January Monthly Grocery Shopping Trip

The last few months we were concentrating on eating from the freezer and pantry. Between that and the holidays we were running low on everything.  This was a stock up on basics grocery shopping trip, particularly produce and meat/fish.

My plan was to buy Aldi frozen vegetables to get us through to Meijer's next fresh produce sale which should be coming up in the next week or so. I've had bad luck with Aldi fresh produce going bad quickly in the  past, although most of my neighbors haven't.

I changed my mind when I saw most of the fresh produce at Aldi was Tanimura & Antle. I had a good experience with the fresh Tanimura & Antle produce I reviewed.  I bought their Artisan Lettuce several times at Aldi after the review. The produce looked  good and wasn't squishy. We decided to give it a shot.


Hopefully this will last us for the month, with the exception of milk. Husband likes the moo juice.



I spent $113.93 at Aldi. That was more than I planned because we found some items Aldi doesn't normally have like the steel cut oats (Husband's favorite), and tissues with lotion (Husband's afraid I'll come back from Blissdom with another nasty bug and wants to be prepared.) Oh, and the wine.

Remember how I said I changed my mind about Aldi wine in my review? Here's proof that I actually buy (with my own money) the items I review and recommend on my blogs.

I did a little couponing too. There wasn't much on sale or with coupons for items we need with the exception of hippie colon blow cereal. Husband likes cereal for breakfast during the week. I paired the Kashi coupons on my Condo Blues coupon database (affilate link) with a sale and Target coupon to get 2 boxes for $1.99 each (normally $4.99 each.) I bought the other two boxes of Kashi with coupons and a sale at Meijer for $2.00 each.

I planned on buying four boxes of Kashi with the sale + coupon at Target but they didn't have one of the flavors specified on my coupon. I found it by happy accident while having photos reprinted Meijer. Good thing I remembered to take my coupons with me to Meijer!

I also make granola to stretch the amount of sale cereal we have on hand until the next sale + coupon cycle.

"Hey wait a minute!" you say, "Where's the..."

Cleaning supplies: There's a jug of vinegar on the table. I use it to make my own cleaners. The kitchen trash bags are an unfortunate necessity for recycling. We have to take our recycling to a city dumpster. Fortunately, that means our the amount of weekly household trash is so small it fits into a repurposed plastic grocery bag each week.

Bread: I started making our sandwich bread last November.

Health and Beauty items: I like plant based products as much as possible and stock up when they go on sale. I have enough on hand if we run out. I was also fortunate to receive some for Christmas - yay! I try to use cloth handkerchiefs as much as possible for dealing with my allergies. When it comes to colds, we go with disposable tissues.

What are your grocery shopping tips and tricks?

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