the quality of being economical with money or food; thriftiness.

Frugality.

Through the wonderful rabbit trails of Pinterest, I ended up on a page reading many many many comments on a post in regards to CHEAP grocery shopping.

Some of the commenters proclaimed a food budget of $60-$150-$200.  PER MONTH.

That floored me.  The past couple of weeks our grocery trips had inched toward $200.  For a week.  Now, those were both really good weeks where we still had meals to make at the end of the week. (Rather than after 4 days we don't have anything else to make for dinners!)

So, I was inspired.  Greatly.  And motivated.  It is truly unreasonable for us to be spending that much money on groceries. Granted, some of those items were diapers, toilet paper, and other non-food items, but the claims of the thrifty were that their budgets included ALL those items as well.

Today I scoured the sale ad.  I loaded digital coupons.  I went through my recipes and found the very thriftiest meals I could find while still giving us SOME variety, (not rice and beans EVERY day).  I went to the store with high hopes. My meal plan:

Pintos, cornbread, potatoes, and greens
Salmon, veggie, baked potato (salmon was from a couple of weeks ago in the freezer)
Chicken and rice casserole, green beans
Denver Bean Soup
French Toast, bacon
Tacos, guacamole, corn
I already had made today's meal so I didn't plan anything (Cottage Pie)
And I figure we will definitely have some leftovers.

I plan on baking some bread this week, homemaking the tortillas as well. My cart included only smoked sausage, a whole chicken, bacon, flavor meat for the beans, ground turkey, a few canned goods, a couple of frozen goods, milk, cheese, avocados, simple salad greens and some discount cucumbers, three pears, potatoes, onions, garlic, baby wipes, a couple yogurts, a can of broth, applesauce, peanut butter, a clearance stocking stuffer item, bananas, lunch meat, hmmmm can't remember what else but not much else.

And checked out with a $130 total.

sadness. :(

Okay, so there were SOME things I got that weren't on the list.  But they were incredible markdowns that WILL serve to stock up and be used later. I could have had tacos without guacamole.  We could have several items without cheese.  I didn't have to buy the cheap markdowns. I also didn't have to get salad fixings, but I really want to attempt to stay low calorie with these cheap meals for myself so a small portion plus a salad will maybe help me do that.

I am hoping that because some of these are items that will last a long time (a big thing of peanut butter, a HUGE jar of minced garlic, big bag of pintos) that my total will be less next week.  I really sincerely hope that I can get our weekly total at least down to $100.  Sadly, it seems that might be as low as we could go.  Maybe I can do better by bulk buying some meat at Aldi.