Grocery Store Money Saver Idea!

So each time I run to the grocery store I always grab salad. The country boy in our house has fallen in love with vegetables and insists on a salad each night with his dinner. After a year or two of coaxing to give salad a try I won't be complaining for the side dish that always appears on our plates.

I tend to like to grab the bagged salad. I always go generic but I do grab one to two bags of romaine lettuce. At $2.89 a bag that's close to $12 a month that I spend on lettuce. Sometimes it's more because I'll throw in a bag of spinach. I don't know why it's taken so long for the saver in me to switch ways!

Last time at the store Tony was with me and I priced bunches of romaine, uncut, unwashed, just plain. To my surprise there was a HUGE difference! I should have known considering the mark up on all other washed and pre-cut fruits and veggies is HUGE! I guess I just figured lettuce was the cheaper of the options. WRONG!

Today at Sprouts I picked up a head of romaine lettuce for .88 cents! For that price I picked up two. Here are the beautiful and fresh heads of lettuce.

When Tony and I got married we registered for a salad spinner. After a couple of uses it took to the bottom of the pantry. Well not anymore!

First I chopped up one head of lettuce into the same small sized pieces that come in the bagged lettuce.

Then I threw it all in the salad spinner basket and gently rinsed the lettuce.

After that I spinned it dry. Time taken: 5 minutes. Money saved for two weeks worth of lettuce: $4.02 (yes I'm that exact!). Not to mention I got sooo much more lettuce buying a whole head. I only chopped up one but after I spinned it dry I put it in a container to keep it fresh.

Tony came home and his eyes lit up at the fresh, green lettuce as well as the amount of money we saved. If you already do this, great! If you don't give it a try!

My New Must Have...

OMG. I think I just found something that would make my two week meal planning so much faster/efficient.

I was random blog grazing this afternoon and came across this:

You can buy the magnetic weekly meal planner note pad (for 25 weeks) and a magnetic shopping list pad (50 sheets). I yelled out to Tony who was in the other room that I found something I HAD to have. His response:

"How much is this going to cost me?" <--He knows me too well.

Lucky for him the meal planner pad is only $16.99 and the shopping list is $10.99. I'm so pumped about this because my meal plan list is usually my shopping list but it will be SO great to see exactly what I need for weekend breakfasts, snacks, and desserts. This is taking my planning and budgeting to a whole new level because I can try to eliminate some of the last minute stops to the store for a Saturday afternoon lunch! As a teacher, I think I love this so much because it is a lot like a lesson plan book where you see your week at a glance. When you plug it all in you know exactly what you need to prepare and you know what your days will look like. If you want to purchase it go here.

Here is something I got from a meal planning site that explains why it's so great to meal plan. I can vouch for most of these reasons.

See, while weekly menu planning for non-families is a rare topic around the blogosphere, it’s just as monumentally helpful for post-collegiates, office workers, struggling singles, and young couples. It even offers extra benefits, mostly involving time management. Like:

• You’re saved from 8pm post-work dinner freakouts, because dinner is ALWAYS planned.
• Ingredients are guaranteed to be on hand.
• Cooking goes much faster, since you go in knowing how to prepare a meal (by instinct or through print-out recipes).
• You eat healthier, as home-cooked meals are generally much more nutritious than calorie-laden takeout or heat-and-eat dinners (Hot Pockets, Hungry Man, etc.).
• Grocery shopping goes waaaaay faster. You go in knowing exactly what you want, and don’t have to blow an extra half-hour wandering around. Case in point: last night, using my weekly menu plan, I did all my shopping in 59 minutes, door to door, WALKING. In that time, I hit two stores, the further of which is about a half-mile away. Woo!
• Extra trips to the grocery store are mostly eliminated.
• You can plan for leftovers for office lunches. This is huge, personally speaking, because turkey sandwiches get tired 40,000 times in a row.
• You always have food for those bag lunches (the night before, no less), saving you $30 per week, or around $1500 per year.
• For budgeting purposes, you can pretty much estimate the cost of your bill to the dollar.
• There’s less food waste, because you’re buying only what you need.
• It allows for variety during the week, since you’ve got all the ingredients on hand anyway.

Let me know if you decide to get one of these or give weekly meal planning a try! Happy Friday and Happy Planning!

What's for Dinner?!?!

This is a question I can only handle once MAYBE twice a week. I probably started planning out our meals weekly about three years ago just out of a desire to try new recipes and not spend $100 bucks each time I go to the store. It's really helped us stay on budget, stay on task at the grocery store (no random packages of oreos in the cart), have whole meals, and stress less during the week because of extra trips to the grocery store during rush hour or figuring out what to eat at 8pm that night.

I always wonder how other people figure out what they need when they're going down the aisles like me at HEB. I see some have lists and some just have that look in their eyes like they know exactly what they're there for. For us it goes something like this:

Around Tuesday of that week I start making a list of meals I'd like to have the next week. A lot of times it revolves around a craving or a new recipe I find online or from a friend. I ask Tony if he has any special requests and he makes up a list and emails it to me at work (during the school year) around Wednesdays. Poor guy, because I get to nix or approve his requests but most of the time the meals he wants I'm up for that week.

After that, I go through our pantry and fridge to see what I'll need for the meals. This week it looked like this:

Pot Roast: roast, potatoes, carrots, onions, beef broth, can of corn for side

Chicken Fajitas: fajitas, onions, rotel for rice, bell peppers

Meat Loaf: ground beef, seasoned breadcrumbs, egg, onions, potatoes for side

Stuffed Pasta Shells: low fat ricotta, low fat cottage cheese, shells, Italian shredded cheese

Penne pasta: shredded cheese (I already have spaghetti sauce and pasta)

We leave a couple of days (usually Friday and Saturday nights) open for dinner out like Chick-fil-a, Taco C or somewhere sit down.

After the list is made I do my grocery shopping on Thursdays. I don't know what made me pick Thursdays a while back, but I remember when we did it during the weekend I felt like it took away our free time and we had that dreaded "ugh, we have to go grocery shopping" feeling looming. Not to mention the crowd at our store is TERRIBLE during the weekend. Plus, I've found that I don't mind doing my shopping on Thursday afternoons because it's almost Friday and that's enough to put me in a great mood (and do our laundry which is also on Thursdays).

At the store I'm a big deal finder. I full on believe in coupons and always check the "coupon tree" before I get started. I grew up watching my mom clip coupons and it's something I laughed about in college, but today I totally use them. I don't care if I have millions of dollars one day, if I pay $1.00 more for something because I didn't check for a coupon and I find out it'll bug me then like it bugs me now! Habits are habits! We also buy generic for most of what we use to cook. Tony was a big name brand boy when I met him in college so I was surprised how easily he took to the generic world. He LIVES for finding deals now and was blown away by how much he spent buying name brand things when most of the generics taste just as great!

When I get home I unpack everything and usually by then Tony's home and he splits up all the meat for the different meals for me. If I buy a large pack of chicken breasts he'll ask how I want them split up and cut and then put them in freezer bags for meals that week. While he's doing that, I'm rinsing the fruits and veggies, and putting away the groceries. I've also started recycling thanks to one of our neighbors who made me feel guilty for living in our home for 6 months and never using our bin. It really is amazing how many things can be recycled that I use to just chunk in the trash.

All in all our system works pretty well for us and I'm lucky to have such a great partner who helps out so much.

Something I've started doing is making Sundays the day I pre-cut all the fruits and veggies for the week. I love cooking big meals and having leftovers for the next day's lunch, but I've found that I dread it a little more if I know that on a Tuesday night I have to cut up meat, dice onions, and slice up bell peppers. Having them pre-cut cuts down on prep time immensely and leaves us with more time to hang out and do what we want.

And if you know me, you know, I DO WHAT I WANT!

After I cut everything up I put them in Tupperware and stash them in the fridge for that week's meals.

Right now we have diced onions for the meatloaf, sliced onions for both the pot roast and fajitas, carrots ready to go in the crock pot with the pot roast and strawberries for the morning parfaits.

After that, I usually just put a pizza in the oven! It's an exhausting few hours but TOTALLY makes the rest of the week go by pretty smoothly.

I still wonder how others, especially those with a few kids, do it. We try to cut down as much prep time and trips to the store because we know that one day when we have children we won't have the extra time to slice, dice, and run to the store for a meal so we might as well get in good routines now. Plus, we like to eat big ol' real meals!!!