Grocery Challenge

The other day I was walking through the library and this book caught my eye.

Anyone who knows me knows I love to save money on everything especially groceries. I thought this would make an interesting read. It turns out this was written by a family that lives in Scottsdale, AZ. I had read an article about them in the paper a year ago but had forgotten all about them. The book was a very interesting read and I got lots of neat ideas from it. The main thing they do to save the most money is they only grocery shop once a month except for a produce run half way through the month. I decided to go back and add up my June grocery things to get an idea of how much I had been spending because I have gotten pretty lazy lately about keeping track. I spent $578.90 in June on groceries which is way more than I wanted to. There were tons of $5 here and $10 here because it is daily occurrence that I call Jerame and say can you pick up this or that because he is already at the grocery store and it is convenient. Well I had no idea it was adding up to so much, so I decided to take take the grocery challenge and make a monthly menu and shop all at once. I made my monthly menu and it looks like this: grilled pork chops, baked potatoes, grilled zucchini bbq pork salads, bread left over Cafe Rio burritos zucchini casserole date night/ girls pasta roast chicken, mashed potatoes, broccoli with cheese sauce zucchini lasagna, bread green chili pie, refried beans stir fry, rice blt sandwiches, french fries history party/ hamburgers and hot dogs meatball sandwiches, salad chili, corn bread grilled pork chops, stuffing, broccoli tacos, refried beans swiss steak, egg noodles sweat and sour meatballs, rice homemade pizza chicken parmesan, pasta, salad beef stew, bread chicken cordon bleu, rice, carrots bbq chicken salad, bread bbq beef sandwiches, coleslaw omelets, muffins, bacon fajita quesadilla, cilantro lime rice broccoli chicken alfredo, bread grilled chicken, grilled potatoes, corn eggs, waffles, sausage chicken pot pie So after making my menu including lunches and breakfasts I went off to shop. I didn't do it all in one day the way they did because I like to get the best deals so it took me a couple days to get everything. After all was said and done I spent $220.62. I am sure this month I will probably find some wholes because I have no idea how much bread and milk we go through a month but I made a guess and we will see how it works out. I will do a post at the end of the month with the rest that I spend but I have to say it is a huge improvement from June.(I skipped July because we had a lot of random stuff going on and that was not an accurate picture.) It is also really exciting to see my menu on the fridge and to know I have all of my meals planned and all of the ingredients to cook it. So how much do you spend and do you think you could cut your grocery budget in half????