According to a poll on the All You Grocery Challenge blog, the two biggest challenges participants anticipate facing are driving past the drive-through and not over-buying. Although we don’t eat out frequently, we also typically don’t count our eating out total in our monthly food budget, so I imagine this will also be the biggest challenge for us. Creating a weekly menu plan and sticking to a budget helps us to avoid over-buying. If we do have excess, we freeze leftovers in meal-sized portions for a quick lunch, and we use these tips I wrote about here for avoiding throwing away produce. For more tips on freezing produce, you can read Kristin’s post here. You can see my weekly menu plan here.
If you took the time to carefully compare the photo above with our menu plan, you likely would notice that we didn’t purchase several items we’re planning on eating this week. This is because in any given week, we eat food from our pantry, food from the freezer and food purchased from the store. All You allows the Challenge participants to create meals using stockpiled items to help keep grocery costs low. I imagine it would be much more difficult to eat well-rounded meals on a budget if all ingredients had to be purchased each week! All we really needed this week was fresh produce so the only coupon I used was a rain check on the chicken.
At the end of the week, I anticipate we will have half a cabbage, a tub of yogurt and most of the bag of chicken, the carton oats and one carton of yogurt leftover for next week. This week’s groceries cost me a total of $34.60.
