Grocery Spending/Menu Plan | a slight bit of procrastination
On Saturdays, I share my menu plan for the upcoming week along with a photo of my groceries and a tally of my spending. My goal is to spend $100/week for our food, toiletries, and cleaning products. I'm currently in the midst of trying to buy more local, sustainably-produced food while sticking to my budget. Can it be done? I don't know, but I'm going to try, and I'll share what I learn as I go along.
The Shoppping
I went about a week and a half between grocery shopping trips this time around...and of course, whenever I can put off grocery shopping, that makes me a happy camper.
Here's what I bought.
I spent $43.83 at Weis and $68.31 at Aldi for a total of $112.14.
The Menu
Since Mr. FG works second shift, we eat our dinner meal at noon during the week, and at night on the weekends. And our lunch meal happens at night during the week and at noon on the weekends.
We do eat breakfast in the morning, though, all week long!
Breakfast options are homemade yogurt, granola, scrambled eggs, oatmeal, fruit, and cereal.
Lunches will be comprised of sandwiches made with whole wheat bread, homemade yogurt, yogurt smoothies, cottage cheese, fruit, raw veggies, nuts, cheese, and leftovers as necessary.
Here's the dinner meal plan (some of these are meals that got bumped from last week's plan)
Saturday
- Takeout date night for Mr. FG and me, something easy for the kids
Sunday
- French Bread Pizzas (plus chips, dip, veggies, and other such Super-Bowl appropriate snacks)
Monday
- Baked Potato Soup
- Garlic Breadsticks
- fruit salad
Tuesday
- Shrimp/Fish Creole
- Roasted Green Beans
- Buttermilk Biscuits
Wednesday
- Swiss Mushroom Chicken
- Rustic Dinner Rolls
- Spinach Salad
Thursday
- Meatball Subs
- green salad
Friday
- Pizza (hmm. I just saw that I have pizza and subs right next to each other. That might be kind of boring, so maybe I'll switch the order of things up a bit!)
Things are usually quiet around here on Sundays, but you should come back tomorrow because I have a fun giveaway just in time for Valentine's Day!
See you then. 🙂
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Today's 365 post: Check out what Mr. FG made for me!
Joshua's 365 post: I'm a Ninja! In a plaid shirt! With ninja stars!
What are rustic dinner rolls? They sound interesting!
They're from my new Cook's Illustrated cookbook (the one I gave away recently). I've never made them before, but if they're good, I'll get the recipe up here eventually.
Hey, Joshua's 365 link is pointing to a picture from August...Not sure if that is what you meant to link to. 🙂
It's fixed now-sorry about that! Sometimes I accidentally paste the wrong link in when I'm writing up a post.
For the Q & A unless you already addressed them somewhere. Do you and your husband faithfully tithe 10%. I find it so hard to do that! Pre-tax, post-tax? I know you mentioned your husband is generous at work- do you also give to charity?
How much do you put away for retirement- do you do a roth ira or 401k?
Yep, we tithe 10% of our income pre-tax. I'm sure if someone had looked at our finances during our lean years, they'd have said we couldn't afford it, but God has always been faithful to meet our needs.
We give to Living Water monthly, and to other ministries as needs arise.
And yep, we have a Roth IRA through ShareBuilder, an ING company.
Ummm....no animals? LOL...We just got a new, large Aldi in Miami. This is now our second one, and we love it.
Thanks for sharing!
Oh! Is it one of the high-ceiling ones? With the line of windows along the top? If it is, I'm so jealous.
Oh, no nothing fancy..ha, ha. But it is really nice inside. They really did a nice renovation of the previous space (something I love to see...using a pre-existing building)
I just started tracking my spending. In fact, that is what my latest post is about 🙂 🙂 I'm still working on menu planning, but I think I'll do really well, because we have a lot of food at home, in addition to what I bought yesterday. So my shopping trip yesterday, was supplementing what we already have. It will be interesting to see where this goes 🙂 I'm just tracking my spending for a few months, and then I'll see where I can save more money 🙂 Love and hugs from the ocean shore of California, Heather 🙂
You can make your own brown sugar for really cheap! All you need are molasses and sugar. It's super easy to make - 1 Tbsp. of molasses to one cup of sugar and fluff it with a fork until mixed. Just a tip from one frugal girl to another. 🙂
Your menu for the week looks yummy. I'm coming over for shrimp on Tuesday hehehe 🙂 Stay young and thrifty!
I attempted cheddar biscuits today and wish I'd seen your link for the buttermilk biscuits! I went after that dough with a rolling pin but it actually helped them I think but you're right about the little suckers being flat LOL! not much oomph but it was only my 3rd attempt ever at making biscuits and probably the best..they were edible and not hard so that was good! the recipe said to knead 8 times and I didnt' want to handle it much since my mom had always told me not to overhandle biscuit dough - oh well! seems flour is the key to not sticking - learned one thing anyways! 🙂
You're menu plan post are inspiring. One of these days I'll actually manage to make a menu plan, but for some reason to me it's like pulling teeth!
I can't believe I "you're"-ed when I should have "your"-ed! Grammar fail!!! 😛