Shopping Goals: April 2018

Well, when it came to shopping goals last month I DID manage to get some boiling potatoes when they were on sale for St. Patrick's Day, which was an upper.  I still haven't gotten cooking oil in any great quantity and I do need it, so that is going to get transferred onto this month's goals.  Tuna salad started to not be quite a priority as the son moved away from eating it all the time and has moved onto angel hair pasta with olive oil and Kraft Parmesan cheese on it, so I've been making a pound of angel hair on Sunday night to see him through the week's worth of school lunches (and making the daughter spaghetti from same pasta a couple of times a week for her school lunches as well).  Right now I'm doing OKAY on pasta, but I'm probably going to end up having to buy a big bulk box of it from Amazon in a few months if a nice sale doesn't pop up on pasta soon (and we have money to take advantage OF said sale if it should occur).  I got a small box of garbage bags (well full sized box but not super sized box like I usually like to get) to see us through till I can afford more, but I know that is going to be coming up in the "need" category here soon as well.

The grocery budget seems to be morphing more and more into getting more fresh produce now that more of it is coming into season, which isn't a bad thing, but makes sideline items like cooking oil a bit harder to work into the budget, but I'm hopeful I can figure it all out.

I had originally had a list of salt free or salt reduced items to get, but started weeding that down considerably as people started chiming in on tips for reducing salt in the diet (thanks for those tips by the way, all :).  I did have a couple of herb blends that I really wanted to get as they sounded really good from Amazon, but cancelled those due to money being tight and I started really reworking my list to encompass things we needed versus things I would LIKE to get.  So, I came up with a few things I use in cooking all the time that are decently high in salt and tried to figure out how to at least get rid of  the excessive salt from those items.  So, the one thing I ordered from Amazon earlier in the month was some salt free bouillon (seen up top) to use in different dishes as I use bouillon a LOT in cooking.  This way I can salt it myself to get the sodium more down where I would like it to be.  And then as time goes on I'll just replace things as we run out of them with salt free or salt reduced items and try to work around things till then (rinsing canned veggies before cooking them to eat, etc).  I'm hoping it will work out okay.

As for the rest of the shopping goals, well they are pretty minimal due to the lack of funds this month.  So, here we go!

Shopping Needs (regular store):

• Cooking oil (if good sale pops up)
• Garbage bags 
• Frozen fish (as I'm going to use up all of ours this month on different dishes)
• Bone in chicken (if a good sale presents itself as I'm down to just some whole chickens in the freezer at this point)
• Apples (to make apple sauce, but only if funds permit unfortunately.  We are down to the pear apple sauce I made last year, which is tasty, but shows we are running out of apple sauce period)
• Eggs (done)
• Lemons (done)
• Tuna Salad (just a few boxes at a time to get son through school lunches)

Shopping Wants:

• Reduced sodium soy sauce
• Reduced sodium ketchup
• Reduced sodium tomato sauce

Amazon:

• Zegerid (on order and paid for, just waiting for it to ship)
• Salt free bouillon (done)

And yeah, that's my list for this month.  How about you?  Got anything you need to get this month?