Welcome to my second post about my never ending quest for healthy groceries on a budget.  I’ll be including my menu inspiration for the week and what I actually had on my grocery list.  I already like doing this post series, even if I’m the only person who gets anything out of it!  Writing last week’s post ended up working as a bit of an audit on myself, and when I started into the menu and budget this week, I found a couple of things I could tweak to (hopefully) maximize the savings.  Mainly, I discovered that I could tailor my menu much more to the sales, and did so this week with moderate success.

Again, the first thing I did this week was check the sales.  I found the Aldi app, but it really wasn’t that helpful as far as letting me know the special buys of the week there.  When I turned my attention to Kroger though, I was pleasantly surprised to see that they were doing their Family of Brand sale and I was able to load up my shoppers card with ecoupons for the Kroger brand of anything.  I made a list of the things I thought were great deals, and used that to write my menu.
I just have to warn you guys, when I said we generally eat the same things for breakfast and lunch, I wasn’t kidding.

Here is our breakfast menu for the week.  The only difference from last week is that I plan to make a batch of the Bust A Myth Banana cake from the THM cookbook to use as a quick breakfast or morning snack.  Still, the main ingredient in that is oatmeal, so it’s not even that much of a stretch.  If I get super lazy and don’t get around to making it, we’ll just be having oatmeal.

Lunch has a little more variety in it, but it’s pretty similar to last week as well.  I forgot to mention that the kids alternate PB&J with cucumber sandwiches.  They don’t usually eat PB&J every day.  I have to make the Hummus but I STILL have not been able to find Tahini.  I’ve been wanting to make hummus for months now and cannot find the tahini anywhere.  It’s killing me!  Thinking I’ll make it sans tahini this time and just go with it.  I have the feta left over from last week, along with a bunch of celery, and cans of chickpeas in the cupboard, making this a pretty cheap round up of lunches.  All I have to buy for this is eggs and bread.

Aaaand here we go with dinner.  I’m excited about making the eggplant parmesan because we haven’t had that in a while, and the rest of the week is basically trying to think of creative ways to eat chicken and pork because I still have a few pounds of pork in the freezer from last time.  I picked up more split chicken breasts than we’ll probably use this week, just because they were a great deal.  Trying out bean burritos as a menu item because I need some good ways to use beans in the summertime.  Except for the pizza, everything here is THM-friendly.  I don’t bread my eggplant or eat buns with the hotdogs.  I DO eat kale instead of pasta and salad with just about everything.  Even the pizza could be THM with an on-plan crust.  It’s a coin toss whether I’ll actually get around to that though. My husband and kids still eat the pasta and bread, and I add fruits to their meals to make sure they’re getting plenty of healthy carbs.

One thing I’ve noticed this last week is that I really have to have carbs since I’m exclusively breastfeeding Eva right now and exercising everyday.  On the days when I ended up eating mostly low-carb, there was a definite difference in my supply and in Eva’s contentedness towards evening.  This week I’m trying to be more aware of what I’ve eaten and make sure to add some healthy carb sources to most of my meals.

Overall, I was really happy with how grocery shopping went this week.  I had to buy diapers, which is never a fun day, but I still came in $3 under budget.  I spent $52.55 at Kroger, which covered our meat for the week, lots of veggies (including frozen okra for .80 a bag!)  diapers, whole wheat flour, shampoo, peanut butter, notebooks and school glue (just can’t resist those back to school sales…) I didn’t really need to get peanut butter this week, but when life hands you natural peanut butter for .99 you buy that stuff up! I also spent $4 at the bread outlet and got 4 loaves of all organic, seedy bread.  At Aldi, I bought my dairy stuff, coffee, marinara sauce (they have an organic, sugar free sauce at a great price), sausage, and a few more fruit/veggie items–total came to 41.27.  My total for the week was $97.82.  I’ve included my final lists for Aldi and Kroger below.  What do you guys have going on your menus this week?