Grocery Haul for Two

This week in "Friday in the Kitchen" I'm sharing my recent 

grocery haul with you.  

 

Now that my last child has left the nest cooking and grocery shopping are looking a lot different. As I mentioned on Monday's blog post it's taking me some time to adjust to how much food is enough. My brain still thinks big, the grocery needs are small.

An example of how small is milk. My hubby and I are not big milk drinkers. After a few times of tossing milk that had gone bad before we could use it up we've finally figured out that we only need a ½ gallon every couple weeks. I still laugh at the contrast of many years ago when all 8 kids were still at home and we went through a gallon a day. And even as my kids left home I still had teenagers and they could go through a lot of milk as well. So it's been a process of downsizing the groceries as well as teaching myself to think smaller, as in much smaller.

I thought I'd share this weeks grocery haul with you. Currently I have a lot of food in my freezer and each week I try and plan at least a couple meals using up my freezer food. Of course with my current situation that is even harder to do, but that's the goal. I've had to tell myself to stop buying sales and good deals that I don't need. 🙂

We shop at two stores for our groceries. One is Costco and the other is WinCo. WinCo is a bag your own grocery store with excellent prices for our area (the Pacific Northwest).

Here was the haul from Costco...

I purchased a bag of frozen skinless/boneless chicken thighs (good for quick easy meals), a bag of decaf coffee (hubby drinks half decaf and half regular), a bag of Kettle sea salt potato chips, 2 dozen eggs and 5 pounds of cheddar cheese. The cheese comes in 2- 2 ½ lb bags and I freeze one of them.

The total for this trip was about $60, but this included a package of my favorite Puma brand socks (which were $12.00)...

So all in all groceries were about $48

Here is what was purchased at WinCo...

Mostly it was fruit and veggies. I find if I buy my fruits and veggies from Costco we don't eat them up fast enough. My biggest goal is little to no food waste so we just try and buy what we need.

I still had lettuce and cabbage at home so all I needed was some salad veggies: the tomatoes, mushrooms and cucumber. I also bought an acorn squash and 2 large beets. Since I'm not eating a lot of fruit right now I got enough for hubby's work lunch, the apples, oranges and bananas. 

It was time to buy another 1/2 gallon of milk and weekly we buy half-n-half for our coffee.  We've tried buying the bigger size of half-n-half but find once we open it, it only lasts a couple weeks.  So we buy what we need and know won't go bad.  

Finally I picked up a few pantry items that needed restocking, olives, ketchup and canned milk. I buy the canned milk for those times when I'm baking or cooking something that needs milk and don't have enough.

Oh, I almost forgot.. the cookies! :) their bakery makes some yummy chocolate chip cookies. Nothing beats homemade but when you don't have the energy to make a sweet treat, these cookies do the trick.

The total for WinCo was $26

We still had a lot of items at home that did not need to be replaced this week such as bread, butter, oils, meat (other then chicken), salad dressing, tortillas for wraps, lunch meat and so forth.

Our grand total spent on groceries this week was about $75 .. 

I'm liking the lower grocery bill  🙂