Author Topic: Here what my grocery shopping looks like  (Read 2692 times)

APowers

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Here what my grocery shopping looks like
« on: September 30, 2017, 05:50:15 PM »
Wanted to share my Safeway trip. A sort of response to those "see how unaffordable groceries are these days!" photos that make the rounds.



10lb of potatoes
6¾lb of ground beef
5lb of bananas
2lb of grapes
5lb bag of flour
Two 16oz containers of sour cream
3 cans of olives
3 bags of marshmallows
2lb of tomatoes
2 bottles of ketchup

Total: $35.53

This is more than a week's worth of dinners for our family of 4, plus some stuff that are obvious splurges-- the sour cream, the olives, the grapes, and the marshmallows. The splurge that's not as obvious is the ground beef. It was $2.88/lb, which is a good price for hamburger, but if I was really trying to watch pennies, I'd have bought the chicken for $0.88/lb.

hgjjgkj

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Re: Here what my grocery shopping looks like
« Reply #1 on: September 30, 2017, 06:24:06 PM »
what do you do with the olives and the flour?

Cranky

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Re: Here what my grocery shopping looks like
« Reply #2 on: September 30, 2017, 06:25:32 PM »
I'm guessing you make other little trips?

You don't seem to have any.vegetables, or anything for breakfast.

LadyMuMu

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Re: Here what my grocery shopping looks like
« Reply #3 on: September 30, 2017, 06:29:23 PM »
How do you make 7 dinners out of this? I'm not trying to be snarky--sincerely curious.

mynewchoice

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Re: Here what my grocery shopping looks like
« Reply #4 on: September 30, 2017, 06:52:01 PM »
I'd love it if you would share the recipes / meals that this will make for a week of dinners. Our food cost is one area that we are extremely unmustachian and I'd like to try and improve. I've been contemplating use of Plan To Eat (not free but I have never planned meals and can't complain to my wife about our costs if I don't take an active role) paired with recipes from Budget Bytes.

APowers

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Re: Here what my grocery shopping looks like
« Reply #5 on: September 30, 2017, 07:53:30 PM »
I'm guessing you make other little trips?

You don't seem to have any.vegetables, or anything for breakfast.

True. We usually get vegetables at Sprouts, so that's a different errand, but if I wanted, I could have picked up a couple heads of lettuce for ~$2, and that would have been salads for the week.

Breakfasts are generally oats+milk+brown sugar, so a bulk buy of oatmeal when it's on sale keeps that cost low. When milk creeps over $2/gallon (or when the weather gets cold enough that I don't want a cold breakfast), I just cook the oats w/boiling water and have hot oatmeal.

what do you do with the olives and the flour?
Olives are a super-yummy garnish/topping for stuff like baked potatoes or burritos/tacos. The flour, I actually used today to make bread for dinner-- to go with our lentil stew.

How do you make 7 dinners out of this? I'm not trying to be snarky--sincerely curious.
I don't intend to make seven dinners using only these ingredients. But the quantity of food is enough for more than a week of dinners. We have veggies and other staples already in the pantry that allow me to make a variety of meals instead of the same thing every day.

I packaged the ground beef into 10 dinner-size portions for the freezer. They'll be used in rotation with the other meat (chicken, sausage, pork) from the freezer to eventually be ten dinner meals. If I needed to use this single shopping trip to make seven dinners, I'd have swapped the marshmallows for some veggies, and then it'd be some variation of meat&potatoes or meat&bread.