This week’s grocery shopping was unusually compact.

This month, the day care that Rafael attends mistakenly deducted an extra 2500 shekels from our account. We’ll get it refunded, but it will take time to straighten it out.

Then, the gas company told us that for the last year they’ve been billing someone else for our account, and we need to immediately pay them the year’s sum of 2500 shekels. Since we try very, very much not to defer payment by putting it on a credit card, we used the cash that would have otherwise have gone to a couple of other categories, including food for the week.

That wasn’t the problem it sounds like – we had 200 left in cash and some small change in my wallet so that became my food budget for the week. I enjoyed my minimal shopping and was grateful that even though I didn’t anticipate having such a small sum to work with in advance, I was sufficiently stocked up that I didn’t need to buy much, even for our family Chanuka party and having guests for Shabbos.

This is really a benefit of shopping the way I do – it’s not just about saving money week to week, but creating margin so that I’m not facing an empty pantry two days before I have cash to restock up. Not only am I not running low, I even had enough surplus that no one noticed that I hardly bought any groceries!

Here’s the grocery list for this week:

• 6 trays of eggs, 30 eggs per tray – 144
• avocados, 1.3 kg x 6.80 kg – 8.68
• onions, 1 kg x 7.90 – 7.90
• onions, 4.80 kg x 5.90 – 28.11
• potatoes, 4.1 kg x 2.80 – 11.44
• grape juice (1) – 11.20
• flour – 1 kg – 2.90

Total – 214.23 shekels

Edited to add in response to a question from a reader:

Can you please also post a menu for a week of what you are planning on making with this food? I just see lots of latkes and potato kugel, with some challah on the side.
Fish? Chicken? Beans? Some kind of protein? Veggies and fruit? Pasta? Breakfast?
I’m honestly confused.

This was my shopping list from the past week – I think the point wasn’t clear that I didn’t need to buy anything else since I was stocked with vegetables, fruits, canned goods, and chicken from previous weeks.(You can look back at my shopping lists for the two weeks before this to get a sense of how I shop and what I bought.) It would be mighty slim pickings if I was only going to cook with those items that were purchased this past week!

My menu from last week using these groceries as well as what I had on hand: Sun – smoky chickpea stew (includes chicken); Mon – chicken/white bean/corn succotash; Tues – sweet potato chili (includes chicken); Weds – polenta casserole (chickpeas and polenta, topped with sauteed zucchini and onions and then on top of that a seasoned tomato sauce – I made an additional pan to put in the freezer); Thurs – Chanuka party (menu below); Sun – l – baguettes and hot dogs, d – tuna vegetable sauce and rice.

We made latkes and doughnuts twice on Chanuka, once for our Chanuka party and once a different night.

The Chanuka party menu was cream of zucchini soup, chicken, latkes, applesauce, rice, vegetable salad and doughnuts.

My Shabbos dinner menu was challah, homemade dips (dill, hummus, avocado), chicken soup, roast chicken, roasted sweet potatoes, roasted green beans with red peppers, canned fruit, babka, rugelach.

Shabbos breakfast for the kids – cheerios and milk.

Shabbos lunch – challah, dips, (forgot to serve the baked fish and had it shalosh seudos instead), cold roast chicken, cholent, tomato avocado salad, traffic light pepper salad (three colors of peppers), baked apples, rugelach. Melave malka – rolls, chicken and vegetables.

I put a few meals into the freezer for my husband to take to work of chicken breast with sauteed onions, red peppers and fennel.

Breakfast this week was the same as always – in our house, it’s almost always oatmeal, polenta or eggs. I usually have a big salad with some kind of protein for brunch. Lunch is sometimes sandwiches, sometimes leftovers from dinner, sometimes something completely different.

So no, we weren’t limited to eating just bread and potatoes!

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Tonight I was talking with ds19 about only buying for what you can pay cash for. He said it’s not so easy to do, because when you want something, it’s hard to put it off a day or three until you have the cash for it.

I was reminded of something a good friend of mine said years ago: “I could never live like you do!”

I wasn’t sure what she meant, since we weren’t going without. She explained, “If I want to buy something, I buy it now. I don’t want to have to think about if I have money for it and wait until next week or next month.”

I understand how that could sound limiting to someone. I see it differently. To me, debt is hard, living outside of my means is stressful, worrying about how to pay the bills and not knowing where the money will come from is anxiety provoking. Waiting a bit to buy myself a discretionary item isn’t much of a sacrifice when looking at the options.

To me, it’s freeing to live with clarity about my finances, not sacrifice.

I don’t care if I impress anyone with what I have or what I buy. I don’t care about if I have the latest, greatest, biggest whatever. I don’t mind if I have to wait for another month when there’s more room in the budget for discretionary items. I’ll either buy what I have the money for or I won’t buy it.

Very simple. 🙂

Avivah