Food in April

I have to say I'm getting pretty proud of myself and my ability to keep receipts (knock on wood) so I can keep track of what my family is buying and eating. So here's our April Update.

Costco

You'll notice the INSANE amount of onions and potatoes we bought... especially considering we are only 2 people. We were trying to run some errands really quickly and only wanted to make one stop... and we were out of onions and potatoes so we decided to "experiment" and see if buying these items in bulk is smart for us. We still have at least half the potatoes and onions leftover at the months end, but i LOVED not running out of onions. I like to toss them in a lot of things and having them around and not running out and having to pay $1.69 for 3 tiny ones each week is awesome. As for the potatoes, we are still trying to dent the bag... but SCB loves how big they are... and the fact that I made some really Delicious mashed potatoes one night for dinner. We also realized that its smarter for us to buy hot dog and hamburger buns in bulk since we don't buy bread in the store. The buns come in handy for pulled pork and shredded chicken burgers when we have run out of homemade bread and i'm too tired to make some. We just make sure that we make at least one "bun meal" a week and store most of them in the freezer. So far, so good there.

I'm going to rant now:
The only thing that makes me unhappy about shopping at Costco is the "welcome people" who make SCB take out his Costco card every time we enter the store. Our Costco card is our AMX card because we hate having 50 different cards in our wallet so we just store our AMX card since its got the Costco membership account stuff on it... and having to get it out and wave it around just makes me unhappy. 

Memo to workers-- we aren't going in to steal free samples or mess around. Sometimes SCB wants to go in there just to get milk and cheese and we don't need a cart but its annoying to have to take out our credit card to show we are members... you should recognize us... because its the SAME LADY EVERY WEEK who rolls her eyes at us when we go inside. It would be different if there was a sign saying you must present your membership card to enter the store... but its not there... and its not legally required for entry into the store. You can go in there for vision appointments and to buy liquor because there is a state law saying you don't have to be a member to go in there an buy liquor... so stop harassing us! End of rant.

Fresh & Easy

Again, I love how we would have spent almost $150 in groceries, yet got it under $100 by not clipping a single coupon. I literally saved $44 in coupons by installing an app on my phone and printing the weekly email coupon that comes into my inbox. I scan the bar-code of the coupon from my phone at checkout and BING money in my pocket. The only coupons that take a bit of effort are the "made for me" coupons since I have to scan them for each item that I buy.

The more we shop around and with the summer weather on the way, we will probably see less and less shopping for produce at F&E because Sprouts generally tends to have a better selection and better prices, but other than that we love the store. We finally broken down and bought burgers in the sleeve because at checkout I realized one day if we spent $5 more we could use a $10 off $50 coupon and would get them for $5 (our general rule for us to buy meat is that it needs to be $3.00 a pound... sometimes $3.50 and the burgers are WAY over that-- but with the extra coupon we could make it happen.-- I'm a burger snob... I don't like the costco sleeve ones taste because they shrink down and aren't as flavorful as ones from Fresh & Easy). We would like to just make our own burgers, but with our current grill, they don't stay together when they are fresh and its a fall apart mess.

Everywhere Else (Walmart, Sprouts, Target)

We bought an extra gallon of Milk at Target because SCB made both Congo bars and Lehi Roller Mills Double Chocolate brownies back to back and we went through almost 2 gallons of milk in a week and needed another one to get us to our next bi-weekly Costco run. 

We hit sprouts because they had strawberries on sale and a better price for lettuce... I also want to experiment with a few new veggies recipes so we bought some broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage. (I'm just now seeing the typos but i'm too lazy to correct them)

As for Walmart, last month we just did a double run so we are just eating out of the pantry and will re-stock next month anything we used. I plan on taking some pantry pictures so you can all see how we store our food stuff and how much we keep on hand. I also made a lot of stuff with Greek Yogurt this past month so we had to pick up another container of it since I did a few smoothies and made onion dip for some veggies with the first one we had from last month.