The joys of grocery shopping with your spouse, or, Why I’m an idiot.

Last night on the way home from work we went grocery shopping. This was necessary, since food level in the house was getting low, particularly perishables.

But I must confess that I’m an idiot. Why am I an idiot? There’s actually quite a lengthy tabulation of ways, but only a couple are pertinent to last night, the first of which is that I went to the grocery store while hungry. And not only was I hungry, but my husband was hungry too. Everyone who’s ever done the remotest bit of introspection knows that two hungry people going to the grocery store is a colossally stupid idea.

Edit: To see a collection of things that may help you lose weight, see Brip Blap's 101 Thoughts on losing 100 pounds. A few of them will also save you money. Note number 75. Let that reinforce the idea that I am an idiot.

I had a shopping list.

It was a good shopping list.

If I’d stuck to said shopping list, I’d have saved myself about $30.

I decided that instead of making macaroni and cheese from scratch, we’d try the fresh tortellini with cheese sauce the store had on sale. I’ve always thought it looked good and have been wanting to try it for a while. Because it was on sale, it wasn’t that big a splurge. It cost about $7.00, which isn’t too bad considering the mac and cheese would have cost about $4.00 to make, what with all the cheese. Not the most frugal choice, but I could have lived with it.

If I’d stopped there.

But instead of stopping I made my second idiotic move of the night. I let these five words escape my mouth: “Do we need anything else?”

Why, yes. Yes, we did.

We apparently needed some fresh crusty bread for the pasta. We also needed a frozen pizza, some pop, some chips and dip, some crackers and some cookies. I caved on each of these except the crackers, which were wholly my idea.

This falls safely into the category of ‘you win some, you lose some’, right?

We’re moving on today. I have a lunch of leftover pasta and bread. We’ll be having the pizza tonight and while it’s cooking we’ll put the ingredients for a nice, hearty, frugal beef stew in the crock pot so it’ll be all ready to go tomorrow morning. Thursday night we’ll eat out somewhere inexpensive as we have a pre-natal class which starts too early to go home in between.

And on Friday we’ll make homemade macaroni and cheese with four dollars worth of ingredients which we already own.