Hopefully all of you frugal mamas out there have been taking my advice and buying the deals in advance! If you have, that’s great! But sometimes it’s easy for the holidays to sometimes be upon us before we realize it, so I thought I’d remind everyone that there’s just a few weeks until Rosh Hashana! Remember, now’s the time to get what you need as far as meat and grape juice from Rosh Hashana through Sukkos, since generally the closer you get, the more expensive the prices are.
Since last month I did my monthly shopping at the end of the month instead of the beginning, that effectively means that I have the bulk of this month’s budget to use for yom tov. In advance I mentally budgeted a chunk of money this month for grape juice; I try to buy six months of grape juice at a time since I’ve noticed the sales are usually a month before Rosh Hashana and a month before Pesach/Passover. Last week I stocked up on grape juice when it was 2.99 for a 64 oz bottle. Well, since I only got 30 bottles I can’t say I exactly stocked up, but they didn’t have any closed cases and it was a pain in the neck to individually load so many bottles, so I stopped at thirty and told myself I’d send dh to get more. Which of course I didn’t because I rarely ask him to go food shopping and didn’t do this time, either. 🙂 But it will hold us for a while and I’m hoping that a different supermarket will run a grape juice sale that will allow me to fill in the gap so I don’t (gasp) have to pay full price for even one bottle in the course of the year.
I also bought meat for the holidays. I buy very little meat and don’t find expensive cuts necessary – we like chicken and ground beef – but since I stocked up on staples at the end of last month, it leaves me with the bulk of the budgeted funds to use on other things. So I splurged and got four roasts (2 were 5.49 lb, 2 were 5.99 lb), four family packs of ground beef (3.49), and four family packs of chicken cutlets (3.79 lb). It will add some nice variety to all the meals.
I also bought a couple six pound boxes of ground beef patties and beef hotdogs (each 2.49 lb) for our camping trip next week. When I got the beef patties, it was just because it was such a great price, but when I got home I realized it was very convenient for our trip! There are some staple foods that we always take on our yearly camping trips – one dinner is always hot dogs, one is always hamburgers. Chicken is usually the third night, and we have to have smores at least one night (still have to buy the marshmallows, got the chocolate and graham crackers already).
So all of the above has been half of my monthly budget, but the most expensive foods (meat/chicken) are stocked up a lot for yom tov and I’ll only need to buy a case of chicken to round it all out. That will leave an ample amount left for the other things I’ll need. Hope you’re all filling your freezers with your local bargains! (I’d love to hear about your great deals!)
Avivah
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