Monday, September 20, 2010

Food Challenge: Week 2 Recap

Hm. This week is iffy. We only spent 35.55 on food we actually ATE this week, but Hy-Vee was having a dollar sale, so I actually spent 82.00 on groceries. True, I got 20 pound of potatoes for $4 and that will last us for awhile (all peeled and frozen and ready to become soup!) and I bought fresh bell peppers (now diced and frozen and ready to be put in baked ziti, spaghetti and lasagna!), and I stocked up on several other items that were on sale for $1 but I overspent.

I'm not sure if I can claim this as a victory or not! I'm going to try to turn it into a victory by spending even less the next two weeks.

Here's the dinner menu:


Sunday:

  • Lunch: ERC's last meal, we took everyone out to Perkins
  • Supper: Due to sickness and general lack of hunger, supper was leftovers from Applebees and Perkins while the kids ate poptarts and PB sandwhiches.

Monday:

  • Supper: Baked chicken, mashed potatoes, corn. Bought: The whole chicken ($4.75, it was on sale for .77/pound!) The potatoes came from our garden and the corn we had on hand.
The awesome thing about this meal - I now have a chicken bone to make chicken broth for potato soup this winter, and a good amount of chicken we shredded and threw in the freezer for later meals.


Tuesday:

  • Supper: Left-over pancakes from Perkins for the kiddies, a bowl of rice for me. Mr. Curly was out of town at a new church board meeting.

Wednesday:

  • Supper: Arby's. It was ERC's last clean up night, and we were in a hurry (told you we justify it way too much!)

Thursday:

  • Supper: Baked ziti. Bought for this meal: Garlic bread, bell pepper, onion, tomato sauce (roughly $5)

Friday:
Supper: Fried cube steak, mashed potatoes and gravy (bought cube steaks, 4 on sale for $4, potatoes $1 for 5 lbs, ate roughly 1 pound, so this was $4.20)

Saturday:
  • Supper: Homemade pizza (bought crust, $1.06)
We will be travelling beginning on Thursday, so like I said, I hope to take my overspending and turn it into major underspending over the next 2 weeks!

2 comments:

Rachel said...

I think that's the biggest challenge of all--how to stock up on grocery deals and stay under budget. This is something Jonathan and I are still trying to figure out---it might be an experiment for us, but we've thought about adding an extra amount per month to our budget for those stock-up opportunities. Grocery deals are hard to come by---and when they come, we want to take advantage! Especially on lean beef and chicken---but that really throws your budget off! Keep up with the experiment, I hope you're having fun with the challenge---

Curly-T said...

We've always had extra wiggle room in our food budget for stocking up on deals. It was eliminated with the $50/week challenge, because I just didn't think about it!
I've decided not to worry about it (this time) and to really utilize it to spend less over the next 2 weeks. After I've been doing this for a month or two, I'll evaluate how it's going and what I might need to change. It's still fun, and has caused us to eat more complete meals!