A Meal Planning Question of the Day
Since we’ve been discussing both what’s on our grocery receipts and the cost of our breakfasts, I want to ask you another question:
How often do you end up eating scraps for meals?
I don’t mean leftovers. I mean the kind of thing where you eat half a bowl of cereal, the two slices of deli meat left in the package, and a plate full of steamed peas because that’s all you have in the kitchen and you aren’t going grocery shopping until tomorrow.
I mean the meal I ate for breakfast yesterday, which was a little bit of steel-cut oats—not quite enough to count as a breakfast—plus a handful of blueberries and the last one and one-half graham crackers in the cupboard.
I’m good at meal planning in the sense that I rarely let things go bad; I plan ahead and Tetris all of my food together so that I eat it before the leftovers spoil or the produce gets moldy. But I still end up with scrap meals at least once every two weeks.
Some of it has to do with not always being able to block off time to go to the grocery store, but I know that part of it has to do with—as Ester Bloom started discussing both yesterday and this morning—the idea that we spend most of our effort micromanaging our small purchases and not enough effort managing the large ones:
But the reason Olen needed to go on her initial Twitter rant on the [Latte Factor], and the reason her theory remains at least somewhat counter-intuitive to some, is that it’s so much easier to deal with the small, everyday decisions that are right in front of us, the ones that are fully in our control, when so many other decisions aren’t.
And, as I’ve learned from all those Doing Money interviews, we love to micromanage our food. All that worry about takeout and restaurant spending, all of that price-per-ounce comparison in the grocery aisles, me buying the cheap canned tuna, every flake soaking in wet, instead of spending an extra few cents on the higher-quality package. (That was a mistake, and I didn’t do it again.) Eating scraps because I can put off groceries for one more day and save a bit more money, somehow.
This is yesterday’s grocery receipt. $98.51 for everything on the list, split out into:
- $60.15 on food
- $6.24 on paper products
- $16.47 on body and hygiene
- $11.99 on a can opener, because the cheap one I’d been using for the past three years wore out
(I guess we need to add “can openers” next to laptops, phones, and washer/dryer units as “things that need to be replaced every few years.”)
About half of this food will be eaten by the end of the week, and what’s left will be the usual scrap meal stuff: a granola bar plus some cheese and crackers plus half of a banana.
It’s different this week because I’m leaving for the JoCo Cruise on Saturday, where I’ll have all the food I could ever dream of eating. But in most other cases, I would make myself that scrap meal in order to put off grocery shopping until tomorrow.
How about you?
Also, just so you know, I did buy myself that Valentine’s Day treat after all:
Happy 50% off chocolate day, @TheBillfold! UR GR8 pic.twitter.com/ndeJQnsq1F
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