Of course, since he does 80% of the grocery shopping without me, we didn't do so well. I would send him to the store with a very specific list of what to buy and remind him about the pantry challenge, and he would come home with random things, like nacho chips, cookies, boxes of pasta (even though we had tons!) and cans of tomatoes. He would somehow rationalize it to me and I would get annoyed, but what could I do at that point? A week later, it would happen again. Ugh! Thankfully we still brought in less packaged food than normal, so it wasn't a complete waste.
For the first month, we came in just under our normal budget of $500, but we blew it in February. Our total for January was $477.14 and we spent $637.68 in February. Towards the end we definitely started buying more packaged food as we were running out of a lot of basics, so there's definitely something to be said for buying fresh food.
On the bright side, I'm happy that our pantry is a little less chaotic. There is still a lot of food in there, but we did work on getting rid of some stuff.
Before:
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| Husband loves his sauces and marinades, so those take up an entire shelf on their own! |
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| I really should make some banana bread with all those frozen bananas! |
After:
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| You can see the difference mostly on the two middle shelves. And since this photo was taken, we donated a few items for a food drive my office is doing right now. |
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| The freezer looks really full, but Husband made a ton of food and divided up for quick, easy meals. We've actually already gone through all of those containers already! |
I'd like to try the pantry challenge again in the summer when Husband may be more keen due to the better selection of fresh produce.
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