Food Waste, Grocery Shopping, Meal Plan

Food Waste

• 6 clementines - These haven't been good recently from Aldi so I'm not going to be buying them anymore.  These were already feeling really squishy when we got them.  $1.00
• a handful of grapes - found the container in the back of the refrigerator with just a small amount of grapes left - $.50
• lettuce - Twice this week, I didn't finish up the lettuce before it started to go bad.  Both times I picked out all the good pieces that I could.  $.50
• a small amount of mandarin oranges that I found in a container in the back of the fridge - $.20

Total Food Waste for the Week: $2.20

Total Food Waste for 2015: $22.39

Grocery Shopping:
Aldi has some great deals yesterday, tons of mark downs which was surprising since I went on Saturday Afternoon.  The meat special buy this week was Chicken Breasts for $1.89 per pound, around 5 pounds per pack.  I bought 2.  We have lots of meat now in our freezer and refrigerator.
Most of the great markdowns were on junk food items or snack items that will work good in lunches such as fruit roll ups, a large box of tropical fruit snacks, and 2 large boxes of teddy graham type crackers.  I also found some great mark downs on sweet and sour sauce and duck sauce so I'll have to plan to make Chinese some night soon.  Juice boxes, salad dressing and some other snacks were marked down too.  I thought for sure I way over spent since I didn't really have much of a plan going in, but left with only spending $145.  If you could see how much food I bought, $145 is pretty impressive.

Meal Plan:
I plan to do some bulk cooking this week to have some items for the freezer.

• Today - Large pot of Meat Spaghetti Sauce
• Tomorrow - Large pot of taco beans and meat for taco salad, nachos, burritos.  I'll probably freeze a bag of beans by themselves and make some bean burritos to freeze as well.
• Baked Chicken Breasts

We'll have plenty of leftovers from those items that should last us a few days for dinners.  Not sure what else will be on the menu but we have lots of bacon in the refrigerator and Italian sausages, ground turkey, chicken, and a large pork roast still in the freezer to use.