Bring all your groceries inside with ONE TRIP every time
How many of you are of the ONLY EVER TAKE ONE TRIP school of thought of grocery unloading? You loop shopping bags over both arms, both shoulders, and maybe even somehow rig up a grocery-bag-backpack. No matter how heavy that load is, you WILL carry in all 28 grocery bags IN ONE LOAD!
If this is you, then you know why I’m so into the One Trip Grocery Bag Holder.
Save food from the fridge
Not that long ago, humans knew what to do to lengthen the shelf lives of our produce, but now? Everything kinda gets tossed in the fridge. (Admit it: you’ve refrigerated onions before. Uh-huh. I know it!) Is there a better way we could store food?
You can afford better food: 10+ ways to get more out of your grocery budget
Let’s start with this: I am NOT a picky eater, but I’m choosy about my food. I haven’t always been this way: when I first lived on my own, life was full of Pizza Hut and mac and cheese and ramen noodles and nary a vegetable in sight. I thought spending 50 cents on green onions was a splurge.
The first changes in my adult eating habits happened when I read Micheal Pollan’s rules for eating. That link is a LONG article, and well worth the read, but I’ll summarize: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. And don’t eat food with more than five ingredients. He goes on to say that if you’re confused, you should stick to foods your grandmother would recognize. That’s pretty simplistic. In real terms, how do you get there?
Helen Jane finishes her meal planning lesson
We already talked about my thought strategies and meal planning, now it’s all about the listing. Like I said, I list out all the foods that we have that I want to use up. Then, I list out all the recipes I’ve seen that I want to make. Then, I list the ingredients I need to get at the store. But there’s more to it than that.
How to plan for a week of meals
I plan my meals every week.
It saves me time and money.
It helps me visualize when I’ll need extra help, or when to scale back or when to pull out the fancy forks (Just kidding, I don’t have any fancy forks. Do you?)
It keeps me from wasting food.
It takes less than 15 minutes a week.
So, what are you having for supper tomorrow?
Sugar skulls of Toluca: sparkling up in your face
I’m loving this time of year. Here I was, thinking the city went crazy for El Dieciséis, but Day of the Dead is so much more colorful, and soulful. Brightly colored sheets of papel picado hang in store windows. Velvety, crimson terciopelo flowers sit in vases at restaurants. Orange marigolds, the traditional Day of the Dead flower (called cempasúchil in Spanish) have suddenly bloomed in the street medians.
Why we shop at our dingey local grocery instead of the place with all the possibly-better food across town
While we have several quality grocery stores that sell all kinds of delicious, organic, 100% good-for-you kind of food, we tend to opt to shop at our local supermarket instead. And by local, I don’t mean locally-grown, I mean… right down the street. We don’t do this because it’s close per se — the location is part of the appeal, but that’s because John, the man who owns the store, employs people who live in and around our immediate area. His store services people who live near us, and we routinely see the same people working and the same people shopping.
I dreaded grocery shopping, but it’s my household job: how I made my chore less loathesome
I really, really dislike grocery shopping. It seems to take time out of my day and stores are hard to navigate and I always forget what I need and blehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I never want to do it.
But friends: NO LONGER!
Not since I made a system — everything I dislike doing is better with a system which removes the barriers to success. Now I finally have a grocery system — or at least most of one.