 Hey friends, welcome back. So today I am going to be talking about a question that I have been getting over and over again ever since I've introduced the whole thing of bulk shopping, bulk food shopping, and once a month grocery hauls. You all have seen a lot of hauls and I do have one for you in this video today, but we're gonna focus on the question of how to make a list for a month. I think a lot of you felt very overwhelmed by the idea of grocery shopping for a month and just making sure you remember everything. It's really something you do have to kind of learn how to do. It doesn't come naturally to most of us, especially whenever we've been kind of trained into grocery shopping once a week for the most part. So there is two ways really to go about grocery shopping for the whole month and really you can apply this also for grocery shopping for the week. Way number one is you can make a meal plan down to the nitty gritty, all your breakfast, lunch, dinner, everything that you're going to make for that time period, whether it's a month or whether it's a week. And I have done that. I've done an entire month of dinners and kind of figured out what we would use up first within the first week or two and then what we would do later throughout the month. You can do the same thing with a week and then of course you make a list of all the things you'll need to create those meals. You can also fill in things like toilet paper, laundry soap, other things that you may not necessarily need for those meals or just odds and ends like making sure you have extra eggs around, those sorts of things if you decide to do some baking, just taking all of those things into account. The second way to meal plan is to go to the store and check to see what's on sale. You kind of know and have a good idea of how much food your family is going to eat within that time period. And then you go ahead and bring all of that home and off of that, plus maybe what you have in your pantry and your freezers, you then create a meal plan. Again, I have done it that way as well. So the biggest question that probably arises at this point is how am I once a month grocery shopping and which way am I doing it? So to answer your question, I do both. I do account for a few of our staple meals that we repeat every single month. We have even one meal that we eat almost on a weekly basis. A lot of families have that and maybe you don't even realize how often you have specific meals that you repurpose and remake all the time. Our staple meal in our house, if you watch my meal preps, you might be able to guess it. It's barbecue meatballs, mashed potatoes and peas. It's just a favorite in our house and it's something that I can generally repeat once a week through the entire months because I have frozen peas, I always have potatoes on hand and then I just pull out some ground meat from the freezer and there you go, you've got that meal very easily. Tacos is another one that a lot of people repeat every single week. If your family gets tired of things every single week, you can always go every other week. So with that being said, you can plan some of your staple meals and that's kind of what I do. I have certain things every month that I purchase simply for those staple meals because I know I'm gonna use them throughout the months. If I have time or if I feel it's necessary, I will sometimes sit down and plan out the entire month of meals with maybe only six dinners a week in case we go out to eat or have leftovers or maybe five dinners a week. It's not always that I plan every single day but a good list of meals to know that I've got most of my months covered. So with that being said, since I've been doing this for a while and I've been bulk food shopping for a while, I really am aware and know what we eat within a month. So a lot of times I put down my staple items that I know we are definitely going to need for that month. And then I go through and I either will check my sale flyers like if I'm going to Costco or that sort of thing or sometimes I just simply go to the store and I see what is on sale. We do eat a mostly whole food diet so we eat a lot of veggies and potatoes and meat. And I simply don't make a lot of recipes that call for a lot of nitty gritty ingredients. And sometimes I just substitute. If I find a recipe in one of my recipe books or on Pinterest and I see that I can maybe make a substitute like instead of using cream cheese, use sour cream in the pasta sauce. You know, just things like that. I've learned to really be flexible in my kitchen so that I don't have to drive the whole way to the store just for cream cheese. So as you can see, you can work with recipes but you can just replace things with things that you have on hand. This is not a new idea by any means. In a lot of ways I feel like I've had to break a idea that is relatively modern, that we have to go every single week and we have to have all the exact ingredients for the every single recipe. And if you learn to cook kind of on the fly, you learn what flavor combinations are good. Get in your kitchen, get messy, learn how to try out new things and you will learn what your family loves in a very short amount of time. Also, I think that there is this other idea out there that we need to get elaborate with our cooking and our recipes. And nine times out of 10, my family enjoys dinners that are extremely simple just like the mashed potatoes, meatballs and peas. I know that most of the time my family is satisfied with healthy, simple meals and they don't have to be crazy or you don't have to go to Whole Foods to find that one specific ingredient for the recipe. So back to making our list. So once I have a lot of my staple ingredients and pieces that I know I need to have in the house for the months, then I can kind of have fun looking at sales and seeing what's on sale. So we love Brussels sprouts. And the last couple of months, they have been at a really good price at Costco. So I'm always ready to grab a big bag of Brussels sprouts. But if I walk in there and they're either out of stock because I don't like to go to too many stores in my monthly shops, I generally at the most will go to three stores. I really like to stick to one or two if possible. But if I walk in there and they don't have Brussels sprouts but they happen to have asparagus at a really good price, I will grab that instead. And I'll just make sure that we have a good stock of our fruits and veggies at the beginning of the month. And then throughout the month, towards the later portion of the month, I do normally lean into my canned fruits and things like that that I make during the summertime because I do a lot of freezing and canning. So that's another component to take in mind whenever I'm talking about making a list for the entire month or grocery shopping for the entire month, I do a lot of preserving and canning in the summer months. If you all have been around my channel for a bit, you know this. So I have a good back stock of things to pull from that I'm also mixing in with my store-bought foods. With that being said, our budget does fluctuate quite a bit for our groceries. For example, this month and the haul you're about to see, I did not actually spend that much. We are really stocked up. The last couple of months, I've gotten some good orders from Azure Standard. I've done a lot of shopping at Costco where we've gotten a lot of big bags of things and we are just simply stocked up on most all of our dry goods. So this month on my budget, I didn't have to make very big and I was able to get a lot of fresh goodies. So I feel like it's a good give and take whenever it comes to deciding what you need to get for that month. And especially if you're buying in bulk, there are a lot of things that you'll buy once and it will last for months and months. On the other hand, like I said, I do a lot of freezing and canning during the summer months and getting things from local farmers and things like that, that extra money that I don't spend on a month like this month that was kind of a smaller haul, I can put aside for summer months when we're gonna buy flats and flats of strawberries or other things that we might need to get from the local farmer's market. To start out, if you are just starting the whole idea of monthly grocery shopping, it would not be a bad idea to break down the entire month of meals. And maybe you wanna just plan for about five dinners per week. Then you can lean on leftovers or going out with friends or any other things that you're gonna do. I'm just giving some good examples. And so you're gonna create those five meals. So that is 20 meals. So four weeks, we've got 20 meals. Sit down and write out a list of 20 meals. You're gonna wanna categorize those meals by the things that are going to need the freshest items first. So the first half of the month, you're gonna eat a lot more of your veggies and fresh fruits and things like that. In the second half of the month, I lean into frozen vegetables and freeze dried. Anything else I have in storage that we can pull from, we will do that. Now there are some things like a head of cabbage that are gonna last well into the whole month. So that's something that I can use all of the time. You all have heard my avocado trick in the video that I talk about how to make vegetables and fruit last a whole month. And there are some of them that you truly can let us in another one. And I will leave that video link below in case you did not see that because that is so key to grocery shopping once a month. This month, I actually grocery shop at Aldi. It's been quite a while since I've been there and I don't go to the same stores every single month. But because I did not need to go to Costco this month, I decided to just hit up Aldi and see what they had. They had so many great deals. I really can't believe how well priced their produce was right now. And so I was able to get a lot of great produce. So I'm gonna go ahead and insert my haul from Aldi here. All right, so here is this month's grocery haul and I did get a small Azure order that I will be picking up in about two days. So that also will be added to this. Over here, as far as some meat, most all of our meat we buy locally. So it's not very often I buy tons and tons of meat in the store, but I did grab a pack of salmon fillets. I am just really trying to focus on eating healthy this month. So I knew that these would be an easy lunch item for me. And then I got three pounds of ground pork. This is a part of their never any line where there's never antibiotics and other things in that line of meat. I got a pack of scrapple. We're gonna do a breakfast dinner this week. So I wanted to have some scrapple around. If you don't know what that is, it's something that people in Pennsylvania and Ohio, we really enjoy, it's kind of a breakfast item. And then I got two packs of sausages. Again, just thinking about trying to eat healthier for myself. So this one is a breakfast sausage and then this one is a spinach and feta. I used to get this pretty often and I forgot about it. And then I saw it at Aldi, like I said, it's been quite a while since I've shopped Aldi. So it was good to see some old favorites. Still there, got a pack of baby spinach. I'm not sure if I'll make spinach dip or just eat some spinach salads, but it's a good option to have around. I got a head of cauliflower. This is a good example of something that was not on my list, but it was such a good deal, a bag of jalapenos. I think they were 65 cents for the bag. And I thought we could do some stuffed jalapenos this month that sounded really good. And then I got a bag of Brussels sprouts. I feel like that's a staple in our house. I always get those every month. We love them so much. And in the video that I recently did where I was telling you how I make a lot of produce last a month, I was talking about how I store avocados. A question I got over and over and over again, I'm gonna address it here, is do you put the avocados in ripe? And the answer is yes, mostly. So I do try to select ones that are almost ripe or if they're really, really hard, I do let them sit out for a little bit before I put them in the jar of water to store for the month. So here is some bell peppers. Now, some of these are gonna go into recipes and I'm also kind of running low on my sliced bell peppers I like to keep in the freezer. So some of these are gonna get sliced and vacuum packed and put into the freezer. And these were on sale. So I was glad to see those. I figured they would go great in the freezer. And that's kind of what I like to do with the bell peppers is when they are on sale somewhere, I stock up and then I just load up my freezer. This was something else that was not on my list but was on sale. So I went ahead and grabbed that. We can make zucchini noodles. We really love those in our house. I got some purple cabbage. I just have been in the mood for like stir-fried cabbage with sausage. It's so delicious together or even with some bacon. And purple cabbage has just a little bit more nutrition in it than green cabbage. So whenever I can get purple, I usually do. I got my romaine lettuce and some strawberries. We got some broccoli back here. We got oranges. I did get a fair amount of fruit just because we are in obviously the winter season and always keeping the vitamin C going with oranges and things like that. I got some red grapes. These were also at a really good price and on sale. Got a bag of lemons also on sale. A bunch of celery. I get celery pretty well every month. It's just a nice, quick, easy snack and it lasts a little bit longer than cucumbers. We like cucumbers a lot too but those go pretty quick. So at least I know I can keep these pretty well all month in the refrigerator. Again, same with carrots. Got three bags of carrots and then we only have one frozen banana left in the freezer. So I went ahead and got 10 pounds of bananas and a bunch of these will go into the freezer for banana bread or smoothies, mostly smoothies. They're a good base for smoothies to mix in with blueberries and we have a lot of frozen blueberries from the summer's time still in our deep freezer so wanted to combine those with that. And then over here I have a five pound block of our favorite cheddar, organic raw cheddar cheese coming from Azure but I did grab two small blocks of a yellow mild cheddar and then this was kind of a impulse buy but I know I'm gonna use them. They look so good. It's these egg life wraps. I've used them many, many times. I really like the everything bagel seasoning ones but these are a new flavor. They're called garden salsa and I just thought with like a breakfast meat or like sausage or something like that it would be so good to make up some wraps and then up here I've got two bags. I had to go to a local store for this but two bags of local coffee. We are almost completely out of coffee and it's something that I have been making. I kind of went on a break of not having it and I've been doing intermittent fasting so having some black coffee in the morning just is the ticket for me and then here is three dozen eggs. Now we go through much more eggs than this and I'll be getting some from my sister-in-law or a local farm that we also stop into but we just were pretty well out of eggs completely so I was like I'm just gonna grab three dozen just to get us through until we run out to one of our local farms. Here is four bags of raised cauliflower. This is a staple I like to keep in my freezer. It's the base of my beanless chili and I also use it for other recipes and I was out of that so I grabbed four of those and then here to finish off the dairy I grabbed some feta cheese. That was a really, really good price there at Aldi and then I do make my own yogurt pretty well religiously but this week is really busy for us. We were just very low on groceries and I don't know that I will have time in the next couple of days to make yogurt and for some reason the last time I made yogurt I completely forgot to pull out my starter for my next batch so we truly are out of yogurt in our house so I just grabbed these. The girls eat a lot of yogurt with my canned fruits and stuff so having this around just as a little convenience to myself is going to be really helpful. This is something I've started getting I think two months ago I started getting you can get it at Costco but I also notice Aldi has them as well and they have a spicy version. That's just these little single guacamole's and it works great for taco night even if the girls wanna get out some tortilla chips and salsa and guacamole it's just a fast easy way for them to have something nutritious that is healthy and then up here is the only thing I actually had to grab that was more household related and that's press and seal and that is a luxury that I allow myself as press and seal. I love it I know some people have been stuck on saran wrap for a long time but try press and seal it's just so much more convenient you can reuse it sometimes I use it a couple different times especially if I'm making sourdough I use it to cover my bowl and it's just super handy stuff our whole household really likes that and then this was a little treat I generally try to buy potato chips with avocado oil there's another brand that I buy pretty often and it's not the cheapest but it's at least better than us getting a lot of seed oils and things that aren't very good for our guts and so here at Aldi in their specialty aisle that's only there for a certain amount of time they have these chips that are made with sea salt and avocado oil so three ingredients I believe sea salt, avocado oil and potatoes and so I grabbed four bags of those because they're a very good price compared to the name brand. All right coming around to this side so again the potato chips and then I also got the blue corn tortilla chips that are organic I do prefer to buy tortilla chips that are made with avocado oil not a seed oil but because I didn't want to make a bunch of stops today and I just wanted to get my grocery shopping out of the way I just went ahead and grabbed these three again it's not something that I make a huge habit of but at least they're organic so that's a big plus and then the girls had requested some pistachios some cashews and almonds these are big snack items in our house because we are mostly gluten free besides sourdough and so having these types of snacks on hand is really handy and I know again some of these have oils seed oils that they roast them in but we do our best. I grabbed some orange juice and then some organic ketchup I have switched pretty much to only buying organic ketchup just because generally when it's organic it does not have corn syrup in it if you look at the back of your ketchup usually it's mostly made out of corn syrup and we would like ours made out of tomatoes and then we really love their ranch and they started making this big size I used to buy the smaller size in just big cases but they've made these big family size which is great and we've tried many many organic ranches ranches made with other oils all of that and nothing has won yet so if you have a good healthy ranch that you all really enjoy and it's nice and creamy or even a ranch recipe let me know in the comments cause I would love to hear it. Okay I can't wait to dig in to cooking with all of those fresh ingredients this month it's gonna be a great load of fresh vitamins and other nutrients that my family needs here during the winter months. I'm also gonna share what I got from Azure since I don't have that to show you here so I actually got a five pound block of their raw organic cheddar cheese we love that cheese and the last time I got a five pound block it lasted us roughly two months so we will see I'm kind of thinking I might not do an Azure haul next month so I had that in mind with some of the things I purchased I also got some of the Nancy's cream cheese we really like that cream cheese it is a cultured cream cheese and then also their sour cream that is also a cultured product so I love knowing that there is no added fillers and things like that in the cream cheese and sour cream and of course they're both organic I also got a big bag of salt because we were sort of running lower on our mineral salt and that's all I use for my cooking and I just like to always have a nice stock of salt it's just one of those things I like to have on hand and then I did order a 50 pound bag of red potatoes I feel like red potatoes last a good long time and I've mentioned before I buy a 50 pound bag of potatoes every other month we do not eat a load of things with like gluten so potato is our main starch in the house I do make sourdough and occasionally my husband does pick up hot dog or hamburger buns but so we do lean into potatoes a lot plus it is my husband's favorite kind of filler in a meal and then along with that I picked up some of the stinging kombucha hot sauce it's raw and fermented I have used it here and there but my husband really loves that on all kinds of things so I grabbed a bottle of that so it wasn't a huge order from Azure this month but just some staple items and I'm not sure I guess you guys will probably see if I end up doing another Azure haul next month but between all of that I'm so happy with everything that I picked up and then once I have done all of my grocery shopping for the month then I start a list for the next month and I wanted to mention this because there is, I do keep a running list because if we run out of one of our staple items it's gonna be a little harder for me to remember when I sit down once a month to make my grocery list so in my planner I like to keep a sheet where I just keep a running list and I actually try to keep them kind of in separate lists like if it's something for Azure I'll do that or something for another store and then when I go to go shopping go to go shopping I actually use the notes app on my phone and I break it into categories I just find that I get through the grocery store so much faster if I have things broken down into meats dairy, produce and canned goods and other things like that I can just find everything I'm looking for in that aisle or that section of the store when I'm in that section of the store instead of running from one end to the other so what I do is I categorize everything in my notes app and then as I put things in my cart I just have my phone I erase that item and I can slowly see my entire list just disappear and it's empty and ready to fill again for the next month so I do have a written list but I like to kind of keep both and then I break everything into a digital list on my notes app whenever I'm ready to go grocery shopping so I hope that this was helpful for you I hope that we can chat in the comments if you have more questions on how to make a list or some more ideas of how to tackle monthly grocery shopping just ask them in the comments I do try to check them as often as I can and reply to them as much as I can and I thank you guys so much for watching if this is the first video of mine you've ever seen definitely hit that subscribe button I do lots of meal prepping and bulk food shopping and all the things to try to keep grocery shopping and meal planning stress less or stress free and of course budget friendly so thanks for watching guys and I'll see you guys in my next video