Reply to If you spend less than DCUM average on groceries

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is OP. I spend about $400 - $450 a week and I think it’s insane. I do have two teenage boys in sports.

I cook from scratch and we eat leftovers. I shop at Aldi, Lidl, Trader Joe and Lotte/HMart for Asian and Hispanic foods and some small local shops for middle eastern foods.

I would just love to know what the families who spend less on groceries eat. Are they eating quesadillas and spaghetti with tomato sauce every day or are there some that still make a variety of meals on less?

I think the culprits for us might be fruit and that my family wants a variety of food. [/quote]

I have younger kids so there’s just going to be less quantity consumer around here for sure!  Teen boys will quadruple your grocery bill.  That being said, we eat a pretty wide variety of food but a lot of it is plant based — we have shrimp about once a week (treat for the kids) and a nice cut of meat about once a month (treat for me) but other than that it’s a lot of chickpeas and tofu and eggs and lentils and beans and nuts and second time around meat (eg split pea soup with a ham bone, rice pilaf with chicken broth made from a roast chicken carcase, etc) and cheap meat (ground beef, chicken that was on sale, etc).

I buy my most of my produce locally/seasonally which necessarily adds variation to the diet and cuts down on the prices.  Berries are mostly in May-June; currently it’s the season of apples and we’re buying those by the half bushel — most farmers market people give you a deal when you buy in bulk.

I do also do the things PP mocked some of us for like exclusively buying dry beans and often making my own bread although I’m not actually sure the bread is a cost savings; I do that because I enjoy baking bread and occasionally freak myself out but reading about highly processed foods and how they’re terrible.  The beans might be a savings but honestly I do that more because the dry ones are lighter to drag home from the grocery store.

Since I work full time and have two kids and do almost everything from scratch our meals are also pretty simple and I make in bulk — tonight we had chili and sliced avocado and leftover sourdough bread.  Tomorrow we’ll have leftover chilli but maybe I’ll make cornbread to go with it instead since I won’t be making the main.  Last week I have a night where I didn’t get all the prep I’d planning for done so we had sliced cherry tomatoes, plain chickpeas, feta, and a little olive oil in pitas.  I find that because I make most of the food we eat to my taste, I don’t mind really simple dishes.  And my kids are younger enough they’re pro deconstructed meals too.  But I’m not at all sure this kind of menu would feed growing athletes! [/quote]

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