A snowy shopping run...

We had a power errand running session last night. We went to two grocery stores and to Target to get two birthday presents for parties this upcoming week. It was freezing and snowing, but I HAD to take advantage of having only one kid again on a Friday night. I miss not having my tiniest grocery buddy, but it sure is helpful (and VERY rare) when I don't have to take both of my girls with me!

Even still, this is not my greatest trip ever because in total coupon shopping failure, I didn't have a list. I'd looked at the grocery ads, of course, and they were just not impressive. I basically just decided we'd wing it at the Hen House since we'd be right by one, and I knew I needed to get cheese at Hy-Vee. That's exactly what I did.

At Hen House I got -

1 box of toothpicks
50 feet of foil
3 boxes of Electrasol gel gaps
3 cans of Red Gold tomatoes
1 can of Rotel
1 Betty Crocker carrot cake mix
1 Betty Crocker cream cheese frosting
1 box of Beechnut banana cookies
1 Pam with flour
1 loaf of Oroweat 100% whole wheat
1 Digiornio for 1 200 calorie pizza (free)
1 bag of Ore-Ida fries
1 Jack's pizza
1 El Monterrey family size enchilada
1 El Monttery Steak and Cheese taquito
5.02 lbs of apples
4.25 lbs of pears
2.19 lbs of grapes

My pre-tax total was $42.57. I saved 50%. It is far from my best total ever, but I did what I could! I was also happy to see that I saved $77.69 in January on just store sales at Hen House. I figure that's pretty good, especially since I don't do all of my shopping there.

At Hy-Vee we grabbed four bags of cheese and a package of almond bark. My total was $7-something pre-tax.

We have a busy week again this week -- Sunday dinner out with my in-laws, 2 birthday parties, Alpha is starting again, the baby has a doctor's appointment, and of course, we all have work and school as usual. We'll be taking it easy and eating pretty simply like we have done for the last few weeks. I do however have a baking project planned -- cake balls! I've been wanting to make them for a long time, and I decided they would be fun for the girl's Valentine's Day parties at school. I figured I better give them a test run though! Stay tuned. That's on the agenda for tonight!

I have to add, that I finally feel like we've recovered from our mini pantry challenge at the end of Dec. I am interested to start reading if others who participated for the whole month of January will experience an after the pantry challenge crisis like I did. The good news is, it got better! I think it really took as a full three weeks to recover from 14 days without shopping, but it was such a good exercise in eating what we had!

See also www.orgjunkie.com and www.grocerycartchallenge.blogspot.com.