groceries…fruit, more eggs, a bunch of yogurt since it was on sale, and couple energy drinks for skiing although the ski plans got shifted to next weekend. And I still need to get some easy snacks for lunches on the lift, but no plans to do that today.
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Week 3: Tracking continues to be a success. I spent $96.39 on food this week ($53.62 on groceries and $42.77 on takeout-food-for-pickup). My closest coffee shop closed for renovations this week, otherwise I would’ve spent more on takeout than groceries.
I’m learning that I really will walk through ice, snow, and negative-fahrenheit temps to get the exact meal I want. And somehow that feels just as hard as cooking at home? idk man.
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