Pointless Rambling About Groceries

Someone was asking me yesterday how we manage, with the kids, because her groceries for two are at least $100 a week plus a massive run to BJ’s every three months that includes three months worth of meat for the freezer.

That made me wonder what I do spend.  Probably not as much as they do, overall.  When I stopped and spent $10.14 yesterday for 5 lbs of potatoes, 3 lbs of carrots, a few pears, a yellow pepper, garlic, a pint of cherry tomatoes (which I hope are as good as the grape tomatoes the kids eat like they are candy) and a head of lettuce, I was thinking it might be interesting to keep exact track.

One thing that happens to us is times of too much food.  Last night I made an impressively good $1.69/lb steak into small, moderately spiced pieces, 1.8 lbs worth, and we had them in soft taco sized tortillas with beans, cheese, lettuce and sour cream.  It was fantastic.  Mainly you could taste cumin, but besides that I used garlic and onion powders, red and black peppers, chili powder, ginger, and allspice.  The last item being a new acquisition, which I bought recently along with a new ginger to replace the empty one, turmeric, and sesame seeds, which besides as-is can be used to make sesame paste.  We could have just chowed down on the meat, it was that good.  But I digress.

There is enough meat left for another meal.  I have a roasting chicken in the fridge, though it still could be frozen, or could wait days more to be cooked.  That’s a couple meals.  I had been thinking Deb should make a bean dish Wednesday, thus the pepper and fresh garlic that isn’t happily growing sprouts.  And we have some lunch meat, which is a major splurge and displaces eating leftovers for lunches, let alone the potential to be supper itself.

We’ll get through all that and then be like “what do we eat, we’re out of food.” Mind you, “out of food” means that if we couldn’t leave the house or obtain any supplies, we could last at least a couple weeks as long as there was potable water, and gas for cooking.

Anyway, we eat pretty cheaply.  You’ve seen how little I try to pay for meat.  The chicken in the fridge is because it was 69¢ a pound; under $5 total.  We do a meatless night regularly, all veggies and rice or Rice-a-Roni.  Or one of Deb’s bean or bulgar wheat dishes.  Or pasta, quesadillas or burritos with no meat. 

We buy a lot of cheap brands, which in some cases are our favorites.  Wal-Mart has the best frozen veggies (the basic peas, corn, lima beans, French green beans), except that Hannaford beats them for frozen broccoli, which we get for convenience in making chicken broccoli alfredo.  Francesco Renaldi makes the best spaghetti sauce, almost as cheap as Wal-Mart’s, which also happens to be acceptable.  I adulterate it so much it tastes similar whichever I start with, but some are easier, and closer to eating right out of the jar.  It’s not “groceries,” but for the most part Wal-Mart’s diapers are fine, even great.  BJ’s has the best unscented wipes, but Wal-Mart’s are good too.  Beats buying Pamper’s Sensitive, which we originally used and highly recommend.

On the other hand, there are certain things in which I have unerring brand preference.  Heinz ketchup, for instance.  I price it only compared to itself, for the best unit price buy.  Jif peanut butter.  Geisha solid white tuna.  It took a long time for me to accept paying more than $1.00 a can for tuna, but to have some on hand, I’ll pay the more normal $1.29 and just buy extra on sale.  We don’t eat a lot of that, but the kids just love it.  They also love ”tuna beans,” which we called creamed tuna and peas and ate all the time, usually on toast, when I was growing up.  I usually cook, and am good at coming up with non-recipe stuff out of the blue, but that’s one of Deb’s specialties and it’s amazing.

Perhaps the toughest thing is keeping the kids in fruit.  They adore apples, so we go through a lot of those.  They also like pears, nectarines, oranges, and so forth.  Obviously we wait for them to be in season and even then they can be a treat, but blueberries are one of sadie’s favorite things in the world.  Grapes, too, which they devoured a couple pounds of, on sale last week, in a few days.

We buy very little convenience food.  In a sense, we buy most of our chicken in convenience form, in that it’s 10 lb bags of frozen boneless chicken breast for a little over $2/lb.  Even when it’s on sale, rather than being what to me is an incredible circa $4/lb (hello? chicken is supposed to be the cheap food...), boneless chicken breasts from the supermarket, there’s massively more trimming involved, and it’s not worth the extra effort to repackage and freeze it myself.  I think that’s one key to saving money; not getting much of the most pre-prepared foods.  But there are times for that, and times for knowing it’s worth the trade-off.

Anyway, off to do some work and/or surfing.  I need to investigate the Digital Sender jamming problem some more, though I fear I will end up on the phone to support, or even making a service call.  We have a great company not a mile away that’s the vendor and also services the HP printers and, of course, this too.  Same place where my mother bought my first typewriter when I turned 18.

Oh, as for the perception that the kids cause a huge grocery bill, not really.  Not yet.  If you count diapers and wipes as “groceries,” well, that’s like $30 - 40 a month I’d say.  We didn’t buy formula to speak of.  Babyfood is cheap and a very brief phase.  Of the real food they initially eat little, to the point where you’re effectively feeding a little of what you’d have otherwise eaten and could live without.  Even now they don’t eat that much, with their love of fruit being the expensive part.  It’s more noticable than it was, but in some cases it also means we use more of what we buy, without what we buy changing.  We do need more snack foods, like crackers, but it’s not that bad.  I’m sure it helps that they eat almost anything.  Speaking of which, I’d been threatening to buy parsnips sometime, so Deb and the kids could try them, but they’re outrageously expensive.  My grandfather used to grow them, or it might not seem so bad.  A week ago Sunday they had some at dinner at my grandmother’s, so we found out that everyone liked them.  Though Val preferred the broccoli.  Go figure.

1. Grape tomatoes are better than cherry tomatoes.  I bought some of each, and far preferred the grape ones.

   Also the cherry ones squirt everywhere.

   Posted by  on  02/07  at  08:16 AM  from  Marietta, GA
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