Happy October! Can you believe fall time is here already!?! Summer was busy with gardening, cooking and baking and of course having fun! But without paying much attention to my grocery budget, we ended up spending way more on groceries, no thanks to increasing prices and running to the store every time we needed an ingredient! We all know when you run to the grocery store for one ingredient, you suddenly have a couple bagfuls!! I have decided once again, to do the “no grocery shopping challenge!”
In January of this year, we did the No Grocery Shopping Experiment but were a little ill-prepared so we ran out of essential ingredients like onions, potatoes, milk and carrots after just a couple weeks.
This time we are better preparing ourselves and buying a few essentials, then the remainder of the month we will be using up what’s in the fridge, freezer and pantry. The idea is to grocery shop just once this month which can definitely be a challenge when we have all the conveniences of city life!
My goal is to use up “old” items from the fridge and freezer as well as use up pantry items before buying more. With money being tight, I thought it important to do this challenge once again, and limit our trips to the store and of course limiting eating out or purchasing pre-packaged items. We’ll be meal planning using what we have on hand and making most of our meals from scratch. We will have a bread or biscuit with most meals since bread has always been a staple on the dinner table to help stretch those meals!
Before I share prices and what we purchased, I thought I’d share my cupboard, pantry, fridge and freezer with you. I go through each area, and write down everything we have, clean and wipe the shelves and place everything back neatly. I also reorganized some of my pantry items so it’s neater and easier to find ingredients. Nothing can be more frustrating than having a messy pantry or cupboard and not being able to find what you need to cook with! I don’t clean like this every month, but I do at least 4 times a year, or more if needed.
We are in Canada, so we have Thanksgiving in October — which I did purposely purchase specific ingredients for, but they’re ingredients we can use the rest of the month too like cabbage, cornmeal, 3.25% milk, pork belly, chicken, turkey and ham. This will help me prepare good hearty meals all month and I will be able to stretch some leftover turkey or ham into November for soups or stews. This time, I’m thinking about what I will cook in October and how it can help me with meals in November.
I just want to share that I do not have an aesthetically pleasing kitchen that you might find all over social media! I want you to know that it’s ok if you do not have that either. I have a functioning kitchen that gets messy because we use it. Sure, I’d love a fancy kitchen that looks amazingly clean all the time, even while cooking or baking but that’s not me and it’s not my kitchen. We spill flour and have crumbs all over and dishes in the sink. We have stuff on the counters, chaos in the fridge and messy drawers, but the most important is we cook with love to nourish ourselves and others. We cook as a family and enjoy being in the kitchen. Yes, it’s a lot of work but it’s well worth it. I remind myself that the pioneers did not have aesthetically pleasing kitchens yet they worked hard and thrived and provided delicious meals for their families using what they had on hand and that’s what I want to do too. It’s totally fine to not have what everyone else has…as long as your kitchen works for you, that’s all that matters. Ok, for the embarrassing part… Let’s get to my pantry, fridge and freezer!
First up…The Pantry! We have a main pantry and a cupboard pantry. The main pantry has more baking essentials and stores other ingredients that we do not use often or takes up more space like sugar, honey, rice and flour. Plus it has dried fruit, chocolate chips, porridge, cornmeal, cornstarch and other similar items. It has mixes for my girls’ easy bake and tea party fun, my market/garden basket and a few other items. Here’s the main pantry “after” it has been cleaned and reorganized! I have a few items I need to organize better, but for now, I’m happy with it. There’s a bunch of candies and chocolates that I use at my workshops for treats for my customers that I decided to store here!
This cupboard pantry has other cooking ingredients I use often like salt, baking powder/soda, dried pasta and beans, canned goods and so on. I did not like the cluttering of the main pantry and that is why I separated it into the two pantries. I dislike having to move a bunch of things to get to another – like having to move pasta to get to the raisins or having to move the beans to get to the flour. This way it’s organized in such a way that I can be more productive at meal prep and cooking. Here’s the cupboard pantry “before”. I had already removed a few items when I took the picture.
I ordered a few more containers and my daughter helped me organize the dried pasta, beans, barley, lentils and soup mix. I removed a few new boxed and canned items for the food bank, wiped the shelves and set everything out on the counter so I could see what we actually had and so we could write it all down. Here’s half of the mess!
Here’s all the packages and boxes poured into containers to keep it nice and neat. I like this much better because the bags of beans always fell over and I could not keep the cupboard pantry tidy. It was a disaster trying to look for something and often things were shoved in the back and forgotten about!
I had set the lids on upside down for the evening because the seals were still wet.
Here’s the cupboard pantry now that it’s been reorganized! Store bought pasta on the top, split peas and soup mix on the top, beans, lentils and barley on the bottom right and canned goods on the left. So much neater now and easier to find something!
I didn’t take a picture of the freezer “before,” but it was a disaster! It is organized once again and is now much easier to find what I need. Fruits and vegetables and miscellaneous items are on the left and meat items are on the right. The top rack is butter, homemade frozen cookies and similar homemade items. We do not have a deep freezer/chest freezer so we have to keep all our frozen goods in the fridge freezer which sometimes makes it difficult.
Fridge time!! The fridge always gets out of hand for some reason. It’s easy to keep tossing things in without realizing what’s in there! Here is the “before.” What a disaster!
I went through everything shelf by shelf so it does not get overwhelming. I do half of a shelf at a time by taking the items out, wiping the shelf and then placing it back into the fridge in an orderly fashion. I’m very picky about where things go, although it doesn’t appear that way in this picture. I like jam under the ice maker, pickles on the bottom, eggs in the middle and milk on the top. After it’s been wiped and tidied up, old things tossed, veggie crispers gone through and cleaned out, here’s the fridge “after!”
Now that the fridge, freezer and pantries are organized, let’s move on to shopping and prices!
Our goal is to not shop again until the end of October or the start of November, so we stocked up on a few items as well as getting things for Thanksgiving and making Christmas fruitcake.
From the local meat shop, we got an 8.7 lb chicken for $33.61, 1/2 lb pork belly (uncured bacon) for $5.66 and a 4 lb chuck roast for $30.60 as well as a small bag of carrots from a local farm for a total of $72.87
From the Asian Supermarket, we got 2 bags of rice (15 lbs each) which was on sale for $13.97 each for a total of $27.94
From the grocery store, we got a few items! We got: 2 boxes of pasta for 8.48, 500ml whipping cream for $3.65 and one for $4.34 (2 different stores), 2 – 8oz pkg of cream cheese for $7.50, frozen whipped topping for $4.99, allspice for $5.99, ground ginger for $5.99, ground cloves for $4.69, ground nutmeg for $2.27, honeydew melon for $6.99, iceberg lettuce for $2.99, cabbage for $3.71, 15 lb turkey for $38.31, ham butt for $13.98, 2kg bag of sugar for $3.27, 4 packs ramen for 47 cents each, small bag currants for $4.97, 6 small bags chocolate chips for $3.27 each (dark chocolate, milk, butterscotch and chocolate chunks), 1 bag caramel chips for $5.99, 4 packs of gravy mix for $1.47 each, small jar of instant yeast for $4.47, 750g thompson raisins for $8.47, golden raisins for $4.47, 750g sultana raisins for $8.47, block of pitted dates for $4.47, 2 beef broth for $1.47 each, 2 chicken broth for $1.47 each, 2 bags sweetlet peas for $2.82 each, 4L milk for $6.38, 400g old cheddar cheese for $4.67 and a 400g mozzarella cheese for $4.67, 2 – 2L next milk (plant based) for $8, 3 lb onions for $4.47, 2 dish soap for $1.97 each, watermelon juice for $4.88, 30 roll toilet paper for $21.98 for a total of $320.14. Of course some items like toilet paper, dish soap and chocolate chips will last a while!
That was a lot — a grand total of $420.95. We are eating a few veggies that we had in the fridge and we have some garden veggies as well which is helpful.
Now that the shopping is done, I’ll be writing everything we have just bought onto our fridge, freezer & pantry sheet along with the items we already have, so we know what ingredients we have to use. This makes meal planning so much easier!
I am looking forward to this once again. I would like to focus on cooking with what we have on hand more, so we grocery shop less and in turn saving a bit of money. Each Sunday I will share our meals, how the week went and will update as we go along by sharing our weekly post links here so it is easier for you to find those posts! I divided the month much like I did last time and my meal plan weeks will run from Monday to Sunday.
As I post each Sunday, the link will be found here:
Week One – September 30 to October 6 — October’s No Grocery Shopping Challenge – Week One
Week Two – October 7 to October 13 — October’s No Grocery Shopping Challenge – Week Two
Week Three – October 14 to October 20 — October’s No Grocery Shopping Challenge – Week Three
Week Four – October 21 to October 27 — October’s No Grocery Shopping Chalkenge – Week Four
Week Five – October 28 to November 3 — COMING SOON
enjoy from Our City Homestead to yours