For the past several months, I have been on a mission to clean out our freezers. I can finally say that I did succeed. So now what?  This month’s grocery budget or should I save overspending will show just how much we can spend in a month.  But more about that later.

The first stop we made to re-stock the freezers was a local meat market. We ended up spending around $200 but purchased what I am planning on being enough meat when combined with our chicken order that we will pick up this Saturday to last approximately six month. We purchased chicken wings for our super bowl party in January, several packs of steaks, a couple of London broils, flank steak for use in some fried rice meals, cube steak and  a pork tenderloin which Matt split into 4 separate roast before freezing.  I did purchase 20# of ground beef which I divided up and froze most of the following out of:
2 meatloaves (this are uncooked but can be easily thawed)
2 Cheeseburger pies. (We have eaten one of these this week)
7 meal packs of Salisbury steaks. ( Matt will combined with frozen mashed potatoes for a really quick but hearty meal).
8 packs of already browned ground beef.
4 meals of stuffing for green peppers. We enjoyed one of these for Amanda’s birthday and a second is a left over meal. The other 2 packs are in the freezer.

Next stop was at Costco where not only did we purchase food to re-supply us but also we need to purchase several vitamins and medicines that I have not been able to coupon for in a long time.  We also had to renew our membership which only ended up costing me $14 so I will continue because that works out to around $1.25 a month and just the convenience of buying in bulk is well worth that cost!

Finally we headed out to Target to grab an awesome deal on Starbucks coffee and to gather some additional items we need to make meals out of our chicken.

In addition to cooking above I have also added a Baked Ziti to the freezer and will be placing some Taco soup in tomorrow as well.

I did take a look at our overall grocery budget for the year. Including all the additional spending this month, our monthly average is $650 which is less than last year. My plan is to make a couple of small trips over the next several months but I would imagine that by the end of the year our spending will be at less than $600 a month!

The plan is to let you in on how we end up processing 120# of chicken on Sunday or Monday after it is completed.