 Hey there friends. So today I have the once a month grocery shopping ultimate guide for you all. This has been so highly requested, especially since I show a lot of grocery hauls here on my channel. A lot of you have been asking how I'm grocery shopping once a month. How do I make my groceries last? How do I keep produce and other things like that? So we're gonna get into all of that today. So a question I've received is why would you grocery shop once a month? I break it down into a couple different reasons. One of them being less gas spent, less time spent, and less trips to the grocery store. For us, we actually don't live very near a grocery store. We live out in the country. There isn't a grocery store just up the street. And so that's one of the reasons that really pushed me into grocery shopping once a month amongst many others. So I'm not spending the gas or the time every single week to go grocery shopping. I am a mom of three. We homeschool, we have a lot going on in our schedule. So being able to take out the time that I have to take every week to go grocery shopping is huge. Along with that, I find that I spend significantly less simply because of the age old trick of impulse buying the way things are advertised or simply yourself choosing to impulse buy in that moment. I think there is so much of that that happens whenever I'm grocery shopping and whenever I go once a month, I have a very particular list. I have particular reasons. I'm gonna need those things throughout the month and it just cuts down on a lot of that, oh look, there's our favorite this or that or maybe even holiday sales or other things that might cause you to spend extra money that you were not planning on spending. I find that I am more purposeful in my shopping when I'm shopping once a month. I find that I make healthier choices and I'm more mindful of just the basic needs we have versus quick things that might only last for one meal or may go bad quickly. And the last biggest reason for me to do once a month grocery shopping is I have way less food waste, way less food waste. And the reason for that being is every week when you go grocery shopping, you tend to purchase a lot of the same things. You might get lettuce every week, you may get certain vegetables and other things every week and sometimes you put it on your list even if you don't need it or say you bought a pack of small bell peppers the week before, you have like two left and you're thinking, well, I'm probably gonna need some more this next week so I'm gonna buy an entire pack again and those two that are left may get thrown away, they may never get used. So that's just one example of so many other areas in my cooking and grocery shopping that I was creating so much food waste and also I think sometimes we just tend to get in a rhythm with shopping every week and we tend to not eat up the rest of whatever we purchased last week. So for those reasons, you can see why once a month grocery shopping is kind of an attractive idea. So let's go over the basics of grocery shopping once a month. Decide your goals, maybe you want to be healthier, maybe you want to stick to a budget, maybe you want to shop locally and you just wanna shop locally and it'll help you hone in on those local stores a little more if you're just going once a month. Whatever your goal is, write them down, figure out your reason of why you want to shop once a month. After you create those goals, then decide where you want to shop once a month and this fluctuates for me a lot depending on what I really need that month, depending on maybe what I have coming up the next month. I tend to shop in bulk so we do have a lot of local bulk food stores. I've done a lot of that in the past but currently I am doing a lot of shopping with Azure Standard and that's a new one for me and then also Costco and whatever I can't manage between those two, sometimes I'll stop at a local grocery store or I will stop at Aldi and I try to get it all done within a very small time period. I usually do most of my regular Costco and other shopping in one day and then my Azure Standard order does fluctuate on when it's going to be delivered so that may not be the exact same day but I try to get it all very close together so I can keep a handle on keeping track of what I bought for the month and I'll get into that as we go on. So is there any exceptions? Do I never run out to the grocery store? So I do have a few exceptions. One of them being if we are invited somewhere to go for supper and I'm taking a dish, I may need a little extra something for that. Obviously events, birthday parties, barbecues, having people over, those sorts of things and also another exception and you can create your own exceptions is we do a lot of things together as a family on the weekend and one of the things we really enjoy doing is cooking. On occasion, my husband will say, hey, let's do, let's barbecue this or let's do that and so then we will make a special trip to the store. A lot of times we do it as a family and it's just kind of more of an event than it is a grocery shopping trip. All right, so we're all ready to go grocery shopping for the month. What should we do before we leave to do that? So one thing that is really handy and if you are a Costco shopper or a Sam's club shopper and honestly I've been seeing them more and more at regular grocery stores but those soft, large, cooler bags, they are very handy. For myself, whenever I go to Costco and a lot of these other stores I'm actually driving about an hour away and so to have all of the cooler things, the freezer things in those bags is very convenient and I think everything stays nice and fresh. Freshness is going to be key in this video as you will see so making sure that everything stays nice and cool that's important. Another thing I like to do is go through my refrigerator or maybe some other cabinets where I'll be storing the things that I'm going to be bringing home. It just cuts down on the chaos when I bring a month's worth of groceries home. It's a lot to do, a lot to put away, a lot to store correctly in a short amount of time so I just want to be prepared and ready for that. One thing we will not be touching on in this video and you can let me know in the comments below if you would be interested in this is how to plan a grocery list for a month's worth of shopping. We are going to be talking more about storage today and how to make groceries last longer. I thought that was a bigger, broader range of information because everyone's grocery list is a little bit different but if you're interested in my grocery list and how I buy things by the month, I can definitely make a video about that. So you also might be saying I do not have room to store a month's worth of groceries and I'm going to give you a little bit of a challenge on that. Go through your house. I have a very good friend of mine and you all may watch her channel. Her name is Sherlyn Gingrich. I'll leave her channel linked below but for a time period of their life they lived in an apartment and she was able to convert some space in that small apartment to create food storage and I think that it just goes to show that anyone can make food storage happen. It might be underneath of a staircase. It might be in a cellar. It might be in a closet in a guest room. It may be somewhere that's a little bit unusual, a laundry room closet, somewhere that you don't often use. You can even get freestanding shelving that could be put in your garage or somewhere else or bins or totes. There's so many different ways that you can get creative with storing extra food and learning how to do food storage. I'm not going to be talking a whole lot about dry goods today. This is going to be more focused on produce and perishables because I know that's the bigger interest. However, one thing that is worth looking up is how to store dry goods correctly so that they do last a long time and there is so much information on the internet about that and I'll let you to it to do your own research. Okay, so let's talk about produce. Produce is huge. It's probably the biggest hang up in the idea of going monthly grocery shopping. You might say, well, how am I gonna make my produce last? How can we eat healthy while grocery shopping once a month? So first and foremost, let's consider what is more perishable and less perishable or, I don't know if that's a word, but basically what will spoil the fastest? So things like raspberries and bananas, we might eat those more quickly than we do other fruits like apples or oranges that I know will last very long time. So that is something to consider as you're making your grocery list and even as you're making your grocery list, you can mark them, underline them, put a little star next to those things that you know you want to use up first. Because storing produce is so key to grocery shopping once a month, I'm actually gonna break down a bunch of different produce items and how I store them and I also want to put a huge disclaimer here. Huge because this is really kind of the way that nature works and that is the fresher the item is when you go to store it, the longer it's going to last. So since we don't really know often when our produce was picked and how long it's been sitting in the grocery store, sometimes these methods do fail. So I wanted to make that very clear and put the disclaimer out there that your things may not last quite as long. I've had a few months where I've done these methods of storing things and stuff has gone bad at times simply because obviously that produce was a little bit older than I thought it was when I got it at the grocery store. So when you pick your produce, definitely pick the freshest looking produce, the best looking produce so that you know it's going to last as long as possible. Also another disclaimer, some of these methods do use things that are disposable and I know for some people they just care to not use these things and that is okay. I personally find that it's worth it to use some of the plastic and other things I'm going to be using to store some of these things so that they last longer versus using up more gas to drive to the store, using up more of my time and also ultimately more food waste like I mentioned earlier. All right, so we're going to start out with avocados. So whenever I started grocery shopping once a month, two of my biggest produce items that I wanted to get nailed down first because they are things we use a lot in our house was avocados and lettuce. So avocados are something we eat a lot and I decided to try out two different methods to store avocados for a month. One of them was to put the whole avocado right into the freezer and freeze it. I heard that works, so I went ahead and gave it a try and then the other way is to actually take your avocados, fill a jar with water. I personally like to use a glass jar so I can see what's going on in there and then put the avocados in and then fill it with water and so the winner out of the two methods was the jar with water and I'll get to that in a second but I do want to mention that putting a whole avocado in the freezer might work for pretty much one purpose and that is guacamole and you do want to use it within a couple of weeks. It just gets really mushy. It's probably the best explanation. So whenever it comes to the jar of avocados, I mean I have had avocados that I have taken out of that jar and cut open that were put in five weeks earlier and they look amazing inside. So I know that definitely every month I can purchase a nice big bag of avocados. I can put them into a gallon jar with water, put a lid on it, put it into my extra refrigerator and we will have avocados all month long. Okay, so the next one is lettuce, like I mentioned. So what I have done and experimented with is romaine lettuce. That is the lettuce that we prefer and so one of the things that I had heard works really well is to take your lettuce and wrap it in tinfoil and I know for some of you, you would care not to use tinfoil so maybe you could find an alternate method or let us know in the comments below if you have another method of making lettuce last a long time. Now I do take each head of romaine lettuce and individually wrap them. Whenever I did this for the first month, I let one or two of them in the refrigerator for five weeks. I wanted to see truly how long it would last. I opened them up and they were just like they were the day I purchased them. It just blew my mind and I think once I had that and the avocados down, it was a game changer for me to realize that I did not have to go to the grocery store for lettuce every single week. Something I recently got down pat is spinach. I personally love spinach salads and so what I started doing is putting my spinach in an airtight container and before I put it in the airtight container, I take a piece of paper towel and I fold it in half so it's a double layer in the bottom of the container and then I do the same thing on the top of the spinach as well. It helps to absorb extra moisture that might be in your spinach and with that airtight container, it's keeping out any extra air and I have so far been able to keep spinach fresh for probably a little over two weeks, just depending again on when that spinach was harvested. Okay, so mushrooms, again, the same exact method I just mentioned, I just put a paper towel on the bottom of the container, put the mushrooms in, paper towel on the top and put an airtight lid on top. Bell peppers is something I do not purchase every month simply because I slice them and keep them in my freezer and they're just really simple to use in most things in that way. I also can bell pepper and onion together but occasionally I'll see a good sale or I'll pick some up and if I do that, I actually like to put it into a vacuum sealed bag so it's really sucking all of the air out but I wanna mention with vacuum sealing, you can also just take a regular freezer bag and press as much air as you possibly can out of it and it's still going to help that item last longer than it would if it were to be just sitting out in a room temperature basket or something like that. So celery, I take that and I actually cut the end off and I think there's a few different ways you can do this. If you store celery a different way, let me know in the comments but I like to cut mine so that it's all trimmed up and I put it into a container that's airtight with water and I do change out that water probably at least once a week, even maybe a little bit more than that and your celery will definitely last a very long time in the refrigerator like that and I'm able to get it out and it's crunchy and I can put peanut butter on it and enjoy a healthy snack. Carrots are something that I think is a pretty big staple in most homes and if they are not peeled and they're just a whole carrot, I like to store them in a drawer in my refrigerator. If they come in a bag, I will often leave them in that bag as well, just kind of an added layer of protection and I'll store them in the bottom of my refrigerator often but if you want to go ahead and prep those carrots and you want to peel them and cut them and have them ready to go, you can store them the same way that you would with the celery just in some water with an airtight lid. Okay, so apples. Apples are something that generally lasts a long time and they're an item that if we're going to eat up some softer, more perishable fruits in the earlier part of the month, there's something that we tend to eat a lot more in the later part of the month. One caution about apples is I definitely would store them in their own drawer in your refrigerator if possible and I actually go an extra step. If you have a bonus refrigerator in your garage or your cellar, you can store them away from your other vegetables. That would be a really good idea because apples do let off a certain gas that does cause vegetables and fruit to ripen more quickly. So that is one thing to keep in mind. It might be a good idea to definitely keep them in their own drawer without adding any other fruits or vegetables to that drawer. Oranges are something that if refrigerated should last a better part of a month and it's a great way to get in vitamin C. My children love the little small oranges so once in a while I grab a bag of those and it's a great healthy snack that they can peel and eat on their own. Okay, so let's talk about potatoes, onions, and squash. And I'm not talking about summer squash like zucchini or the yellow summer squash. I'm talking about butternut squash or spaghetti squash, a squash that has more of a hard shell like pumpkin. Those types of things along with potatoes do really well being stored in a cool, dark place. For us, we just store it in our cellar or basement. I know some people store them in a bottom of a cabinet in their kitchen and those sorts of things. I've heard of people putting squash underneath their beds. Just as long as it's kind of in a dark, cool place, it works out perfectly. And onions, I actually keep my onions hanging in a bag in my kitchen. So another component that's good with potatoes and onions is to put them in to something that has air flow. So my potatoes are stored in a crate that has holes where the air can flow through. And my onions, I do store in a net kind of a bag and they get air flow a lot. And those sorts of things store really well. One thing that I like to do, and it's possible because you have a little bit more time not going grocery shopping every single week is maybe once a week, mark on your calendars to kind of check over your food stock. Check over what might need to be used up a little bit more quickly. Maybe your potatoes are starting to turn and you wanna use those. But I know from buying 50 pounds of potatoes, my potatoes generally last two months at a time. But again, it's a good thing to keep an eye on and just know if your onions are starting to get a little soft, you wanna dice them up and throw them in the freezer so that you don't get any waste. So the last one I'm gonna share today is cabbage and it is a very hearty, hearty vegetable. It's something that I have kept in my extra refrigerator for months at a time. And I like to wrap mine in like a saran wrap, just something to help keep it a little airtight on the outer part of the cabbage. Quick note on the later part of the month. So obviously some of these things are only gonna last a week or two. You're not gonna have them all month. So I know that not all of you have a seller storage like I do. I have lots of home canned things that I do in the summertime, whether it's green beans or corn or potatoes. So we obviously reach for those things when we're getting towards the end of the month and we don't have as many fresh items around the kitchen. For you that do not do home canning, it is very easy to find organic canned pears and other items that you can keep for your later in the month. You can get things like green beans that are frozen and plenty of other frozen fruits and vegetables. So one option that we like to lean into towards the end of the month is making smoothies. Whatever bananas didn't get eaten within that first week of me going grocery shopping, I throw in the freezer so we can use them in smoothies. I think by now you're probably picking up on the great amount of food that could be thrown away throughout a month that you're paying more attention to because it's what you have there. I have my bananas on the table. I just went grocery shopping this past week and so I'm kind of keeping an eye on them as they get a little more ripe. I'm gonna throw them in the freezer and they're still gonna get eaten and not thrown away. So the last category that we are gonna talk about today is dairy. I'm not gonna talk a whole lot about meat. I feel like meat is pretty self-explanatory. We actually purchase our meat locally so it's all in our deep freezer so I very rarely buy meats at the store unless it's sausage or something that's kind of special but most of our meat is in the freezer. So you can decide how you wanna handle that in your house whether you buy fresh meats for the month and you bring them home and you may put some of them into freezer bags so that they last throughout the month. So back to dairy. Dairy might be something that is challenging you going how am I gonna do milk without going to the store every week? So there's a few ways to approach this. One thing to keep in mind is that the best buy date on a lot of dairy products is actually pretty far out. So when you purchase your milk and sometimes I even look at the best buy date in the store, which I buy my milk locally now which is really nice but I've done this in the past where I'll look at the top of the milks and sometimes there's a lot of milk in the case and you might notice that some of them have an extra week on their best buy date. So that means that milk is fresher and so you can purchase that and you can use it up into its best buy date. Especially if you keep it closed and you're only opening one container at a time the whole thing of air tightness is very key whenever it comes to storing your foods. So you can look for the best milk at your store and then you can take some of it home and sometimes I've even frozen it in the past. Milk freezes pretty well, especially if it's pasteurized from the store. You can take and dump a little bit into a cup and use it that week just to give you a little bit of space on the top of the milk so that when it freezes and expands you're not having milk blowing up in your freezer. And another option if you really don't want to freeze milk is to try out powdered milk. I've had some pretty good experience with powdered milk in the past. So it's just dehydrated milk and all you have to do is add some water to it and you wanna let it get really cold in the refrigerator. It's definitely not something you wanna just mix up and drink but if you do that it actually works out very, very well. I'm going to get to dairy free milk here in a minute but let's talk about cheese. Cheese I think for most of us we know but for anybody that doesn't know cheese is something that lasts a very, very long time. And I actually tend to buy our cheese now in five pound blocks and then I can shred it as I need it. I usually bring the blocks home and I cut them into one pound blocks and then I vacuum seal them. But one thing to keep in mind especially if you don't have a vacuum sealer is to maybe look for cheese that's already vacuum sealed. I know that there's times that blocks of cheese in the store are already in a packaging that doesn't have any air in it. And so maybe if you don't have a vacuum sealer and you would rather go that route it's going to last a good long time in your refrigerator because it's nice and tight already in that packaging. A few very cheap investments whenever it comes to cheese is a cheese slicer like this one. It's very simple, there's a little wire right there and just run it down the block of cheese and it makes a nice slice of cheese and also a box shredder. I have a food processor and I could shred all my cheese that way but I like to fresh shred my cheese for the most part. I just think it melts so much nicer and I also like to fresh slice our cheese as well. I don't do a lot of pre-slicing and pre-shredding just because the melt is so great on fresh sliced cheese. So I like to have this on hand as well to just be able to grade things quickly. Another note about cheese is that I've had cheese last months in my refrigerator being vacuum sealed so there is times that I've even bought cheese in a two months chunk of whatever I think I'm going to need and it's lasted perfectly fine. Dough or cream and cream cheese. Both of these things for the most part I'm gonna say I've never purchased cream cheese or sour cream directly from the store that has not had a months best by date out. So the date on it is a month away so I know that my cream cheese and sour cream is gonna be perfectly fine all month long and it works out great to just purchase one month at a time. Having cream is also that way. A lot of times I purchase heavy cream and the best by date is two, three, four weeks away so I know that especially if I don't open it right away it will last a nice long time in my refrigerator. For this reason you may wanna purchase heavy cream in smaller containers just because it's got that seal again with the airtight and it's going to last longer as you open up the smaller containers versus one large container. Take that mindset with other things that you might be purchasing for the month might be better to purchase smaller groupings of things than one huge amount if you don't have a way to store it correctly. Okay so let's talk about nut milk. So I drink a lot of nut milk and through this whole entire learning process of shopping once a month I've learned that a lot of nut milks are also best by dated a month away so you could purchase one month's worth of nut milk if you drink almond milk or coconut milk or something like that but for myself I have just started keeping those things on hand almonds, cashews, the things that I want to make milk out of and then I just make it as I want it. It's very simple, if you have a blender you can make nut milk at home. It's very very easy, even if you don't have cheesecloth you can use a t-shirt, a clean t-shirt to strain out your nut milk so that you have fresh homemade nut milk whenever you wanna make it at home. So since nuts store a very long time in the freezer I just keep mine in the freezer, pull them out whenever I wanna make nut milk and I go ahead and do that. So I know this was all probably a lot of information. I don't even know how long this video is gonna be. I'm assuming it's gonna be a little bit longer than my usual videos but it is such helpful information if you are really serious about wanting to start shopping once a month. These are things I've had to do a lot of learning on my own and obviously I did not talk about every possible thing that's in a grocery store but we can talk more in the comments if you have tips and tricks on how to store certain things that maybe I didn't talk about or another idea about how to store something I did talk about let me know in the comments. I would really love for this to be a great resource video for people that are trying to find the tips and tricks when it comes to shopping once a month. I know whenever I went looking for a lot of this information I really had to experiment myself and couldn't find a lot of resource on this so I wanted to share what I've learned so far. I will be sharing a lot more of what I'm learning over the next couple of months as I share once a month's grocery haul because I'll be doing that as well and I know that you all will appreciate that because I've had so many questions about how to store this or that for a whole month. I hope this gives you a starting point and if you're just starting into doing once a month shopping I hope that it goes really well for you and if you wanna leave comments in this video I will do my very best to respond to them as quickly as I can and I'm so glad that you're here. If this is the first video of mine that you've ever watched think about hitting that subscribe button. I do lots of meal prepping and food preservation and recipes and just very good home simple cooking. Also hit that like button for me if you enjoyed this video and I will see you all in my next video.