The sixth week of our $25 grocery budget challenge is finished, and I will no longer be posting my grocery hauls and menu plan here on Patty Cake’s Pantry. This challenge has been a learning experience for all of us, and I was surprised that I didn’t feel like we were deprived during this time. Except for my refusal to buy soft drinks, no one […]
This is going to be my last week posting this experiment, but I plan to continue with a more restrictive grocery budget until the week before Thanksgiving. I think that I will follow Amanda’s lead, and allow $30.00 per week for our family’s groceries, but I know that as long as I have a plan, and stick to it, I will be able to adhere […]
The fifth week of my challenge has come and gone, and we did much better this week than last, but we continue to have difficulty with adhering to our menu plan. Sue Chef pointed out that it has been a month, and we have still not had pulled pork sliders or Linguine with Clam Sauce. She’s right, but fortunately, the ingredients for those two dishes […]
After last week’s disaster, and the previous two weeks of being over budget, I knew that I needed a better plan, so I headed out for my shopping trip with a list in hand that I intended to follow. This week I skipped the produce sale at Vallarta, and shopped only within a few miles of my home. I was determined to stick to within […]
This week’s review is about the cost of not having a good plan. You will recall that during my third week of this challenge, I went to the store without a plan. I purchased what was on sale, and what seemed like a good idea, but I didn’t have a plan for how I would be using those items. Because I didn’t have a plan, […]
After spending more than twice the allotted $25 last week on groceries, I was committed to do my best to adhere to my budget this week. The problem was that this is an Aldi week. Once a month, Bus Boy has a doctor appointment in Civilization, and there’s an Aldi a few miles from the hospital. Whenever he goes to the hospital, we swing by […]
Up to this point, we have done fairly well with adhering to our $25 grocery budget, and we began this week’s shopping trip feeling optimistic, but because my work schedule has been crazy, I didn’t have the opportunity to really think and plan before heading to the grocery store. Instead, I headed to the store without a plan, and I hadn’t consulted my family regarding […]
This concludes the second week of our $25 dollar grocery budget. Honestly, this hasn’t really been that difficult, except when you consider that I went a little over budget. No one is complaining, and no one is requesting food that we don’t have in the house. In fact, I think that everyone has been fairly content with what we’ve been eating.
The first week of our plan has gone very well, except for the fact that we didn’t eat everything on our menu. We still had some leftover roast beef in our refrigerator, so I turned that into chimichangas. We also had leftovers from some of the meals, so we will be carrying over a few of the menu items for this week.
Life happens, and the best of plans are sometimes disrupted. That’s how life is around here, too. We had a menu plan and the groceries to carryout that plan, but a special request by one of the kids, the discovery of some leftovers in the fridge that needed to be used up, and a couple of late nights at work resulted in deviation from the […]