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Our First Attempt at Once-a-Month Shopping and Cooking
Well, it was an interesting weekend at our household. We started off with some grocery shopping on Friday, a very long Saturday of cooking (for my wife), and a Sunday of snow culminating in a snow day for everyone on Monday!
Two shopping trips on Friday
Friday morning we stopped by Sam’s Club to pick up our first attempt at a Click’n'Pull order. We spent $123.60 on an assortment of products. As it turned out, that was only the preview…the main event was to come later that evening. After dinner, my wife, son, and younger daughter headed out to Kroger where the real fun began. After about 2 hours of shopping, we had completely filled up two shopping carts. And when I say completely, I mean completely – the food was mounded up over the top of both carts. The final tally was $582.30! The price was high but the total amount of time expended for all this shopping was not too bad. About 30 minutes to pick up the order at Sam’s Club and two hours at Kroger. I think those numbers can be reduced a bit too in the future once we get used to the routine.
At least when you spend almost $600, you get some minor benefits. My wife stated that she felt like a celebrity. As we checked out, obviously the clerk checking us out was there and they had to have two guys bag and pack it up and take it out to the car for us. And the manager came up and was chatting with my wife and gave our kids stickers and ran back and got us another dozen eggs after ours broke.
When we tell people that we’re attempting this, the first question we usually get is "won’t the fruit and veggies and milk spoil before the month is over?" For the vegetables, we bought mostly frozen ones ready to microwave and my wife saved time cooking buying some (onions, peppers) that were already chopped and frozen. I realize this was more expensive than fresh vegetables, but remember that at this time, saving time was our main focus. We are staging fruits to see if we can stretch out the single shop throughout the month. We bought bananas, apples, and oranges. We will eat the bananas first and then the oranges and finally the apples which should be able to last most of the month in the refrigerator. Finally, we are attempting to freeze extra gallons of milk. The containers bought from Sam’s have a lot of extra space at the top, so we just stuck a few in the freezer as is.
Cooking and Cooking and …
We got started on the cooking Friday evening with chopping and peeling and slicing, etc. We actually stayed up pretty late trying to get a head start on Saturday. I have to admit that at the end of the evening, when I was cutting up seven pounds of cooked chicken breasts, I was oh-so-tired and my back was starting to feel very uncomfortable. I was absolutely exhausted the next morning when I woke up early (seriously, I can’t remember a time recently when I was that tired)
My wife and her mother did all the cooking and childcare Saturday while I was at the Iron Sharpens Iron Conference in Colonial Heights, VA. Yes, I do realize this was terribly bad timing (or good timing depending on your point of view). We had discussed this last week and my wife really wanted to put this plan into action, so she decided to go ahead with her mom’s help instead of pushing it back.
She started cooking around 7 am and took a break around 3 pm to take a shower and get ready to go out. She cooked a little bit more and then had just a few things to finish up after we came back. (Our friend Brian – who also runs LiveForChristResources.com – had his ordination service to officially become a Presbyterian pastor – Congrats!). All in all, my wife spent about 9 hours cooking on Saturday.
An exhausting weekend is over, now we’re hoping for some benefits…
The (interim) final verdict is so far, so good. My wife had an exhausting weekend but is still optimistic overall. As long as this saves time during the month cooking, then it will be worth it. The next time that we do this (which will hopefully be for closer to 6 weeks from now) I will be available and we still might get someone to come help with childcare.
Regarding the once-a-month shopping, unfortunately I do not think that we will be able to hit that target this time. We have already found a few items that we did not purchase and will probably run out of this month. So, that is a bit frustrating, but we assumed that we would not be 100% successful on our first attempt. I am going to try to keep very good records on what we bought and what we still need throughout the month in the hope that we can optimize this over the next few months.
That being said, I still think it will be better than haphazardly going to stores whenever something small is needed. My new goal for the first month is to only take one more trip about half way through to pick up the items we missed.
The review? Two forks up
So far we have only tried one of the meals. We ate "Mrs. Ringle’s Brisket" and it was wonderful . It’s one of those meals where you hope everyone else fills up early so there’s plenty left for you to have seconds (and thirds!). If all the meals even approach that one, I’m going to be eating like a king for the next month or so!
Of course, if all of this effort was just for one meal, it would certainly not be worth it (even as yummy as that dinner was!). So, I will periodically update you on how the plan is progressing and whether we still think this is an idea worth pursuing later on in the month.
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4 Responses to “Our First Attempt at Once-a-Month Shopping and Cooking”
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I am glad to see you posting your trial with this. I was a bit exhausted just reading it! It is really neat to see someone walk through the process. I am tempted to try it myself so I will enjoy hearing about your journey.
D´s latest blog post…Invention Idea
I would like to see a utilization chart in Excel at the end of the month for each item. Maybe you could do that in all your free time now!
I really enjoyed reading this, but enjoyed picturing your family lavishing in the attention at the grocery store the most.
Impressive… we are on about the exact opposite system – we go to the grocery store many times a week… I will take this to heart
ChristianPF´s latest blog post…6 steps to reducing your credit card interest rates
@D – It was an exhausting evening of shopping and preparing food. I’m not sure how my wife was able to stay awake through all the cook the next day but she did.
@Spencer – I have actually started a spreadsheet to try to keep track of everything we need to buy (OpenOffice of course!). But then I found an iPhone app that might work even better
Yes, the celebrity treatment is nice and since I can’t sing, act, or play a guitar, I’ll enjoy this!
@ChristianPF – We considered starting with shopping only every two weeks but then my wife wanted to jump in and do the entire month. It’s kind of a good feeling thinking, “hey, I don’t have to go to the grocery store again for an entire month.” I just hope when next month comes around I’m not completely dreading the trip!