How do you all approach sale items and stocking the pantry?
My approach up until now has been to shop exclusively to a list which is created off of a meal plan and to ignore sales. I'll buy a 2 for 1 long life item if I've got one on my list anyway but besides that I only buy what I need at the time.
I'm starting to think that I might be missing out on an opportunity to lower my grocery bill over the year by not buying bulk staple items when they are on 50% or better sales. Or perhaps I should look at the grocery store sale catalogs and meal plan around those?
I mostly just look at the sale flyers and buy what's on sale, making meals around that stuff (deciding what I can use that I already have, or buying as little as possible in addition to sale items).
For example, last week zucchini was on sale for $0.99/lb, carrots for $0.79/lb, and tomatoes $0.99/lb. Store-brand taco shells were a box of 12 for $1.
I can use all those vegetables, together with some cube steaks in my freezer and some canned mushrooms in my pantry, plus some rice & an egg that I already have, to make a stir-fry over fried rice, all I need is stir-fry sauce. So I buy the cheap bottle of stir-fry sauce.
I have ground beef in the freezer, sour cream & cheddar cheese in the fridge, so the taco shells & some of the tomatoes will go towards tacos. (Bought an extra box of shells since we like tacos often.) If I didn't already have cheese & sour cream, I'd still have bought the shells, but just kept them until I could get the cheese & sour cream on sale. They won't go bad.
Some of the zucchini went toward zucchini parmigiana, since I already had breadcrumbs, an egg, flour, and tomato sauce.
We also eat zucchini "pasta" by spiral-cutting it with a tool we have, so that will be one meal, too.
Some of the carrots went into a roast (we had 3 lonely potatoes that needed used up, and a roast in the freezer). The rest were eaten as carrot sticks as a side dish to something else.
That's 5 meals based off of what was on sale + what we had. Only had to buy one thing extra (the stir fry sauce).