Wednesday, December 10, 2008

How Far Can $10 Go?

I cashed my $10 check and went traipsing off to the grocery store last night. I spent $3.13 on one bottle of tonic water, one bottle of ginger ale and a bottle of grated horseradish sauce. I have $6.87 left to spend on food between now and Monday morning.

My biggest complaint about my local grocery store is it is next to impossible to purchase things like onions, all purpose potatoes and some other basic veg unless they are pre-packaged in bags of 3,5 and 10 pounds or four to five peppers to a shrink wrapped carton.  This seriously irks me. I'm trying to be a good, thrifty person and all I needed was two very small onions. I could buy a 3lb bag of onions for $2.69 or a big sweet onion for 99c per pound. I've blogged about this before. I like selecting my own produce, I like getting the tactile sensation of going through a pile of peppers to find the "right ones". I really wish my local grocery store would have more bulk bins. I left the grocery store without the onions, knowing I had one big one at home I was planning on bringing with me this weekend but decided to use it up instead.
I switched up my meal planning for the week. I had my veggie burgers and fries last night and made a pasta sauce for tonight’s dinner. The purpose of this meal planning is to clean out my cupboards of the odds and ends that are sitting in there that are perfectly edible and not to spend money at the grocery store because I'm to flipping lazy to use my brain to cook out of the cupboard. A couple months ago, I bought some whole wheat pasta. I really don't like it, could be the brand, could be that my palate just does not like whole wheat pasta, but I still have 4 pounds sitting in my pantry (I bought  8 boxes of Barilla Whole Wheat Pasta at Costco thinking it would be "good for me and my diet"-WRONG).  I'll cook it up tonight and have that as my dinner.
The upside to all this meal planning from the pantry is that I am using up food in the pantry and not spending money at the store. I'm trying to see what I can make with the variety of interesting and odd canned and dried goods I have in my cupboard if I decide to swap out my meal plan for the week.

1 comment:

Dawn said...

I am not a big fan of wheat pasta either, but I find if I cook it longer (over cook it by regular pasta standards) some of the grittiness goes away. Like you I think more stores should do bulk produce. As a single woman sometimes I only need 3 carrots or 2 potatoes.