Once a month grocery shopping

I recently discovered Our Tribe of Many on youtube and really enjoy learning how to manage a large homeschooling household from her channel.  Something that really interested me was grocery shopping only once a month with a mid-month grocery run for milk and fresh produce.  So at the end of December, I made a huge grocery list and Andrew, Esther, and I went grocery shopping for about 5 hours straight and managed to buy enough groceries for most of the month.  Here are a few pictures of our haul:

Our first stop was Costco where I picked up a bunch of eggs thinking it would be cheaper than Aldi, but I ended up paying twice what Aldi was charging for eggs that week.  I enjoy wandering through Costco on occasion, but I'm not sure how much money I actually save there.  The shredded cheese and chunks of cheese are cheaper, but I have to make special trip to go there.  

More cheese from Costco.  I bought 10 lbs of shredded cheddar, 5 lbs of shredded mozzarella, 4 lbs of chunk cheese, and a package of string cheese.  Maybe we like our cheese a bit much??

Our 2nd stop was Aldi where we spent most of our money.  I picked up tons of staples like oatmeal, tortillas, canned goods, butter, etc.  

We also stopped at Meijer and Daily Deals.  Meijer was mostly just a few things I couldn't get at Aldi and some produce.  I got yogurt, chicken, lunch meat, and Italian sausage at Daily Deals.

I plan on doing this again next week for the month of February.  I will probably be at just above $600 for over 5 weeks of meals for our family.  But we also had some meat in our freezer that we used and I was able to get a lot of ground beef at the seminary's food pantry.  

Now, I still ended up going to Meijer every week.  There were a few things on my list that I needed to get at Meijer and they were not on sale when I went and I was not going to pay full price when I knew they would go on sale soon.  So I did go a few times and stocked up on some of our family's essentials like whole grain pasta, spaghetti sauce, salsa, and coffee creamer.  Hopefully I got enough to last a couple of months.  Even though I still ended up going to Meijer every week, I still was not in the grocery store as much as normal because alot of weeks I would end up going to Meijer twice or Meijer and Aldi so I think I still saved money.  

For February, I am not going to go to Costco, but I will probably go to Sam's club.  I found an offer online where I could get the membership for free and I think they are a bit cheaper than Costco.  I doubled a few meals this month so I have a couple in the freezer for next month.  I also picked up a few things to make really easy meals when I don't feel like cooking, like hamburgers or chicken patties.