Grocery Shopping and Meal Planning 2024 Week 1 of 52

Happy New Year! I am committed to shopping and planning mindfully again in 2024. I kind of lost steam about halfway through 2023 when I thought I was missing out on buying more fun things to cook with. Turns out I can still get those fun things, I just need to plan better for them.

This year long grocery shopping and meal planning blog series will focus on three themes. One is how much is spent on groceries, the goal being $75 a week, give or take. Food waste is an issue in every home so that is a second theme I will keep working on this year and third will be meal planning and prep. I constantly stress myself out and succumb to eating out because I am not planning and prepping well enough.

This week I spent $87.11 on groceries and I went to Wegmans for all of it. This is a huge splurge for us but since I already have plenty of meats in the freezer, I shopped for fun ingredients to stock up my pantry.

Oh, and hey, just a side note a mini 4th area I want to explore this year is shopping at more ethnic mom and pop stores in the city. We are 30 minutes from downtown Rochester, NY and my Italian and Irish heritages can be better served at Rubino’s, and the like, which I haven’t been to in years.

Ok, back to my shopping today. Some of the fun ingredients I needed to stock up my pantry were balsamic vinegar and olive oil. I bought 2 boxes of Cracklin’ Oat Bran at $5.19 a box. I bought two because you can’t find it in any stores anymore and Doug will eat an entire box himself, so one for him and one for me. I also bought a 2lb bag of fresh green beans at $5.99, that’s a lot of beans! Blueberries and raspberries were a splurge at $4.99 and $4.49 respectively.

Meals planned this week are pan fried pork chops with fresh mushroom gravy, green beans and mashed potatoes, salmon with sweet potatoes, rice and broccoli, Baked stuffed chicken with brussels, tacos, and soup and salad one night and the rest will be leftovers.

So here we go into 2024 with all the hopes of a grateful and humble year.

Total spent on groceries so far in 2024 – $87.11

Until next week – MM