project: food budget, weeks 7-10

I think most of the participants in the project skipped posting on Thanksgiving, but since I’m posting bi-weekly, that makes it a whole month since my last update.

As I guessed, our food expenditures increased based the amount of people eating at our house. Not only did we add 3 adults and a ravenous 4-year-old, my husband had some extra days off work and was actually home for meals.

It’s not entirely accurate; we ate out several times in a group, and my sister kindly paid for one grocery run, Mom for another. We took a trip to the farmers market and spent more money than usual, but I didn’t keep a good tally of the cash we had. So it’s an estimate.

Totals

Week 7: $59.62 – 3 grocery store visits
Week 8: $184.45 – 4 visits, farmers market, CSA pick-up; Thanksgiving dinner for 7 adults and a kiddo
Week 9: $46.85 – 3 visits (Mom was still here)
Week 10: $43.55 – farmers market, 1 grocery store visit (last night) and dinner for 2 at Chipotle

Lessons Learned

We splurged while our visitors were here, and that’s OK. My mom was drinking green smoothies with me which went through greens twice as fast (totally fine, but required more produce). Introducing my family to new food was fun and worthwhile, and we bought more snacks than usual to keep my energetic niece running.

The farmers market field trip was great because it didn’t feel like an errand, but everyone had a chance to pick out what they wanted for a few days — and we had lunch there, too — even if we spent more than we usually do.

Other Thoughts

The challenge of cooking for everyone was exciting, but I’m content to return to my routine for a while, too. We’re still finishing up leftover ingredients from Thanksgiving!

Conceptually I would like to actually post some recipes or a general meal plan of what I eat, but that may have to wait until after the holidays. I do seasonal work for a holiday card vendor and I am working full days doing that while developing a group coaching program for January from scratch plus all that “life” stuff. Something has to give, and ambitions of additional blog content seems to be first on the chopping block. I’ll work on it!

Check out the varying budgets of our illustrious group:

Tagged as: family, holiday, project: food budget, winter