Shop the pantry

Today’s post is partly from that tome I mentioned I wrote about the things that Kent and I have learned in the last 32 months.

This afternoon we’re heading to a barbeque with some friends. In the past, I’d have made a shopping list and gone to the store to get stuff to make whatever was on my list. We don’t do menu planning that way anymore, and that’s a direct result of the 32 months of living on a single income. Here’s what we do now:

We completely changed our approach to menu planning and grocery shopping. I’ve always been a good menu planner so I didn’t need to learn to plan our meals. But I would shop for the week and plan menus around that week’s sale items or I'd buy things that weren't on sale because that's what was on my menu list. That’s not a horrible approach but I read about a different way to go and it’s saved us a lot.

We stock our pantry with sale items we know we always use—for example we have about a dozen cans of black or pinto beans in our cabinets right now because they were 2 cans for $1 which is a great price. Previously I’d have bought the one or two cans I needed and missed out on future savings. Now my pantry is stocked with beans within our space limitations and I won’t need to stock up again until the next sale. I’ve read in various other frugal blogs that the sales seem to be on a 10 to 12 week rotation, so I try to get about a three month supply of the sale item if we have the room to store that much of it.

Now we shop the pantry for our menu planning. What that means for today’s get-together is that I looked at the ingredients I already have on hand (which were all pretty much on sale when we bought them) to plan what to bring to the barbeque. As it turns out, we’ll bring a pasta-mushroom dish from Nigela Lawson that I love, plus I had everything I needed to make my amazing brownies (not bragging, they would rock your socks off).

For fresh produce and fruit, we do still shop the sales because clearly those won’t keep for months and months. Buying produce in season helps to keep costs, too, although I'm not the best at that. I flat out don't like a lot of the New England seasonal vegetables that can be gotten for practically nothing (Brussel sprouts for example). But I get the ones we do like and we eat a lot of salads. Salad fixings tend to be inexpensive if you aren't going for the more extravagant items like avocado.

We also keep a price book in our heads. Some people actually create soft copies of this but I’m pretty anal about numbers so I haven’t taken that step. We know the normal prices for our regular items so when something is on sale or says it’s on sale, we know if it’s a good deal. For example, last week Kent passed on “sale” tuna at Costco because we can get it cheaper at a regular grocery store.

If you'd like to see the average cost of food as reported by the government, go here. Then you can select the month you want to see (the actual reports are PDF documents). It makes for interesting reading and also a good place to start figuring out where you are, and where you'd like to be with your grocery bill.