Did my shopping this week, I like to shop for the house every two weeks ideally, and its always a shock to me at the cost of certain things in the stores, up to a point because many of the things that we grow/produce cost so little to do so, and yet to get even close in the stores, would point in fact be out of my chosen price range.

Its worth noting that I do NOT include my critter food, or Household needs in my food costs, they run in a different area of my budget.. So here is a little breakdown for you.. When I am being hardnosed about my shopping, I can very easily get by with $50 per two weeks for a family of two in regards to required purchases and in July/Aug/Sept, I can push it down even further, I have brought it as low as $30 per two weeks..

On average, we eat three meals per day, with at least two snacks, and one dessert. We typically have a min of 3 servings of fruit per day,  4 to 6 servings of veggies per day, and we tend to eat meat or eggs at almost every meal, however having said that.. its been years now that we have been eating meat like the chinese.. in this I mean our meat normally only takes up 10 to 20 percent of our total meal..  We use it to add to the meal, not make the meal.. I remember reading this a number of years ago, in a very good book on why certain countries didn’t have as many health issues as the average N.A.

My hubby takes Breakfast/lunch and two or three snacks per day for his long work time, he is gone on average for twelve hours per day.. and we rarely eat out, on average twice a month.

Its worth noting that when my beloved mother comes, that she swears we have no food in the house (LOL), really what she means is that we have no express food, that when you open the cupboards, you can’t just reach for XXXX and eat it.. you need to plan and think out your meals ahead of time and do the required prep work in order to have it at your finger tips. I do agree with her that compared to the amount of food we were raised with on the table, that I don’t cook nearly enough.. a perfect example is pork chops, we have ours cut a half inch thick, and we wrap three per package, that is one chop each for supper meal and one chop left over for hubbies take to work lunch the next day.  If you were at my mom’s she would have cooked 12 of them at the same time, yes she would have had leftovers to use but it also means that with that many more on the platter, more folks would be willing to reach for a seconds.

So here is my question… How much do you spend per week on food? that you do not produce yourself.. and are you finding yourself watching that food bill go up? Each time I go into the stores, I would swear that the price of many things are going up in price and the amount being sold for the higher price is less..