How to Do Once-a-Month Grocery Shopping
By hitting the grocery store only once a month, you can save time and potentially money. Follow-up trips to pick up one forgotten item after another add up quickly, translating to hours lost throughout the month. Additionally, if you are constantly making stops at the grocery store, you may be more likely to engage in impulse buying, picking up items you neither needed nor later wanted. While once-a-month grocery shopping has its challenges, for many, the advantages of this type of shopping system outweigh them. Does this Spark an idea?
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Instructions
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Prepare storage space. For once-a-month-shopping to work for your family, you will need ample space to store the foods you purchase. If you already have a large fridge and sizable pantry, you may be fine; however, if you lack kitchen space, purchasing a back-up fridge or setting up additional shelving somewhere else in your home may be necessary.
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Create a meal calendar. Shopping only one time a month requires, above all else, careful planning. If you do not plan your meals out well in advance of your shopping trip, you will likely find that you have failed to pick up some of the staples required to bring your meal plans into fruition. Using a large desk calendar or other calendar with ample space, write out what you intend to make for breakfast, lunch and dinner on each of the days that fill your month. To make the task of shopping for all of these meals at once a bit easier, choose recipes that do not contain a large number components but instead are relatively simple in nature.
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Translate the calendar into a shopping list. Move through your calendar one day at a time and place the items needed to make each recipe on your shopping list. To make the sizable shopping trip easier, start by creating columns for your list, each representing a different department. As you write the items on your list, place them in the appropriate columns.
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Rely upon frozen fruits and vegetables. While you certainly can use fresh fruits and vegetables at first, near the end of your month any produce you bought fresh will be gone or rotten. When you have passed the shelf life of fresh fruits and vegetables, which, depending upon the produce, can be several weeks, use frozen in its place, such as chopped frozen onions for recipes and frozen peas and carrots as sides. Take this lack of available produce into consideration when planning out your monthly meals menu.
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Freeze your milk and meats. Though freezing meat is common place, many do not take advantage of the freezability of milk. If you are only going to visit the market every 30 days or so, you will need to freeze this highly spoilable staple. Buy as much milk as you will require for the month and freeze all of the milk except for the gallon you intend to use first, suspending its shelf life.
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Make modifications throughout the month as necessary. Even the best laid plans can get a bit off track as the month progresses. If you find that some of your purchases didn't go as far as you thought they would, revisit your meal calendar and make modifications, replacing some of the more complex meals you had planned with simpler options, such as pasta and jarred sauce, to make up for the error. As you become more adept at shopping for a month at a time, these errors will likely become less and less common.
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Tips & Warnings
Freezing milk causes the fat to separate; simply shake thawed milk before each use.
References
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