planning

I have been making pain-staking, exceedingly nerdy spreadsheets of recipes, ingredients, weights, and prices at a variety of stores in my area. It’s taken hours. Many hours. Literally. If I were single, with no children and unemployed perhaps this much time dedicated to feeding me would be reasonable. Otherwise, it’s totally unrealistic. Just another disclosure to do with as you like. For example, you could judge me. That’d be fine, because it’d probably be true.

Oh and good news (for me at least). As interested as I have been about trying this out, the one thing that made me sad is to do it by myself. My husband and I usually cook and eat together every night, and I was unhappy about missing out on that for a week. So my good-natured and accommodating husband has agreed to serve as a second guinea pig. My original thought was: Great! $25 more dollars. I’m rich! Except then I looked up his caloric needs. Gah! I’m pretty small and not that active so I only need to provide myself with 1800 calories a day. Not so bad. My extremely active husband apparently needs 2600. I looked it up. So while my budget just doubled for the week, the number of calories I need to provide just went up 144%. Great.

In other news … I love grocery shopping. A lot. So this part has actually been kind of fun, and I haven’t even bought anything yet – just cruised around window shopping at the grocery store. It has been weird to take notes at the store though. I’m shopping at several places so I’ve been jotting down prices in order to compare. I get all paranoid that I’m going to get kicked out. My dad used to work in the grocery business eons ago and sometimes he’d get sent over to the competing grocery to write down all their prices. It would take awhile for the competing store manager to catch on, but sooner or later, he’d get kicked out. I’m seriously afraid I’ll get kicked out, which is totally unreasonable as I look totally unprofessional with my little piece of scrap paper, pencil nub, and weekend jeans. Not a clipboard in sight. Seriously not a threat. Nonetheless I worry. If you knew me, which obviously you do, because otherwise, why would you be reading this boring blog?, you’d know this is well within my normal temperament.

And I haven’t even shopped yet. Just prepared for shopping. Right now the plan is to shop on Saturday and start this thing on Sunday. See you soon.