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Once-a-Month Shopping and Cooking Checkpoint: Month 1 Completed
It has been about a month since we started our experiment with once-a-month shopping and cooking. We spent some major moolah at the grocery store and then my wife spent one very long day cooking. To get the full scoop, check out the posts where I mentioned getting ready to try it , where I discussed our first weekend , and then gave an update on our experience after a week .
So after a month….
It’s been about a month since we did our big shop and cook, so that means it must be time to hit the grocery store again. The only problem is that we still have a ton of meals left! My wife originally made 32 meals (she divided 2 of them in half for freezing) and we still have 12 left in the freezer! I guess that means we will need to adjust our strategy slightly. Remember, the month plan calls for literally 30 meals – one for every day. Our family just does not eat that many meals at home in a month. We occasionally eat out, eat with friends/family, usually eat Wednesday night at church, etc.
Our non-meal supplies are running out (I’ve been dangerously low on salsa for a week or so), so we definitely need to get to the grocery store again. We certainly do not need to do a full shop and spend another day cooking 30 more meals, however.
We’re altering our once-a-month plan
For this coming month, we will continue to do the once-a-month plan (I absolutely love not having to go into the store for the entire month!) We will do our "staple" shopping the same way we did last month. By staples, I mean all the normal stuff you need for a household – cereal, milk, fruit, veggies, snacks, drinks, toilet paper, salsa, beef jerky (all the essentials). We will push off the meal shopping and cooking for at least another 2 weeks. When we do another round of meal cooking, we will only do a 2-week cycle and make 14 meals. For our family, I think this will still last a month. And it will take a lot less money to buy and a lot less time to cook 14 meals instead of 30! We are also going to take another trip to the store at 2-weeks for fresh stuff like fruits that won’t last a month and milk because we don’t have room to store a month’s worth.
Hopefully this month we’ll save some money
I felt like we spent a lot of money on groceries last month – as I mentioned, we spent over $700 during our shopping weekend. We actually did pretty well, there were very few things that we had to get during the month (other than milk…a lot of milk). This month, since we don’t have to do the meal shopping, we are looking to spend much less. My wife took a trip to the grocery store yesterday and spent a little less than $100 and I have a Click-N-Pull order in at Sam’s Club for ~$150 plus tax. That is obviously much less than we spent last month. Even with another trip in the middle for milk and fresh stuff, I am hoping that we will get nowhere near $700 this month.
What have we learned so far
The most obvious takeaway is that we drink a tremendous amount of milk – but I already knew that. We simply can not buy a month’s worth of milk as we would not have the space to freeze all of it. So, I’m going to start off with 8 gallons and hope that lasts us at least half of the month.
The main thing I learned is that I consume a vast quantity of salsa each month. I totally lucked out and found the kind of salsa that I like (second to my homemade salsa based off my buddy Spencer’s recipe) at Sam’s club so I ordered a jar. Have you ever seen a 47 oz jar of salsa? It was a bit larger than I expected. The bad part is that I ate all of it this month – in fact, it was basically gone a week ago!
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