A Weekly Grocery Haul
If you read my last post from the kitchen, you’ll know that I like to meal plan before I buy my groceries. One of the easiest ways to keep on track with eating good meals at home is to keep your fridge and pantry (and even freezer) stocked with all the ingredients you need. As I meal plan, I make sure all the ingredients I need are on my shopping list so nothing is missed, and there’s also a few staples that make it on my list as well.
I talk all about how I meal plan in this blog post here. I find it to be the easiest method to ensure we make and eat homemade meals. One of our resolutions this year was to cut out eating fast food. Having scheduled meals really helps keep us accountable, plus there’s nothing worse than paying for groceries only to have them rot in the fridge because you didn’t end up using them. In order to make good homemade meals, you need to start with good ingredients. I prefer to make things from scratch, as I’m putting less processed foods into my body, and I know exactly what is going into my meal, but there’s also nothing wrong with having a frozen meal on standby. In fact, I think having frozen meals or Kraft Mac and Cheese boxes on hand is key to eating meals at home. “Sunday meal planning” you may have been more ambitious than “Thursday night after a long shift” you. Instead of ordering a pizza after a long day, you know you have a meal in the freezer that, while maybe not ideal, has more nutritional value than a pizza, and comes at no additional cost.
So, what’s on my typical grocery list?
This really depends on what my meal are and what staples I need to stock up on. But usually on a weekly basis, I buy the ingredients for my meals, and then any fruit, veggies, oat milk, breakfast items, and snack items that I may be running low on. What I buy also depends on which grocery store I’m going to that week. If I go to Costco, I like to buy my paper goods (paper towels, toilet paper, etc.), meat, pasta, and frozen meals. The individual single serving packages are the easiest for lazy days and nights when you don’t feel like cooking. I try not to buy fresh bakery goods and produce here because with just the two of us, we can’t eat it all before it goes bad. BUT I will have a whole separate blog post all about my Costco staples coming up.
This week, I tried to use up as many ingredients as I had on hand. We tend to keep a decent amount of meat stocked up in our freezer, so I used those to plan our meals. After scrolling through Pinterest, I gathered my meal ideas and wrote down all the ingredients I needed to make them. I decided to test my wine-braised pot roast one more time this week, and you guys! I’m so excited to have this recipe for you in a few weeks. It’s so amazingly tasty and perfect for those cold winter days. Here’s the breakdown for meals this week:
Monday : Red Wine-Braised Pot Roast and Potatoes
Tuesday : Shredded Chicken Tacos
Wednesday : Homemade Penne alla Vodka with side salad
Thursday : Copycat Pick Up Stix House Chicken (if you know, you know)
Friday : Mushroom and Wild Rice Soup
Saturday : Homemade Pizza
Sunday : Leftovers
So here’s my grocery list:
And here’s what we actually bought on our trip to Costco and King Soopers (Kroger):
As you can see, there are a few things that ended up in the cart that weren’t originally on the list. I do like to buy easy frozen meals and healthy snacks when I’m out, and those aren’t always on my initial list. And no matter how hard I try to be thorough when taking inventory of my fridge and pantry, things like butter get overlooked and I don’t remember till I’m in the store! I also switched some items from one grocery store list to the other, or completely removed them from the list once we arrived. I figured I could sub the heavy whipping cream I had at home already for the half and half, and I could find smaller portions of alcohol and eggs at our regular grocery store rather than at Costco. Grocery lists are huge in helping you stay on track and remove the guesswork out of grocery shopping, but they’re not set in stone.
I hope you found this post fun and inspirational. I love seeing what groceries other people buy. Grocery hauls and meal preps are often some of my favorite videos to watch when I’m in a food rut. If you like this type of post let me know in the comments and make sure to follow me on Instagram! I tend to post more grocery hauls on my stories there.