Grocery Haul!

Hey guys!

Welcome back!  I hope you all had a great weekend.  We had a spectacular summer storm here on Friday afternoon and enjoyed much cooler weather all weekend as a result.  I did my weekly grocery trip of Friday instead of my usual Saturday morning run because my hubby wanted to take another online practice test for his upcoming GMAT and I thought it would be nice to give him some peace and quiet to work in.  When I got into the check out line, I heard a guy one lane over exclaim really loudly, "Look at that!" and when I turned around, I saw through the doors that it was raining really hard outside. I comment to my checker that now I really didn't want to leave, and she told me, "That's okay, you'll just have to stay and shop more!" to which I was like, "No way!  I've got ice cream in here that will die."  So I braved the wind and rain to race my cart to the car. 

The wind was blowing so hard that the rain was coming in through the open back door and into the front seat while I was throwing bags into the back.  I took my cart back to the collection stand and realized once I got back into the car that the wind had blown it right back out!  I am a nice enough person to return my cart once in the driving rain, but not twice, so I left it.  Storms tend to move south to north here, so I raced home (north) as fast as I reasonably could given weather, traffic, and grocery bags strewn all over my back seat and managed to get ahead of the fast moving storm.  I was debating the whole way back if I should ring the doorbell and interrupt hubby's test for help or if I could get all the bags into the house myself before the storm got to us.  Thankfully, he heard both me and the weather coming, and was already at the front door when I came screeching up.  I think the storm hit exactly half a second after we sprinted the last bag inside and slammed the door.  What an adventure!

In addition to my weather tale, I wanted to mention that I did all of my shopping at Safeway this week.  They have a new app that I've been playing around with this summer.  When I first put it on my phone, it was actually really unhelpful, because I found myself buying a lot of stuff I didn't really need because it was on sale and driving up my grocery bill.  Also, a lot of the coupons that you can add onto your store card through the app seemed like they were for junky food that I wouldn't or shouldn't eat.  However, I've been figuring it out slowly, like that the best sale prices on an item have "limit 2" or "limit 4" in the fine print, and the personalized coupons based on items you've bought before with your store card are pretty cool. 

In a typical week, I do about 90% of my shopping at Trader Joes and then make a small trip to Safeway for a few things that Trader Joe's doesn't offer, like Cool Whip and the fresh sliced deli turkey my husband loves.  However, this week the sales, coupons, and personalized deals were for a lot of great, healthy stuff, so I intended to get most of my stuff at Safeway and just hit Trader Joe's for a few things.  I changed my mind when I realized that turkey bacon (for me) and trail mix (for Hubby) were both on sale where already was and got all of my stuff at Safeway.  Using the app and the store flier, I saved 36% on my bill with more than $50 in coupons and offers.  My total came to almost exactly $2 less than my weekly budget, with both stocking up stuff and everything for the week.  I feel pretty darn clever!  Here's what I bought:

Veggies:

 

Scallions, cucumber, mushrooms, green beans, zucchini, broccoli, 4 bags of frozen veggies (at 89 cents each!), spinach, lettuce, an onion, scallions, and a green pepper.  You can see that we've already been into the mushrooms and both bags of greens.  I still have carrots, celery, radishes, garlic, and potatoes from last week.

 

 

Fruit:

 

 

 

Blueberries, bananas, apples, and strawberries.  I still have some black cherries and grapes in the fridge.

 

 

Protein:





 

Eggs, sliced turkey (on sale for half price!), turkey bacon, and extra lean ground turkey.  I still have about three pounds of chicken in the freezer, since I tend to buy a package a week out of habit. 

 

 

Dairy:

 

Reduced fat milk (hubby had a few big bowls of cereal this weekend, so it may not last us the week), light sour cream 2% mozzarella shreds, and plain whole milk yogurt.  I normally go with vanilla, but I'm going to try some plain to cut back on my sugar intake.  I'm thinking a spoonful of honey drizzled over the top is probably a lot less sugar than the vanilla kind and certainly more natural.

 

 

Carbs:

 

 

100% whole wheat bread (on sale and with a coupon it cost me $1!), mac and cheese for an emergency dinner since I'm heading back to work soon and will have a dinner time crunch at some point, and whole wheat pasta.

 

Cans/Misc.:

 

 

Here's where I did a lot of my stocking up!  Can diced tomatoes, can black beans, OJ (for Hubby), parsley, cinnamon, oregano, pasta sauce, two cans white chicken, two boxes light butter popcorn, can tomato soup, can cream of mushroom soup (both great for cooking), crystalized ginger trail mix (for Hubby), two bottles extra virgin olive oil, two cans sliced black olives.  There were some great deals here!  Like the spices: I got a dollar off of both the cinnamon and the oregano and the parsley for free.  The olives and the olive oil were both buy one get one free, and I spend a dollar each on the popcorn by combining two coupons. 

 

 

Sweets:

 I wouldn't normally take a separate picture here, but I wanted to get both of these back into the freezer, so I did them first.  The ice cream was on sale and then I had a coupon so it cost me $1.50!  Ice cream is so expensive, you can spend five bucks on a tiny thing of Ben and Jerry's easily, so I'm extra proud of this one.  Plus I like plain ice cream that I can dress up rather than the fancy ones with all the stuff in it.  The cool whip was a personalized deal for $1.29.  How well they know me!

Stay cool!

Amy