Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
We go to Wegmans about once a month. It's further away. I try to get stuff that I can't readily find at the grocery stores near where we live. This past week, I got some wraps - turmeric and sweet potato.
I go shopping without a menu plan (unless I need something particular). I hate food routine, I never planned menus that would repeat every so often. I cook whatever I feel like eating or whatever looks good at the store.
I am similar to this. I'll have an idea of what I want to make and make a small list, but then as I am shopping I often see an ingredient, maybe something in the produce area that is a perfect specimen, and create another menu on the spot around that item.
But to answer the original question Do you look for new or different products? Generally I don't. I shop for ingredients and, to me, products are prepared things and I don't buy those. There are certainly some things I don't make, but they are staples - for example fish sauce, tamarind paste,sriracha and go****ang (which my hubs has been bringing home from Korea for years and now is trendy so I can find it easily here). My hat is off to those of you who make that stuff yourselves.
Talking about new things though - some new ingredients I used this year are asafetida and green mango powder, which I had before and previously tossed because it sat in my cupboard for ages without being used Also dried shrimp paste to make thai green curry paste. The stuff is extremely vile smelling even if the finished product is divine. I also used guajillo, arbol, japoneses, de Puya dried chilies and dried hibiscus in making tajin. It was delightful and I will certainly make it again.
I have a spreadsheet where I quantify what I use throughout the year. By knowing this I was able to shave a huge amount off my food bill without not only not sacrificing quality but actually improving it.
I note the brands and varieties I like, and when they come on sale
For instance, for decades I bought ALDI housebrand stewed tomatoes and tomato paste. I tested many varieties and ended up altering my recipes to work with their brand of stew tomatoes. . I prefer Red Gold stewed tomatoes (I tasted a variety of tomato pastes and cannot tell store brands from name brands, but I sure can with stewed tomatoes) but it is case of 59 cents a can verses $1.49 a can. But about twice a year Red Gold stewed tomatoes come on sale, so I purchase a years supply at a time. To be specific, I normally use 98 cans a year or a bit over 8 cases, so that is what I buy. I also use 49 boxes of Penne pasta. Knowing this I was able to way undercut my ALDI based budget by a substantial amount and increase the overall quality of what I consume. Soup are another example. Progresso comes on sale 3 times a year at .88 a can. Campbells 2 times at .99 a can. When the sale comes I buy a years supply. I do this with all canned goods, household supplies, BBQ sauces, potato chips and hard cheeses. I was shocked by the savings and quality improvements.
I have a spreadsheet where I quantify what I use throughout the year. By knowing this I was able to shave a huge amount off my food bill without not only not sacrificing quality but actually improving it.
I note the brands and varieties I like, and when they come on sale
For instance, for decades I bought ALDI housebrand stewed tomatoes and tomato paste. I tested many varieties and ended up altering my recipes to work with their brand of stew tomatoes. . I prefer Red Gold stewed tomatoes (I tasted a variety of tomato pastes and cannot tell store brands from name brands, but I sure can with stewed tomatoes) but it is case of 59 cents a can verses $1.49 a can. But about twice a year Red Gold stewed tomatoes come on sale, so I purchase a years supply at a time. To be specific, I normally use 98 cans a year or a bit over 8 cases, so that is what I buy. I also use 49 boxes of Penne pasta. Knowing this I was able to way undercut my ALDI based budget by a substantial amount and increase the overall quality of what I consume. Soup are another example. Progresso comes on sale 3 times a year at .88 a can. Campbells 2 times at .99 a can. When the sale comes I buy a years supply. I do this with all canned goods, household supplies, BBQ sauces, potato chips and hard cheeses. I was shocked by the savings and quality improvements.
This is really great! Tracking every dollar helps a lot, I'm only recently learning how we can save a significant amount of cash by having a routine and buying in bulk. Oddly though I'm finding shorter shelf-life use-by dates on canned goods. Seriously why has the cranberry sauce I bought last November already expired? I opened it and yes, it was slightly bitter and discolored. So many other products I'm finding seem to have shorter shelf life as well, lately.
My biggest problem is due to me living in a 3rd-world state (CA), it's too risky to buy and freeze other staples like cheese, fish, etc... in bulk because if the wind blows more than five knots here, our electric company has to cut off power to prevent fires. When that happens in three day timeframes, you're going to have to toss out a lot of food, which will defeat the entire purpose.
Last edited by settled00; 10-13-2019 at 03:03 AM..
Reason: clarification of purpose
I pretty much buy the same things. I use the online coupons so all I have to do is enter my phone # at check-out. I go to Publix for my food items and Target for my cleaning supplies, paper goods, beauty supplies, etc.
I generally look for ingredients, not products so I typically have a decent selection of ingredients around. I stopped shopping the circulars because I was buying things we didn't use.
We finally have a Publix in our area so the quality of produce, meat, and fish has improved over Walmart. Fish is one of the few things that I generally plan a menu for before buying because getting fresh fish around here is hard, so I tend to buy it when needed for a specific meal. Otherwise, I make a meal out of the ingredients I have.
One problem in many areas of the country is produce quality is very seasonal. In the summer we were buying a lot of fresh items to eat. Now, and for the next several months, "fresh" is a relative term since it's been picked and shipped a couple weeks or more before it hits the store shelves. And what's there tend to be high priced and tasteless. So we'll be hitting the frozen and canned section a lot more for the next few months.
I don't impulse buy either. I hate those digital coupons. I'm as tech savvy as the next woman, but I find this insistence on loading an app and using it for every single business I patronize very irritating. If the store is obnoxious about it, I stop going. I look at the circular and if it has what I usually buy on sale, I'm glad, but I buy it anyway if I need it. If it's meat and it's not on sale or at least a decent regular price I wait until the price drops. I keep fresh veggies and a few dairy products stocked constantly.
I've never used a coupon and they are not here, anyway. We are satisfied with pretty simple stuff, just the same few basic meals most of the time. I like to cook but am not very creative. Pork loin, hamburger, canned tuna, street-roasted chicken, stir-fry. We save shrimp for going out.
We have one large grocery store (chain) which has hardware too. We don't buy anything processed (except pasta and a couple canned foods---coconut milk, mainly). Dairy is strange here, and sporadic, LOL.
The same few items is fine for us. There is also a farmers' market for the more adventurous, but it's hot with flies and no refrigeration for the meat and fish, so no thanks. I don't like to barter. Lots of local fisherman, but they don't put it on ice, so I'm hesitant to buy.
An example of comical English translation, is that this chain store is called "Super Maxi",
In that my husband eats like a 9 year old boy, I get most of what I need at Costco and Wal-Mart. I keep it simple as I really, really hate to actually cook anything.
Bacon, eggs, toast, soups, hamburger helper, salad, pot pies, fried rice and orange chicken, pizza. And cookies, Doritos, cheese crackers.
We live in a small rural town (about 2,500 population) and we can get most everything we need in town. Saves on gas and time since the next bigger sized town is a half hour away and the biggest towns are more than an hour away. There's one of the two big towns on our island in either direction, although Kona has a Costco and Hilo doesn't.
Mostly we shop in our little town; a lot of the veggies are grown nearby and there's a slaughterhouse within ten miles so everything is pretty fresh. There's a small grocery in town as well as a vegetable market, a Filipino market (veggies & dry goods), a Country market (meat, veggies & dry goods) and a farmer's market (veggies, prepared lunches, plants) on Sundays.
We buy a lot of the same things although a lot of those same things are discounted salads and such. Since we now live in town, we can pop into the grocery when they mark them down since they have a schedule time for markdowns.
We also source a lot of things from non-chain stores and they don't have weekly flyers or any advertisements at all. There's a nice vegetable seller in town where the veggies are brought in each morning. They don't have refrigeration so the veggies are kept in bins with water, but that also keeps their overhead low so the prices are low. They have a small amount of non-veggie stuff such as oils and sauces as well as fresh flowers, but we usually just get veggies there. It's about half the price of the chain stores. Possibly because things aren't shipped in from far away. They will also swap avocados for tomatoes and the tree in our backyard has more avos than we can eat or give away.
We get some stuff from Costco, especially when taking friends to and from the airport since the airport and Costco are near to each other. Bulk flour and yeast for making bread is a Costco item, although last time they had that asterisk on the price tag of the bulk ( 3# ) yeast, so it looks like they may be discontinuing that. I bought enough for several year's supply, yeast is pretty shelf stable. We probably use about 100#s of flour a year, but that's pretty much all our bread and rolls and such. Baking bread twice a week saves loads of $$. Tastes better and doesn't have weird additives.
There's a lot of stuff that is given back and forth. Avocados during this time of year. There's also guava, lemons, limes and calamansi limes. I dropped my friend off at her house after Sunday market last week and she gave me white guavas, big yellow lemons and a lot of Calamansi limes. That's now three dozen jars of jam so we're set for guava jam for the next year. Although we will probably give a lot of it away and run out well before that. Guess we should make more since it is guava season.
So, I guess we get a lot of the same things all the time, although most places we get things from don't have advertising so we can't shop sale ads. Costco has them, but we usually just browse around Costco and don't really bother reading their advertisements. We also get a lot of different things, although most times that's stuff that was given to us. I'd never had any Calamansi (calamondin) limes before, they're excellent in guava jam.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Also dried shrimp paste to make thai green curry paste. The stuff is extremely vile smelling even if the finished product is divine. I also used guajillo, arbol, japoneses, de Puya dried chilies and dried hibiscus in making tajin. It was delightful and I will certainly make it again.
