After a New Year’s Eve at home making cheese, bread, english muffins and laundry soap, Sunday Spending is back! So is Once a Month Shopping!

Yesterday we put together the meal plan and grocery list and set off on the last day of year, to start 2012 on the right foot. With a full larder!

Here’s how we did…

3 stops, 2 hours.

Farmers Market: $160.
Stocked up on local, organic eggs, chicken, bacon, sausage, pork chops, and a butt roast (hee.)

Whole Foods: $92
Used a $1 off coupon for keifer, $3.99 coupon for a free slice of turkey sausage pizza, and got .30 for bag refunds.
I think I am officially ‘over’ Whole Foods. There was so much I didn’t buy there because of bad sourcing or packaging. The only hold out is locally roasted PB thats .70 cheaper than anywhere else. That and I think I can recycle my old Christmas lights.

Local Market: $42
$5 off coupon, and .15 bag refund.
All the things I scoffed at Whole Foods, and got here instead, including milk in returnable glass bottles. I have mixed feeling about this milk. It’s not organic, but it is local, and jersey milk, which we prefer. I love the limited plastic and waste involved. I just hate the idea of antibiotics and hormones and, and, and… More research required.

You will note I got virtually no fruits and vegetables. This is because we are somehow dealing with a glut of apples and oranges. Plus a crisper full of parsnips and spinach. And *drumroll please* my homegrown sprouts…

Lovely on sammies and salads, or just the random mouth full, I eat because I grew them and I can. We buy the seeds for pennies in the bulk section of our local market, and as you can see the equipment involved is very complicated. HA! Those sprout growing kits, got nothing on my mason jar and cheese cloth!

Total for today is $294, plus the usual $76 beef allotment, and $72 for our 2 CSA boxes = $442.

Total for December is officially $540. Thats because of the $210 we spent on the Christmas Party and an undetermined amount on Christmas Dinner, both of which were budgeted for separately, and involved a significant amount of leftovers, which we utilized for weeks at a time. Basically our last 2 week of December were highly subsidized by other budget categories, making this something of a false positive.

With January all new and shiny, I’m feeling inspired to trounce my previous uninspiring record with the grocery budget. Maybe just this once it will work. Let’s try it again, $50 a week for the next 4 weeks, plus $8 for fudge room. $650 for January.

Come on New Year mojo!