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This Week’s $57 Grocery Shopping Trip + our menu plan

I’m so excited to be back to sharing my grocery trips and menu plans after taking time off for my maternity leave!

If you’re new here, I practice the Buy Ahead Principle — which means that what we buy each week is often for future weeks. We stock up on the best deals and markdowns each week and that means that we then have a variety of items from previous shopping trips to use to plan a menu from.

In addition to practicing the Buy Ahead Principle, I Reverse Meal Plan. This means that I plan based upon what we have on hand plus what good sales/markdowns I found at the stores. (Read more about Reverse Meal-Planning here.)

Breakfast — cereal, toast, fruit, cheese, eggs

Lunches — veggies, fruit, cheese/crackers, leftovers, Ramen (for the teens!), yogurt, PB&J, grilled cheese sandwiches

Snacks — banana bread, cheese/crackers, popcorn, fruit, M&M’s, brownies, chips

Dinners (we usually have fruit/veggies on the side) — One Pot Enchilada Rice (I added chicken), Dinner with friends (we brought fruit), Spaghetti, Chicken Gravy over Noodles, Homemade Hot Pockets (I’m filling them with the ham & cheese I bought), Waffles/Sausage, Frozen Pizza.

My little shopping helper!

I was excited about this cracker deal!

Here’s everything I bought. My total was a little over $57. So we’re $13 under our $70 grocery budget — I’m rolling that over to this next week and hoping there will be some great deals to use it on!

The onions, two packages of ham, three boxes of crackers, one bag of cheese, and some of the eggs and butter will be saved for future weeks.