My Weekly Grocery List // Spring 2019

Meal planning is.. a good idea. It’s one that I’ve floundered on a lot over the last couple of years. The idea of planning out the meals for the whole month, doing the big monthly grocery shop, and then just a weekly (or semi-monthly, even) produce run to supplement is so appealing.

I have loved watching and learning from Brittany’s monthly meal planning for years. I have watched all the videos. I get the system.

The reality, though, is that I do not have the bandwidth to monthly meal plan. I don’t have 30 meals in my brain that I can add to a list.

What our grocery shopping looks like, then, is that every two weeks I go to the store and get everything we need, spending about $150 each time. Three hundred dollars for grocery for two is a lot, but it’s not terrible. Since we value quality food and good ingredients, it’s a sacrifice we’re willing to make.

In my ideal world, I’d love to have all of my groceries come from three sources:

• a meat subscription service (like Butcher Box)
• a CSA or ugly vegetable subscription service (like Hungry Harvest which I loved when I lived in Baltimore)
• pantry essentials, like rice and flour, delivered to my door (through something like Amazon or Thrive Market)

Unfortunately, this reality isn’t possible today. I think Butcher Box is overpriced, there are no CSAs in our area, and I value the time savings of purchasing pantry essentials through a subscription less than I do the cost savings of buying them myself. I’m optimistic that the market will catch up to my ideal soon, but for now we’ve got to make do.

I recently signed up for a Shipt subscription. For $99 per year, I can place an order through the Shipt app or website. If the order is greater than $35, there are no delivery fees. Comparing this to Kroger ClickList, where I had to pay $6 to have to go pick up my groceries myself, Shipt pays for itself in just 16 orders (somewhere between 6 and 8 months, I’m guessing)- not including the convenience of having the groceries delivered right to my house instead of the 20-30 minutes it would take me to go pick them up!

I have some serious travel time coming. The cool thing about Shipt is that you can place an order anywhere. When I’ll be in SF for 10 days, I can place a Shipt order to my hotel room! Without a kitchen I won’t be cooking Chicken Cordon Bleu, but I can buy lunches that are 1. much cheaper than the alternative (eating out) and 2. better for me (because I can control the ingredients!).

Jury is still out on Shipt, but I’ll be sure to update. For now, I’m pretty into it.

I have a weekly grocery list that I use as a starting point every week. I think of it as a things to check. I don’t buy toilet paper every week, but I do check the toilet paper every week. The goal of this list is to make sure that we never run out of things that are going to force us into the grocery store mid-week. So far, it’s been working well.

Let me know if there’s anything you’d add!

Here is my list:

• Toilet paper
• Paper towels
• Avocados
• Eggs- at least 2 dozen
• Peppers
• Onions
• Broccoli
• Spinach
• Sweet Potato
• Chicken breasts (Boneless, skinless)
• Salmon
• Tortillas
• Clementines
• Bananas
• Berries or Grapes
• Bread
• Tofu (Extra firm)