With twelve people in this house we go through a LOT of food. We kept track of what we bought for four weeks starting the middle of January. Want to know how much we spent between SamsClub and HEB? $1575.39 (yes, I am scared of how much food we’ll need in five or ten years).

First I made menus for four weeks. I hate menu planning, but it’s a necessity. My parents cook dinner twice a week. I don’t plan breakfasts. I use emeals, a few cookbooks, and some recipes I’ve collected over the years. I make my plan in Artful Agenda which I also use for my to do’s and our schedule.

Anthony went with us to SamsClub for our monthly giant shopping trip. That’s a lot of meat in that cart there (and we needed to get a little more from HEB).

When we got home from Sams, I processed the meat into meal portions to make it easy to deal with during the month.

That all went into the freezer. We have two full size refrigerator/freezers. We’ve toyed with getting a standalone freezer as well. Once I finished with the meat we went to HEB to get the rest of what we needed for the month.

We use OurGroceries for our shopping list. After getting everything at SamsClub and HEB, that left us with much, much shorter lists for the remaining three weeks of the month.

That was our smallest shopping trip of the remaining three. The third week was quite a bit bigger. I always try to keep at least one unopened extra of everything non-perishable in the cabinet. When we open an extra item we write it in OurGroceries so we can replace it. It happened a bunch of things were needed that third week.

The fourth week we need quite a bit fewer things than we did the third week. We took all the kids to HEB that day which is always quite the adventure.

So that’s all the food we bought over that four weeks. We also got some stuff from Amazon Subscribe & Save. I forgot to go over our subscriptions before the deadline so it was much higher than usual ($198.42). We’ll use everything, but it means we won’t need several of the things for a while. That’s where we get stuff like toilet paper, Fritz’s contact solution, and Clorox wipes. Adding in the Subscribe & Save stuff, we spent a total of $1773.81 on groceries over the course of that four weeks!