I walked you through what types of things we buy, but now I want to show you how we use it. Every week when we go to the store, I’ve been recording what we buy and I’ve kept a running list of dinners. Keep in mind that we strategically purchase and save things, so there may be things on the menu that were purchased a week or two prior or that were part of our original stash. For this reason, this is a running list of three weeks of shopping and detailing one week of all of our meals.
Jan 10th our purchases included:
Bread $3.29
Strawberries $5.99
Raspberries $5.49
Bananas $1.39
Pork tenderloins (on sale for $3.49 a lb and there were 8 of them in the pack! We still have 4 in the freezer!) $18.19
Carrots $4.99
Cauliflower $3.49
Snap Peas $4.29
Blueberries $7.49
Total was $54.61
January 17th we got:
Eggs $6.99 for 18 eggs
Franks Hot Sauce (yeah, I regret blowing money on this, but we were out of hot sauce!) $5.59
Brussel Sprouts $4.29
Honey (around $10)
Cauliflower $3.49
Chicken $16.57
Tofu (4 pack) $5.49
Bread $3.29
Toothbrushes (came with a bonus toothpaste and had a rebate) $9.99
Total was $65.70, but we had roll-over from the week before
January 24th:
Strawberries $5.99
Raspberries $5.49
Avocados $5.99
Hummus $4.99
Bread $3.29
Milk $5.59
Cheese $7.16
Cauliflower $3.49
Half gallon of heavy whipping cream $10.49
Eggs $6.99
Total $59.47
In a sampling week, I recorded the following meals:
– Monday breakfast: Cheerios with honey and fresh fruit
– Monday lunch: I had a meeting at work with lunch served, Mr. Jacks brought a sandwich and fruit. Girls had pizza Monday at school which we paid for at the beginning of the year.
– Monday dinner: creamy chicken with carrots and wild rice. (I couldn’t believe that I actually did use one of my wild rice packs!)
(Adapted from this recipe, I omitted mushrooms and added carrots because that’s what we had). Sorry I don’t have an image of the finished product. It seems that photography wasn’t high on my priority list once this fragrant dinner was done. Imagine this creamy sauce over chicken and wild rice.
– Tuesday breakfast: hard boiled egg and Cheerios with honey
– Tuesday lunch for girls: carrots with ranch dippers, banana with sunbutter, blueberries, leftover wild rice and hard boiled eggs.
– Tuesday parent lunches: leftover dinner from the night before
– Tuesday dinner: Corn tortilla quesadillas with broccoli (I was too tired to make the dinner we planned. Luckily, I had stuff for a quick easy dinner. We had a frozen broccoli stash.)
– Wednesday breakfast for girls: Cheerios with honey, strawberries
– Wednesday lunches for girls: banana, carrots and ranch dippers, blueberries, sunbutter and jelly sandwiches, strawberries
– Wednesday lunches for parents: Leftovers and fruit
– Wednesday dinner: Italian dressing chicken and artichokes with pasta (or chicken and strings as we call it)
Italian dressing chicken is one of our family mainstays because it is so easy and delicious. I sautee some onion and then remove it from the pan. Then I cut chicken into bite size pieces and season with some montreal seasoning. As it is beginning to cook I add a generous amount of Italian dressing (maybe a quarter cup?). We usually use Newman’s Own or the big bottle of Italian dressing that you can get at Costco. We cook it down until the dressing thickens and carmelizes. Just before it’s done we add artichoke hearts and/or sundried tomatoes if we have them (which we don’t right now). While that’s cooking, I cook some pasta. In 15 minutes, you’ve got dinner! We’ll use other veggies sometimes, but the tangy-ness of artichokes and sundried tomatoes seem to go best.
– Thursday breakfast: Steel cut oats with Kodiak berry syrup and fresh berries
– Thursday lunches for girls: raspberries and blueberries, sunbutter and jelly sandwiches, hummus with snap peas and carrots
– Thursday lunches for parents: leftovers
– Thursday dinner: Tofu stir fry with vegetables and rice. This was a delicious dinner with plenty of leftovers!
– Friday breakfast: cinnamon toast and hard boiled eggs
– Friday lunch: leftovers for everyone with fruit salad added to girls’ lunches. We really have to eat all the blueberries now or they’ll go bad! We’re going for zero food waste with this budget.
– Friday dinner: pork medallions with fresh vegetables and mashed potatoes (remember that huge bag of potatoes we started with?)
– Saturday breakfast: waffles with fruit compote and powdered sugar
– Saturday lunch: leftovers for parents (we try really hard to cut each piece of meat in half so that we can get two meals out of it) and veggies with hummus and fruit and cheese for girls.
– Saturday dinner: crispy fried tofu with creamy brussel sprouts and bacon (don’t tell anyone but I batter the tofu in flour and then crisp it in the leftover bacon drippings. This makes it taste absolutely amazing!)
– Sunday breakfast: eggs and hashbrown potatoes with bacon
– Sunday lunch: dinner leftovers and fruit
– Sunday dinner: Cheesy cauliflower casserole with panko and brown rice
It seems a bit tedious when you write it all out, but at the end of the week we actually have plenty of food to roll over into the next week. We try to make sure that anything that’s less fresh gets strategically used. This means we can always choose from a variety of fresh vegetables and fruits and that we don’t have to fall in the rut of sunbutter and jelly every day for the girls. Any meat we buy, we separate and freeze individually so that we don’t have to defrost a whole bunch to make a meal. You may also notice that we don’t mention snacks. The girls get two snacks a day provided by school, while the parents have virtually eliminated snacks from our diet. This has been so good for me! I feel so much better without processed carb
I’m still keeping track of meals going forward so that I can continue to share sample weeks with you. It’s hard to tactically plan our food out for the week, but we’ve become far more efficient at it. The unanticipated outcomes were our better health and the almost total elimination of food waste. There have been a few nights where the planned meal is just too hard to do if I get home late from work. Our back up meals end up being really simple, like the quesadillas we had above or grilled cheese and tomato soup. We try not to do back up meals too often because I fear that it will burn us out on sticking with the plan.
This past week has been the hardest so far. I’ve been working so much that I haven’t been able to dedicate as much time as I should to planning. It’s only when I fail to plan that I’m tempted to cheat and break the budget. Mr. Jacks and I so far have been able to keep each other on track. He’s really stepped up and tried his hand at planning in my absence.
I hope this helps make extreme food budgeting seem more attainable. If you have suggestions for great meals that fit in budget, please share them!
kiwi / 511 posts
Wow you have it budgeted out pretty well very impressive. I don’t keep a weekly total like you do but based on memory I am slightly higher than your budget. I could probably trim more if I used our BJs membership a bit better. But for now I am comfortable with where we are.
I try to meal plan monthly (minus Sat/Sun since I will buy what is on sale when we hit the store) and shop weekly. Most of are meals are ones that can be made and on the table in about 30 minutes.
I had to laugh at your comment about not getting into a sunbutter and jelly rut. My oldest will eat a soynut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch every single day (minus Fridays which are pizza day at daycare). I don’t fight this because he gets a variety at other meals and it makes it easy on me. My youngest is a lot more flexible.
I had my Mom send my copy of Bread and Jam for Frances from when I was a kid and we read it to the kids. http://www.amazon.com/Bread-Jam-Frances-Read-Book/dp/0060838000
pomegranate / 3643 posts
So when I was in JVC, we had a budget of about $14 per person per week for food! Looking back, I don’t know how we did it. Okay I do – oatmeal for breakfast always. Or pancakes. We ate at work. And we got a lot of the leftovers from the food pantry. (That might sound bad. But food pantries get some stuff they won’t use – way too much bread and yogurt.)
But for dinners we are a LOT of beans and lentils. Lentil potato and sausage soup is super cheap and filling. As is black bean soup – my favorite! And breakfast for dinner a lot. Also pizza is pretty cheap if you make the dough and sauce yourself.
Chana masala is another good cheap and quick meal. The kitchn has a good recipe. Add spinach!
Another really cheap meal is eggs in purgatory. Heat a jar of spaghetti sauce in a pan. Crack some eggs on and cook until over easy. Serve over toast. So good!
apricot / 364 posts
One of the things that has helped us stay on budget is to buy a whole chicken when oriced well. I put it in the crockpot with some seasoning and nothing else for about 5 hours on low. Then shred all the chicken and freeze the broth in 1 cup increments (get anywhere from 2-4 cups from just cooking the chicken without even adding water). I do this on a weekend and it makes cooking throughout the week super easy if you can just throw some shredded chicken into a dish or make chicken salad if really running behind.
pomegranate / 3225 posts
You arey hero. Thanks for the ideas. I just blew $200 at whole foods, I really need a plan!
blogger / pineapple / 12381 posts
@kml636: don’t feel bad! It really took pre-planning to get to this point. I’m on service right now and it’s so much harder. If we weren’t so committed, I’d feel like ordering a pizza! But with eight days left til C section, we’re working hard to keep our eyes on the prize.
To everyone else, thanks so much for the suggestions! Breakfast for dinner saves us on lazy nights. I was wondering if anyone was going to comment on the ridiculous amount of eggs we’ve been consuming, but they are such a great source of protein.
kiwi / 511 posts
@Mrs. Jacks: Eggs really are not terrible for you at all especially if you aren’t doing a lot of bacon and sausage with them. http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-cholesterol/expert-answers/cholesterol/faq-20058468
I miss eggs.
blogger / pineapple / 12381 posts
@Mrs.Maven: I know. They are good, but it’s just a large part of our diet right now. And you can see that we are using bacon– mainly as a flavoring… we’ll use a few strips to season a whole dinner… So I don’t even feel too bad about that either. I think my body is healthier than when we started this experiment. I’ve lost a little weight and that’s without restricting portions or feeling hungry at all. We have cut out sweets at home, and I’m glad about that.
pomelo / 5084 posts
This is amazing. Thank you so much for keeping such detailed notes. I am saving this!
eggplant / 11408 posts
@Mrs. Jacks: amazing job, Mama! I also really like polenta with eggs and pasta fagole soup. We are also roasting a chicken every week and stopped buying chicken breasts. Do you have trader Joes by you? We love their “bacon bits and pieces”, which is really just pieces of raw bacon that aren’t pretty enough to sell as slices. Much cheaper!
Question: have you decided how long you will keep up the meal budget being so low? It strikes me that this is a sustainable thing for a short term, but I don’t know how I would do it long term!
pear / 1696 posts
@Mrs. Jacks: This is amazing, I wish you could come over and do a personal consultation and teach me how to do this! Seriously you should start a business doing that (that and being a baby naming consultant, of course). Our grocery spending is much much more then yours, sadly.
My favorite healthy quick and cheap recipe is this Beef stir fry with with Curried Cabbage:
nomnompaleo.com/post/41781593486/whole30-day-29-garbage-stir-fry-with-curried
apricot / 287 posts
I love the simplicity of only shopping at Costco and rotating through what you have stocked at home! I used to do a lot of couponing but it takes a lot of time to make a shopping list, gather coupons and shop at multiple stores.
Do you keep track of the prices so you can estimate what you will spend in a given shopping trip? Do you do all your meal planning first then shop for what you need?
Thanks for a great post, can you continue this series indefinitely?!
blogger / pineapple / 12381 posts
@lady grey: I bet we could get yours down. I’ve cut my sister’s in half. She’s not quite as low as we are, but she shops Whole Foods ;). Thanks for the recipe. I have a huge head of cabbage this week so I’m going to see if it will work with what we have.
@LovelyPlum: great tip on the bits and pieces! As for sustainability, we’re in this for the long haul (at least through the summer so we can build a tiny cushion). What I’m thinking I may do is to keep the budget the same, but allow myself to replenish staples like rice above our weekly budget, so that we have a stock to work with. Not to exceed our $250/month. Right now we are technically coming in at $240 a month… So $10 extra for staples every month should be enough to keep the pantry going.
@Veggiemama: without shopping mainly one store and only once a week, we would blow the budget. We do occasionally shop whole foods on Wednesday nights for their meat sales, but otherwise we’re pretty strict.
Anyone have great uses for potatoes? My stock needs to move!
blogger / pineapple / 12381 posts
@Veggiemama: there’s a great website that tells you Costco prices. It was last updated in November, so fairly accurate. I use that to go I. With a rough estimate for the things on my list and then I go in with a calculator and my phone to document what we buy.
pomegranate / 3643 posts
@Mrs. Jacks: beer cheese soup, potato soup with bacon, shepherd’s pie.
pear / 1696 posts
@Mrs. Jacks:
Smashed Potatoes with crème fraîche
http://www.thekitchn.com/recipe-smashed-potatoes-157613
English jacket potatoes
http://joannagoddard.blogspot.com/2014/08/how-to-make-english-jacket-potatoes.html
blogger / pomegranate / 3044 posts
Nice breakdown! Mr T and I started the whole30 in February and it’s super expensive unfortunately
I plan to work on cleaning out our basement pantry in March!
apricot / 287 posts
@Mrs. Jacks: Neat, could you share the website? I started making a spreadsheet of Costco prices so I could compare with other stores and stick to our budget, but it would be nice to have a resource to help estimate when I am making my shopping list.
I’ve switched to using only cash for our groceries/household expenses which along with meal planning has helped immensely. You can’t spend what you don’t have in your wallet!
blogger / pineapple / 12381 posts
@Veggiemama: http://queenbeecoupons.com/costco-price-list/
guest
Not sure if you like curry, but one of our go to cheap meals is sweet potato lentil curry. 1 cup red lentils, 1 cup frozen peas, 1-2 diced sweet potatoes, 1 can coconut milk, 1 cup water or broth, 1 tbsp curry powder, ginger and garlic to taste. Cook all in a big pot or crockpot until soft (about an hour but you can’t really overdo it) and serve over rice or pita bread. It also is something that you can throw in extra things (we often add kale or spinach or sub potatoes for sweet potatoes) and also goes well into a gallon ziploc into the fridge (minus liquids) to be cooked later.
apricot / 347 posts
I guess groceries are really cheap here by comparison- I was shocked at how expensive your list was for individual items. We spend about that on food per week but buy double. Eggs $1.66/dozen (on sale, obviously). Strawberries, always under $2/lb.
blogger / pineapple / 12381 posts
@mrsrugbee: wow! That’s amazingly cheap! Where do I need to move?
pomelo / 5866 posts
@mrsrugbee: our strawberries are $4-7 and eggs are at least $4.
Costco is almost always cheaper for us, especially the eggs. IF we don’t waste the food. LOL at the wild rice comment. I always ‘save’ mine too. We use the breakfast for dinner as a back up too.
apricot / 347 posts
@Mrs. Jacks: @808love: I find that’s around what things cost at the “expensive” big name grocery stores here. I only shop on sale and at ethnic stores where fruits & veg are cheaper. Its also been my experience when traveling (LA, Vegas, Cape Cod) that you can save quite a bit when you commit to shopping in season and on sale.
http://www.supermarchepa.com/eng/specials/february-2-2015/samson.html