We had quite a day. It started with our research at the farmers market and the co-op. We didn’t make any purchases at either, because we were waiting to see what our best best would be. Ultimately, we decided to stick with trips to multiple stores to get the best deals.
Today was particularly intense, because we were out of a number of staples that we buy in bulk (coffee, mozzarella cheese for homemade pizza, and black peppercorns). Those are all pretty pricey because we buy enough to last us a little over a month. We also bought a whole chicken that we’ll roast for dinner tomorrow night, then use the leftovers for chicken Alfredo later in the week. We use the carcass to make a gallon of chicken stock.
We went to two grocery stores and Costco for the coffee and cheese.
Our grand total? Still a depressing $91. Sigh. I feel like I’m failing miserably at bringing our grocery bill down to $60 a week.
I know it’s time to make some drastic changes, but I’m just unsure of what my next step should be. Unfortunately, grocery store coupons don’t help us much because the only processed foods we buy are cereals (I do use coupons for that when I have them) and pasta. The rest is produce and fresh meat.
I know that cooking without meat is a big money saver, but we don’t have many vegetarian meals in our repertoire, and the ones we do have require expensive produce like grape tomatoes. Next week we’ll try to come up with some menus that don’t require us to purchase additional meat. We have some chicken breasts on hand in the freezer, but we usually buy some kind of meat each week. I think cutting out the extra meat will help, but I’m just afraid that our meal plans will begin to lack variety.
Anybody have any delicious vegetarian meal ideas to share?!
One thing that helped me cut my grocery budget was to start posting my weekly meal plans online in “meal planning monday” hosted by orgjunkie.com and looking at what other bloggers are serving up for the week.
I stick to my meal plan and only buy things that we’ll consume that week.
It does make sense to buy certain things in bulk though, such as your coffee and mozz purchases.
I’ve also found benefit to calculating the cost of any particular recipe. Some meals are a lot cheaper than I would have expected, and some are much more expensive.
In recent months, we haven’t been too big on meat, and just stuck with cheaper cuts such as ground beef or chicken breasts on sale.
Maybe you could even post your shopping list and maybe we can help you come up with lower-costing substitutions.