In this trip I managed to pick up 4 12-packs of soda. I know that I am trying to cut back on it, but generally when it is on sale Jason and I each pick up 2 of our favorite kinds. This just means that mine have to last me longer. I also got gummy snacks for Logan, which I almost never buy, and Pop-tarts, as well as some granola bars for him for breakfast. The kid does not like cereal, otherwise that would be a much simpler solution. Logan also got some string cheese and crackers for snacks. Keeping a variety of snacks and breakfast foods in the house is mandatory to avoid his little nuclear meltdowns, and to prevent him from getting burnt out on any one thing (ie. cereal).
As far as dinners go I picked up some little packets of burrito materials. I had never seen these before, but they are made by Old El Paso and they are with the taco shells. They are just little packets that can be microwaved and put into tortillas or taco shells. They had a few flavors and they were BOGO, so I gave it a shot. Hopefully they don't taste like cat food. But if they happen to be edible and as easy as they look, they may become a staple for us, since I know that the key to us not going out to eat is to have readily available dinners on hand. These only take 60 seconds to microwave, so that is even faster than the time it takes to go through the drivethru.
I also took a chance on a few new kinds of boxed dinners, just add chicken. I maintain the fact that we are not going back to Hamburger Helper. There are so many other boxed dinners that are actually really yummy. I won't say they are gourmet, but they are definitely more exciting than noodles + hamburger + random sauce. This week I am trying a Sweet & Sour chicken meal made by La Choy. Once again, I can only hope that it tastes decent enough to make me want to buy it again. And of course, we stocked up on Mac & Cheese, both the Kraft variety and the Velveeta kind. Logan doesn't mind eating the Kraft stuff for lunches and it is cheap. However, for family meals, Velveeta's family size of shells & cheese is much tastier, and makes more. I also cheated a little bit and picked up a frozen lasagna for $7 and a Voila frozen meal for $5. The Voila meals come in two sizes. The smaller size is about $4.50 normally, or as high as $7 when they aren't on sale, and it really isn't enough to feed more than 2 people. But they just came out with a family size that is WAY more than enough to feed us. We have leftovers every single time, and since they are new they are on pretty good sales right now down to $5. It looks like they are normally priced at about $9 without a club card. Unfortunately I have only seen them in Safeways. I have not been able to find the family size at Walmart or Target to date.
In the meat department yesterday I managed to track down the clearance section which didn't have a whole lot in it, but I still made a few good picks. Sirloin and blade steaks were on clearance for 50% off, and were on a club card sale as well. So I paid $5 for one package of steaks and just less than $2 for the other one. Bratwurst were BOGO, pretty typical for the summer BBQs, so I got a couple different kinds of those for only $5.49. The only really expensive purchase in meat was pork chops. They had gigantic packages of chops that were only on a small discount, but I went ahead and picked one up. It ended up costing me $15.31 for the whole thing, but they are 1 inch thick bone-in pork chops, and I was able to separate them into 4 bags of 2 chops each once I got them home. So when you look at it as 4 meals, the average was only $3.82 per dinner. Logan doesn't eat a whole lot so I just share mine with him normally and we have more than enough for everyone.
I also managed to make a discovery yesterday at our new Safeway store, which our old store did not have. Clearance Seafood!!! Now, Jason isn't particularly fond of seafood other than shrimp and lobster, but I still picked up a few things that I was not expecting at all. A half pound of fresh medium sized shrimp only cost me $1.96. A pound of fresh crab meat only cost me $1.80, and a single serving sized salmon steak cost me about $1.75. I'm not sure what I plan to make with these things, but I am super excited to have a resource for seafood again!!!!
So looking back at what I picked up I have a total of 16 dinners, which is more than enough to get us through the next 2 weeks. I consider this kind of lucky, because we did get so many pork chops I will be able to spread them out more instead of having to eat them twice a week just to get to the next paycheck. Whew. I picked up plenty of snacks for Logan and restocked on soda while it was at a fair price (any time I can pay less than $3.50 for a 12-pack I consider a good deal. When it isn't on sale it is $6.29, and I refuse to buy it.). I also picked up some blueberries and a big watermelon to take to a family gathering last night, plus a few cans of veggies for side dishes.
I suppose you could say that this trip was a little bit lopsided. I actually did spring for more snack foods than I would normally buy, but we were completely out, and Logan doesn't make it through the day without at least one small snack at some point. Usually when I buy snack food it lasts a long time though. However, I only had to buy 4 cans of veggies because we had a whole bunch of canned and frozen veggies left over from my last shopping trip. Plus, we always have tons of rice and pasta type of things to go as sides as well.
So, now that I have rambled endlessly, here are the two photos of my receipt that I wanted to share:
The photo above shows how much I saved just with my club card, and my total savings from paper coupons. The 50% clearance coupons are in the paper coupons category, and I did not have any other coupons with me at all, so these were all savings that I found inside the store without any pre-planning. 33% of my total bill is not bad!!
This is just showing the 50% coupons on the meat and seafood that were applied. The reduction on produce was for the watermelon because it came up wrong in the computer and they had to manually adjust for the club card price.
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