Thursday, June 7, 2012

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: :crazy: .

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!

6 comments:

Deanna said...

Once a week...day varies...usually when I run out of milk or eggs. Young Son, age 14, goes through a tremendous amount of food right now so sometimes we have to restock earlier than I predicted.

Lists save time and money.

Menus do, too.

Paulette said...

Usually once a week, or when I absolutely have to. Not on my list of things I enjoy doing, that's for sure. You are very organized! If i can scribble a list, I'm doing well!

Shay said...

I used to shop weekly but now it's just the two of us so I've dropped it down to fortnightly. I usually do a shop for essentials (milk, fruit, veg ) somewhere in there but don't spend much extra.

I just started online grocery shopping and I am loving it. I dont overspend, I only buy what I need and I get to do it in my pyjamas!

Jennifer Lovell said...

I have a grocery store horror story. Maybe you'll want to hear it some time, I don't know. But in short, there was a guy who worked there who was very friendly to me, and over the course of about 3 years, I went from being kind of annoyed by it to realizing he had a strong attraction to me to eventually feeling attracted to him too. In the end I had to stop shopping there! (And then, thank heavens, I moved to the other side of the country so I don't even have to drive by that store anymore). It was an awful mess. I bet you didn't expect that kind of grocery store story, eh?

On a happier note, I don't have as much trouble shopping now that I've been planning my menus ahead. Only one problem. I've been off-track with my menu planning for about 3 weeks now. I need to get back on track.

Jill said...

I like to try and plan a menu and then shop on Saturday. Nothing spectacular there. I like having the plan in place. But I often have a hard time remembering to plan a Saturday dinner. I'll have to look into the pre-made stuff for that!
I buy 4 gallons of milk on Saturday, and I often have to buy 1 or 2 more to make the fridge feel stocked (and not accidentally run out) around Wednesday. Nuts!

QuiltNut Creations said...

We do one big trip at the beginning of the month and stock up on flour, sugar, canned goods. Than weekly is fruits/veggies/bread/meat.

Great poll!