This week's shopping trip

So for this week, I was trying to stick to a budget of $30 for food. I'm sad to say, I went over a little bit. Not by much, but still, I went over. It cost me $31.92 for all this. What you don't see pictured is 10 bottles of gatoraide I grabbed at Safeway for $8. That puts me at just under $40 for the week. I hear that's actually pretty good, but I'd like to challenge myself to do better. After all, we're only doing meals for 2 people.

Here's what I got. French bread for tonight's dinner, coffee, bananas, tuna, pepperoni, kashi waffles, yogurt, sausage, stuffing, ground beef, eggs, pineapple, refried beans, baked beans, chicken, bread, hot dog buns and hamburger buns. I saved $9.85 by way of coupons. All this will feed us for more than a week. I'm eager to see how long we can go without shopping for groceries again besides milk.

The nice thing is, over the past year, I've been able to buid up a nice stockpile of certain things due to couponing. Combining manufacturer coupons with store coupons or sales or rebates or some combination of those has allowed us to have a healthy stockpile of foods that will last us for a while in a pinch. Obviously, I don't want to eat cereal, lunch meat, and snack foods for any long period of time, but we have good foods to fall back on if we need to scrape together a meal when we're broke.

The thing about this week's shopping trip though is that the chicken, the waffles, the coffee, the tuna, and a few other things will last us for more than just this week. I've got at least another 3-4 day's worth of food there. I think I can safely say that I can plan to go at least 10-14 days without getting any more groceries. Again, besides milk.

On another note, I'm in the middle of a project tonight. I've recenly discovered what everyone else knew about ages ago. Apparently, this woman knows what she's talking about! I spent the whole evening last night pouring over her recipes and then most the day today at work copying them into my recipe book and planning meals. Oh, right, I was talking about my project. I'm making cinnamon rolls from scratch! I've never done that before. I do fairly well in the kitchen, and as time goes on, I get more organized and daring and realize all that I've been missing. My next feat will be making my own pasta! I'm really excited about that one.

I've used her recipe for cinnamon rolls but cut it in half. I certainly don't need 7 pans of cinnamon rolls, but I can take 3 large pans of them to my sister's wedding in the morning so we all have something to snack on as we get ready for the big day. However, I don't have any maple flavoring for the frosting, so I'll have to improvise.