Saturday, June 18, 2011

Food Budget

Everyone talks about ways to save money on your grocery bill... I'm not going to try to re-invent the wheel. But... I will tell you what we do.

We buy most of our food in bulk. We purchase our meat once a month.We have a local meat market that is pretty great. Dumas is a short drive for us and well worth it. They offer large bundles but we haven't committed that much to are our carnivorous ways just yet so we usually buy 1 pound of bacon,  5 lbs ground beef and 10 pounds of chicken breast.

Every two weeks we hit Sam's club. I stock up on the huge bags of shredded cheddar and mozzarella and a very large block of colby cheese. Cheese freezes well so it gets divided up and pulled from the freezer as we need it. The cheese usually lasts close to a month. I usually get a large bag of tilapia and salmon for the month as well. We also buy most of our produce in bulk. Strawberries, blueberries, bananas, apples, salad, and oranges. We usually will munch right through this in about a week to a week an half but I try to freeze some to stretch us out to two weeks. We buy the large bags of garden rotini pasta and brown rice and that lasts us a long while... maybe 3 to 4 weeks.




After I divide out all my meat, I count how many dinners I have. This month is 11 chicken dinners and 6 to 7 beef dinners. We eat tilapia or salmon twice a week.   The rest of the month we will eat pasta, pizza, egg, beans and vegetable dishes for dinner. If there is a special occasion I will stop back at Dumas and pick up steaks or lamb.  I make meal plans, but rarely stick to them. We stop at the grocery once a week and spend $40-$50 in little things like milk, condiments, butter, etc. We are a family of 4 and we spend roughly $350 a month in groceries. I have gotten this much lower in the past but everyone complains about being hungry and hating what I make. This is what works for us for now.

1 comment:

  1. very cool. I love hearing how you do stuff. It's very inspiring.
    :) Jenn
    (((hugs)))

    ReplyDelete