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Have you signed up for the Eat at Home Challenge? (Plus, our groceries & menu plan from this past week!)

I'm currently challenging myself to stick with a $70 grocery budget for our family of five. This includes almost all of our breakfasts, lunches, snacks, and dinners + most household products (toiletries, laundry soap, etc.).
For live updates, be sure to follow my Instagram Stories. See all posts on my $70 Grocery Budget here.
Note: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links and we will be compensated if you click through and sign up. Read our disclosure policy here.

I’m gearing up for another Eat at Home Challenge and I’m so excited about it!

I’ll be sharing my grocery list, what we bought at Aldi for the challenge, a video of a quick and simple recipe you can make every day this coming week, plus lots of menu-planning tricks and tips! If you haven’t signed up for the daily emails from me, be sure to go sign up here.

You can also sign up to get notifications of my daily Facebook Live videos where I’m making dinner in the crockpot. Just click on the button below and we’ll send you a quick message on Facebook so you don’t miss out!

Here are the groceries I bought this past week and what we ate:

Kroger Shopping Trip #1:

Pineapple — marked down to $0.99
Organic Salad Mix — marked down to $0.99
Bag of oranges — marked down to $0.99
Total with tax: $4.01

Target Christmas Clearance Shopping Trip:

Milano cookies — marked down to $0.29 each
Pepperidge Farm cookies — marked down to $0.89
Total with tax: $6.48

Kroger Shopping Trip #2:

8 packages of Pumpkin Cookies/Bars — marked down to $0.25 each
Half & Half — $1.49
Fudge Brownie Mix — marked down to $0.49
OxiClean Laundry Detergent — $1.49
1 bag of mangoes/oranges — marked down to $0.99
5 boxes of DiGiorno Pizza — $3.49 per pizza with the Kroger Digital coupon (deal is no longer available)
3 packages of Kroger sausage — $1.49 per package with the Kroger Digital coupon (deal is no longer available)
2 boxes Back to Nature cookies — $0.99 each when you buy 5 participating items, used $1/1 coupons = free
2 bottles Herbal Essence Shampoo/Conditioner — $1.99 when you buy 5 participating items, used $2/2 Digital coupon = $0.99 each
Gillette Shave Gel — $1.29 when you buy 5 participating items, used $0.75/1 Digital coupon = $0.54
Stayfree Pads — $1.79 when you buy 5 participating items, used $1/1 Digital coupon = $0.79 after coupon + submitted for $1.25 ibotta rebate = FREE + overage!
4 Eckrich Sausage — $1.50 each when you buy 5 participating items
Dole Slaw Kit — marked down to $1.29
Kroger Broth — $1.29
Black eyed peas — marked down to $0.39
Glade candle — marked down to $0.79
2 boxes Quaker Granola Bars — marked down to $0.69 each
3 boxes of Barbara’s Puffins — marked down to $0.79 each
Kroger lemon juice — $2.49, used $0.25/1 Digital coupon = $2.24
Total with tax: $55.69

Total spent on groceries: $66.18

Psst! Need some help with cutting your grocery budget? Check out my series: 5 Days to a Better Grocery Budget.

Cashback earned this week: $1.50 from Ibotta for submitting my receipt and buying Stayfree and 128 points for submitting my three receipts to Fetch rewards.

What We Ate This Past Week

Note: When you see the meals below, please remember this: I buy ahead often. Which means that when I find a great deal on something I know we'll use, I buy as much as I can afford in our budget to have on hand.
This means that you aren't going to see all of the groceries my shopping trip that I used to make all of the meals we ate.
Please also remember that I'm putting this out there and it's not a perfectly balanced menu. This is just really what we ate — and I hope that it encourages you to see the real-ness and lack of perfection here. 🙂

Breakfasts:

Cereal, Oatmeal, Scrambled Eggs, Mangoes, New Year’s Day Brunch with Friends, Yogurt, Banana Bread

Lunches:

The kids were home from school so we had really snack-y lunches and everyone took care of fixing their own. We mostly had: Banana Bread, Cheese/Crackers, Salad, Leftovers, Clementines, Cookies

Snacks:

Yogurt, Cheese/Crackers, Popcorn, Oranges, Cookies, Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins

(We had so much fun hosting our friends for a New Year’s Day Brunch. We moms brought the food and planned the menu and then the dads made it all for us while the moms sat on the couch and sipped tea. It was the BEST! And then everyone stayed for most of the day and played games. It was such a great way to ring in the new year!)

Dinners (Again, since the kids were home and we had a much more relaxed week, our meals were super simple and kind of boring!):

Sunday: Dinner out with a gift card
Monday: Peas/Potatoes/Sausage in the crockpot, salad, Jello
Tuesday: Leftovers + Tater Tots (we had friends over for a big Brunch that morning and just ate Brunch leftovers that night + we made a bag of Tater Tots… oh and I had a big salad, as I do most nights!)
Wednesday: Leftovers (again) — we had some Brunch leftovers still + Monday night dinner leftovers. We also had Twice Baked Potatoes and an apple cake in the crockpot using some peeled and sliced apples from the freezer!
Thursday: Turkey Meatballs, Twice Baked Potatoes, Fruit
Friday: Dinner out — since we had driven a long way to a basketball game for Kathrynne and ended up staying for all four of her school’s games! Jesse ran and picked up Zaxby’s for us since I had only brought muffins, clementines, and banana bread for snacks thinking we weren’t going to stay the whole night!
Saturday: Turkey Meatballs, Twice Baked Potatoes, Fruit

There you have it! I hope that was helpful and inspiring… or at least caused you to feel a little better about the meals you made for your family this week! 😉