Jen's Blog

We went armed with our $80 (combined) and carefully planned shopping list. Since we Sean does a fair share of cooking, the actual shopping wasn’t TOO different. Some notable differences were: 

• Normally we don’t plan out meals so far in advance so it was a lot more shopping. 
• I usually buy a mix of store brand and brand name. I definitely don’t strictly shop brand/ not brand but I don’t think we bought one brand name item (ok the raw cookie dough we bought for dessert was Nestle :) ).
• I had to fight Sean to buy fat free items. I won sour cream and jelly, lost others. 
• No more “convenience buying”. Normally I make my salsa (it’s more delicious and inexpensive) but I would buy a jar of sliced jalepenos that cost $2. 3 fresh ones cost $.25. Also, croutons for the salad are expensive. But we bought a loaf of bread and garlic… a little toasting and butter and voila! We make our own croutons!
• When it comes to buying chicken, I go with what’s easiest. I love my pre-boneless, skinless, chicken breast. It also costs ~ $8. We are having chicken one night, and chicken tortilla soup another. Instead of buying chicken for both of those meals AND chicken broth, Sean bought a whole roasting chicken for about $5. This provided plenty of chicken and homemade chicken broth for the soup.*

When we checked out the total was $65 and some change. We did forget a few more items and had to run back to the store later, so our final total spent = $70.57

Oh and when we were taking the groceries in there was a hole in our bag and the jelly fell out and broke!! It cost a whole $2 and I had fought for the light version. You better believe the replacement one cost $.99 and was not light!