Welcome back to another installment of my budget grocery shopping.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for a budget is just not buy anything.  I know, shocker, right?!  For the last several weeks we’ve ended up with stuff left over in the fridge and cupboard.  Not usually quite enough for a full week of meals, but all those ends add up eventually. This week, my goal was to not buy anything else.  I don’t have a menu made out, but we need to clean out leftovers and the produce so it’s going to be a hodge-podge of whatever I can throw together with odds and ends.

I didn’t exactly achieve it.  The kids needed more milk and I had to pick up a few odds and ends, but I only spent $25 dollars as opposed to the full hundred.

Since I only had to buy a few things, I chose to shop at Kroger, which is right down the street, rather than spend the gas money to get all the way to Aldis and maybe save a dollar or two.  In a serious budget situation, balancing grocery savings against gas money is essential to getting the most bang for your buck.  If the savings you can get by traveling a little farther to a specific store more than makes up for the additional cost of gas, I consider it to be well worth the time.  Otherwise, not so much.

My main purpose with the shopping today was to get a few things I needed to make a dish for our church fellowship dinner, and milk.  Here is my list.

4 bananas ~ 2 gallons milk ~ 1 quart half&half ~ disposable pie pans ~ rubber bands ~ graham crackers ~ baby teething gel ~ Kotex

I had coupons for the Kotex, and almost everything else was on sale, except the teething gel.  That stuff is expensive!  It was aggravating, but I have a grumpy 5-month-old chewing on everything, so I’m hoping it will help her out.  If it does, great.  If not, I’ll continue to be annoyed about spending more than 1/5th of my total amount spent on groceries this week for a little tube of goo. 😛

That’s it! Do you do an odds and ends week once in a while too?