Cut the Grocery Bill Challenge - week 4

It's Sunday night, the end of an expensive week. We're in the process of getting our house ready to put on the market. Seven years ago, when I put my townhouse on the market after a crazy staging frenzy with my mom, I vowed that NEXT time, I wouldn't wait until I wanted to sell my house to my make it all pretty. Yeah, well, NEXT next time... We actually started working on the house last summer and have done all sorts of things like landscaping, finishing the deck, painting, etc. Now we're in the final stages with getting a few new pieces of furniture, as well as pretty pricey renovation to our kitchen (putting in a hood over the range so the smoke alarm doesn't go off every time I cook, aka, every day!) and new carpet in the bedrooms. I hate spending the money, but love the way our house has come together.

One area where we are NOT spending obscene (to me) amounts of money is our grocery budget. I'm thrilled that we just bought our fourth week of groceries and are still under my goal of $400!

To recap:
Week 1: spent $6.02 $393.98 remaining
Week 2: spent $151.30 total spent: $188.57 $242.68 remaining
Week 3: spent $53.80 total spent: $242.37 $157.63 remaining

Week 4: spent $74.85 total spent: $317.22 $82.78 remaining

I'm not exactly sure why I still have another week left in March when I thought I started this challenge at the beginning, but I'll go with it, and add next week's groceries to this challenge.

I was reading on another blog that someone had a goal of $25 per person per week. For us, that would be $75/week, although one of those persons is only 2, so I think $60 is a better ultimate goal.

As I was tallying up the receipts tonight, I was thinking about how I could have saved more. I spent $5.00 in chicken broth this weekend. I know I should have been able to get it for no more than $4.00 if I had waited for a sale, and even less if I had coupon, but I had run out and since I'm having surgery on Tuesday, I knew I'd want soup. So, not smart shopping, but logical.

Another big expense this week was pine nuts. I LOVE pine nuts, they are a staple in several of our favorite recipes. But they are pricey. A few weeks ago I happily discovered that the organic section of one of our grocery stores sells them for $15.79/pound, which is decidedly less than the $26.95/pound we've been paying at our local farmer's markety place. Yeah, we loaded up today.