I Must Ask . . . How Often Do You Go Grocery Shopping?

My kids always perceived the bathroom as a place where you wait it out until all the groceries are unloaded from the car.
–Erma Bombeck

I've finally sorted out what I'm going to do about the layout and new patterns and my Sesame Street quilt. Thanks to everyone who voted for their favorite layout. As you can see, layout 2 won. But I told you that I was asking which layout you all liked best to help me decide what I really wanted and that I might not go with the majority vote. I've already announced it, but just for the record, I'm going with layout 3. The patterns are so much fun to put together and I love working with the bright Moda Marbles fabrics. Prairie Dawn is next!

When I first started pondering expanding my quilt layout to accommodate several recently released blocks, as well as some that were already available but that I'd omitted, P. asked me what I would do if even more patterns are released. My answer to that is the same answer I gave in regards to my Twilight quilt when someone asked me what I'd do if Stephenie Meyer wrote more books: .

Now that I've talked that one to death, I'm jumping back to a one-off of the question I asked two weeks ago, which was, how often do you cook? Today, we're talking about grocery shopping. Going to the grocery store is kind of a big chore. I used to love it, but it's not much fun anymore. Nevertheless, we all like to eat, so I go once a week and that works best for me. When I wasn't working I would go mid-week, but it easier to fit it in Saturdays now and the upswing to that is if I don't feel like cooking on a Saturday, I can grab a rotisserie chicken from the deli on my way out.

I plan my meals ahead of time and shopping once a week allows me to get the fresh ingredients for what's on the menu that week and keeps us from running out of really important things like milk, frozen waffles and Oreos. I keep a little magentized notepad and pencil on my fridge and as we use things up or people have special requests, we write what we need on the list. At the end of the week, I plan my menu, check inventory to make sure that we're not running low on things we use a lot and then I transfer the hand-written grocery list to my swanky new spreadsheet, which is divided by departments and aisles in the order that I shop them. It took a little bit of doing to get it set up, but now that it is done, it saves a ton of time at the store, because I know everything I'm looking for on each aisle and I don't miss anything and have to back-track to find it. Love it!

How about you? I must ask . . . how often do you grocery shop? Do you have any time or money saving strategies? A favorite clerk? A great grocery shopping story? Vote in the poll and leave a comment. I can't wait to hear!