Welcome new friends and returning readers!
This is my 3rd round of recording and photographing a full week of what groceries I bought, what I made to eat, and how much it all cost for my household of 3 adults.
And what’s really exciting, is I’m going to keep track for a full month to give a fuller picture of what my shopping and cooking habits look like, so look out for 3 more consecutive weeks of posts!
If you are stuck trying to figure out “What’s for dinner?” or looking for ideas to stretch your grocery budget further, I hope you can find something within this blog that either helps or inspires you!
As for some disclaimers:
- We all have different dietary needs.
- We all have different preferences.
- We all have access to different food sources.
- We all have different ideas of what a healthy diet looks like.
If you just looked at this short list of disclaimers and you are still saying, “Yeah, but…” then I encourage you to have a look at my original post where I talk in a little more detail about the hows and whys of my personal meal budgeting and planning – the most important word in that sentence being “personal”. There is no rule book to any of this after all, so take what fits into place for your life and feel free to leave the rest behind =)
On to the food!
Since most of us don’t use all of every item we buy from the grocery store every trip, and because most of us have various staples in our pantries and refrigerators that we pull from here and there, I’m going to give you 2 different cost totals. The first being what we actually spent on our grocery shopping for the week. The second number is going to be the cost per meal, including everything down to oils and spices. I know I sometimes get frustrated when I read a blog or watch a video of someone sharing their “extreme budget meal planning”, only to find that they don’t include “pantry items” or other items that they already had on hand.
If I paid for it, it gets counted in the total!
Also note, this week is a little abnormal because I’m counting 8 days instead of 7.
So the total amount we spent on groceries at Aldi was $25.25.
The total amount we spent on groceries at Food Lion was $31.38.
The grand grocery total was $56.63.
And the total spent for all of our meals from Wednesday dinner to the following Wednesday lunch was $62.04.
The total includes an additional $5 to account for random bits of food here and there that weren’t “family meals” that we all ate. Because most of our lunches are leftovers, this usually is just a handful of lunches and snacks consisting mostly of eggs, bread, pancake mix, PB, etc. I did recently bother the others in my house over a couple weeks to keep track of everything they ate outside of family meals, so I feel my estimate is spot on enough that I won’t make them do it every week haha!
I can’t find the recipe for the baked zucchini fries… I don’t understand what you are costing it with…