I started with $26.17 in my grocery “envelope”. I knew I needed to stock up on some staples at Cash & Carry, a restaurant wholesale store so I budgeted $100. rather than my usual $70 this month.
Let’s see what I bought and what I ate…
Cash & Carry $70.32
Safeway $18.61
Right away I made a batch of oven baked Chicken,
then used some of that to stock my freezer with Burritos.
I made breaded pork chops
accompanied by oven roasted red potatoes made with
Marked down Onion Soup Mix
Pork chops and apple sauce go together in my book so when I discovered I’d finished off all my home canned apple sauce, I made a quick trip to the produce stand for
Apples $1.33
After that I individually wrapped the rest of the pork chops and put them in the freezer for future meals.
Grocery Outlet $3.35
These helped my make
Hawaiian Pizza
In fact I think I made pizza 3 times this month.
Safeway $4.78
I wanted whole milk so I could make a batch of yogurt, but also grabbed the 2% when I saw it was marked down. With so much milk on hand I decided to use the day-old Honey Wheat rolls I brought home from work
free bread
to make bread pudding
Pioneer Bread Pudding
Safeway $.05 -no picture of the ginger root I needed to make
Honey Garlic Chicken
using some more of the chicken I’d stock piled.
The freezer still held a nice assortment of leftovers at the first of March so although I didn’t do a lot of cooking the past month I still had a varied diet.
For snacking, I made
Chex Mix
banana bread
and
Peanut butter bars
I took advantage of some loss leaders
Haggen’s $11.00
Grocery Outlet $9.69
QFC $4.50
Grand total:$123.63
and I still have $2.54 to supplement April’s grocery budget.
I still have lots of chicken, do you have a favorite recipe for me to try?
Same goes for pork recipes.
afrugalspinster 
Someone’s going to have some delicious hot cocoa! Or do you use the Ghirardelli cocoa powder in baking?
I use it in baking but mostly when I make chocolate syrup for my imitation mocha each morning. Honestly I don’t buy it for the Ghirardelli brand but because it comes in a large quantity. Sometimes I just buy Hershey’s.
I’ve never used Ghirardelli in baking, but that must make some delicious brownies and icing. Although, Hershey’s consistently ranks high among cocoa powder in consumer blind-tasting tests. I think ATK did a sampling of various cocoa powders, a while back, and found Hershey’s to rank quite highly with it’s testers.
I think I went with Ghirardelli rather than Hershey because Hershey’s come in a larger package therefore higher cost (not per # but overall)
Would you share the pork chop recipe?
I make them similar to this recipe,http://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/breaded-pork-chops
but I use bread crumbs instead of saltines.
What do you use DaVincis syrup for?
I make Raspberry Iced Tea with it. This time I also got hazelnut for my coffee.