Grocery store score!

I have made it a habit to always peruse the clearance racks at the grocery store.   Like I mentioned in earlier posts, I have 2 full sized refrigerators with freezers, and a large chest freezer, so I have room to freeze any meat that I find on sale.  Recently, I was at our local grocery store and hit the jackpot.  It must have hit mark down day, because I found some really good deals on chicken sausages, whole chickens, and organic ground turkey in the meat department, and some rolls in the bakery department.  What baffles me is why the bakery clearance cart is by the dairy department, practically on the other side of the grocery section of the store.  The bakery does have a clearance cart, but it has middle isle items that have been marked  down?!?!  The marked down meat is either mixed in with the same product at the regular price, or else right at the end of the refrigerated meat case though.

This shopping trip I walked out with 2 packages of sweet Italian chicken sausages, 2 packages of apple chicken sausages, 2 whole chickens at 6+ pounds each, a pound of organic ground chicken, 2 lbs of strawberries, a head of lettuce, a head of cabbage, a living basil plant, 2 bottles of BBQ sauce, and a 6 pack of kaiser rolls.  And my bill…$35 and change!  You read my post about 3 meals from one chicken, right?  Well, the meat I got at a discount will make at least 10 dinners for my family of 5 with enough leftovers for my husband to take for his lunch the next day.  You can’t beat $3.50 for the meat component of dinner for a family of 5!

I try my best to keep my total meal cost to less than $10 and can some times get it as low as a $5 dinner.  I don’t clip coupons either…ain’t nobody got time for that!  I do look through the stores weekly adds and occasionally add a $2 off $20 or $5 off $50 e-coupon to my store loyalty card, but that’s about the extent of pre-gaming that I do.  You would never know to eat at my house that our whole nutritious dinner cost less than a value meal from McDonald’s though. It’s not like I’m serving up my family Ramen or rice and beans every night either…although they can be delicious and do occasionally make there way onto our plates.  I make my meal plans around the deals and sales that the grocery stores are running, especially on the fresh produce items that I can’t put in the freezer for use in another week’s meal. I guess that’s why being able to miss grocery shopping for 2 weeks and cooking out of my pantry has worked so well for me.  Soon, I’ll hopefully have a garden full of produce to pick from to add in that fresh produce to our meals for even less.  The picture is just of my container garden, and I have a bunch more seedlings sprouting in the front garden as well. ( Please excuse all the pallets in the background, my Husband has quite a few different projects going on using the reclaimed pallet wood.)

So how am I going to use up this meat and stay under the $10 per dinner budget?  I guess you’ll have to look at my meal plans in the next few weeks to find out…

-Mussgo Momma