Grocery Shopping

When we grocery shop, we try to be:
-Healthy: we buy lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, and as many clean foods as possible
-Thrifty: we LOVE coupons, and at least 75% of what we buy is on sale
-Earth-friendly: we have our own reusable grocery bags (these...they're adorable and fold up really small), reusable produce bags (these, but in a set of 9), we buy organic when it's not cost-prohibitive, and there are certain things we only buy locally at the Clintonville Community Market.





We usually do our grocery shopping on Sundays. I like it when we go together; if I go alone, I come home with tons of junk, and if Chip goes alone, he comes home with exactly what's on the list (usually minus one or two things that he forgot). When we go together, we can bounce ideas off of each other and we usually come home with some really good stuff.

Most Sundays, we pick up these staples:
-1 bunch of lettuce (usually organic redleaf)
-3 crowns of broccoli
-organic spinach or asparagus (spinach goes on sale a lot)
-4 or 5 organic apples
-4 or 5 bananas
-2 avocados or a container of hummus
-Campari tomatoes (definitely not cheap but SO delicious)
-a salty snack (Triscuits, pretzels, Goldfish, etc.)
-a sweet snack (cookies, granola bar, cereal, etc.)
-2 or 3 starches (rice, noodles, potatoes, etc.)
-1 container of organic tofu

At the market, we pick up every other week:
-1 loaf of locally-produced, organic 10 grain bread from Crumbs Bakery (based in Athens, Ohio). This bread is old-school sized (a loaf is about 5" square), not like a lot of bread in grocery stores today, that seems to keep getting wider and wider.
-1 dozen local pastured eggs (if you don't know what pastured eggs are, this link gives a concise description; we eat pastured eggs first for the welfare of the hens that produce them, and second for the health benefits)
-1 brick of Colby cheese and 1 brick of pepper jack cheese (produced in Minerva, Ohio)
-1 gallon of 1% milk from Snowville Creamery (great milk from a sustainable farm that allows its herd to graze on pasture instead of being confined on feedlots or in sheds)



Most of this will carry us through a week of lunches, when combined with whatever we've got in our pantry, and any other special items we pick up.