Letters from Pemberley

Note to self:  Next time you’re tempted to deep clean, wait another half hour, especially if you are living with a savage masquerading as a toddler. 

So I finished the floors while Tommy napped, and we tackled the upstairs bathrooms once he got up.  After a few too many things got dropped into the bathtub during cleaning, I chased Tommy out…  Big mistake…while I contentedly checked tasks off my list upstairs, he was investigating my just-purchased 25 lb bag of bread flour…

Yep, I came down to discover flour all over my clean kitchen floor.  Tommy was covered in it from head to toe, and of course he decided to run all over the downstairs afterwards, shedding flour everywhere he went.  I was livid (but lucid enough to think, “I cannot spank in anger!”).  And I stripped him and started cleaning it up before thinking that maybe I’ll find this funny in a few days and I’d better take a picture.

By the time Derek came home, the entire downstairs was swept, vacuumed, swiffered, and mopped up again.  And I decided to give up on the rest of my list until tomorrow morning.  I’m listening to a classical Christian homeschooling lecture online instead.

From what I can tell, there are several ways to be a frugal grocery shopper:

• You can shop almost solely at Aldi and SuperWalmart because their base prices are so much lower than anyone else’s.  (The Aldi Queen blog demonstrates how much you can do just at that store!)
• You can clip coupons and pair them with store coupons and sales to get really good deals on name-brand groceries.  (My crowning achievement was our first year of marriage, back when Kroger did double dollar coupon days…I once bought $43 worth of groceries for $1.87.)
• You can watch sales at all the major grocery stores and just buy the loss-leader items at each one.  (When we lived in Mishawaka, we were less than 5 minutes from 6 major grocery stores, so I would literally go buy meat at Meijer, cheese at Kroger, paper products at SuperWalmart, cans at Aldi, etc., all in one shopping trip.  This was much easier pre-Tommy.)
• You can menu plan for several meatless meals a week, taking care not to substitute them with meals that call for too many expensive gourmet ingredients.  (Four cheese mac and cheese is more expensive than beef tacos, for example…)

Well, I’ve done a combination of those methods in our four and a half years of marriage, and it seems like things have been a lot harder since moving to Chicago.  Both nearby Aldis are actually kindof yucky and always have long lines, the far-off SuperWalmart doesn’t have much food, and the mainline grocery stores don’t double coupons or run good sales (except on milk–one or the other always has it for $1.99).  Add to that how hard it is to take Tommy out grocery shopping (today I don’t even want to count the number of times I had to discipline him for screaming fits while running errands), how yucky I felt all fall, how tired we’ll be when Baby arrives this spring, and we decided that we need to come up with a new plan.

We’re going to try something radical this year!  We’ve joined a CSA (farm share) program where we pay a farmer up front and then get fresh (organic) fruits and vegetables delivered to a nearby drop-off every week for 9 months.  It’s a galling $1000 or so up front, but it comes out to $25 a week, which is what I’ve been spending on produce here in Chicago, anyway, and the quality will be much better.  I have been fascinated by this concept, and after three summers of unsuccessful gardening attempts, I’m ready to try it.  We’ll probably get a lot of strange veggies we’ve never eaten before, but I’m depending on Mariel’s recipes from her farm share last year to pull me through the summer.  (Mariel, this will require you to update your blog more than twice a year!)  We also took a trip up to Costco this weekend to check out the prices (I was going up and down each aisle, pad and paper in hand).  I liked the idea of buying in bulk (not because the prices were that much cheaper than Aldi, because most weren’t, but because we go through food like nobody’s business around here), Anna had been positive about their Sams Club experience, and the prices on meat and cheese were WAY lower than what I’ve been paying anywhere else…$2.79/lb for pork tenderloin, $5/2 lbs of cheese!  Will the $50 membership pay for itself?  We’re going to take this year and find out.  So after having calculated out the bargains and made up a menu for the coming week or so, Tommy and I headed up to the ‘burbs, got our membership, and filled our cart.

Here’s what we bought:

Having never bought in bulk in my married life, the $160 bill was a little staggering!  But this was an unusual trip–I rarely buy junk food, but my in-laws are snackers, so I had to stock up for their visit this weekend.  I would never buy $50 of meat at once, but we’re having a lot of upcoming company meals, so I’m going to fill my freezer for those.  Swiffers are NOT frugal, but Tommy loves to help me clean if he has a swiffer, I had coupons for them, and I justify it by how frugal I am cleaning everything else in my house with baking soda and vinegar.  I don’t want to go grocery shopping again for a week if I can help it, so the 10 lb. bag of carrots is my attempt to have plenty of healthy snack options until I shop again.  And I now have 200 kitchen trash bags, so I won’t have to buy trash bags again for another year or two!

So…we’ve spent over a quarter of our food budget for the year on the 6th day of the year…I’m terrified!  Stay tuned throughout the year for update on the Muller Family 2009 Grocery Experiment!