It’s Saturday.
It’s Sunday.
Today is the day before…
Hallowe’en
Thanksgiving
Christmas
New Year’s Eve
Easter
The Fourth of July
Labor Day
Memorial Day
Veteran’s Day
The Big Game (any Big Game)
The World Series
Your (child’s, spouse’s, mother’s, father’s, best friend’s, favorite aunt’s, favorite uncle’s, beloved grandparent’s, boss’s) birthday
Your own birthday
The church potluck
You are…
Hungry
Feeling put upon
Feeling generous
Losing weight and need new clothes
Gaining weight and need new clothes
Depressed
Happy
In a great mood
In a terrible mood
Pregnant
Married to or otherwise closely associated with a pregnant woman
Planning a party
Searching for something, anything, to take to a potluck
You have just…
Acquired a new puppy
Acquired a new kitten
Given birth
Been told you will give birth sometime within the next nine months
Won $100 in the lottery
Received the annual Costco AMEX cash kickback
Been paid your biweekly paycheck
Been paid by a client
Fallen in love
Fallen out of love
Realized life is short and eternity is long
Ha! So true. Good list!
I should be ashamed to admit this, but I adoooooore Costco. I sometimes pretend I’m in a medieval village marketplace. There is something for every need I could possibly have, and stuff for needs I didn’t know I had. The food is the most beautiful I have ever seen. The Christmas packaged chocolate goodies make me slobber while standing in the aisles gawking at them.
And frequently we drive there just to eat their scrumptious food court offerings while people watching from under the red umbrellas. An incredibly cheap date but one that never fails to satisfy.
You can certainly tell that a lifetime of frugal living has left my needs simple.
LOL! Me, too.
The occasion for this list-fest? I spent
two
hundred
and
fifty-five
DOLLARS there today!!!!!
Kinda does remind you of a giant medieval market, doesn’t it? Especially with all those people hawking free tastes of the food.
ROFL.
I want to go to one, just once, for the hell of it.
Next time you’re in Phoenix, I’ll take you there!
How did we miss taking you? Next time you’re in the States, one of us will take you 🙂
IMHO our country has changed shopping from a chore…to a competitive sport. I don’t go to Costco but I will visit “it’s evil step-sister” … Sam’s Club….right around lunch time when I’m running errands. I take the full tour, enjoying the free samples and taking in the sights. For the life of me…I just don’t see the big appeal. But love the free lunch….$255…????…I feel faint. Please share what ya bought. DW and I find our biggest problem is eating the food before it goes bad. Sadly it seems we can’t even buy a 5 pound bag of red potatoes without the last couple going bad….
Welp, I was completely out of food. So had to stock up on things like frozen veggies, the campari-style tomatoes I favor, orange juice, apples, a package of chicken thighs…that kind of thing. An OTC pharmaceutical that I could’ve bought at Walgreen’s jumped to hand.
Then I bought several unusually expensive items:
Decided to try an LED lightbulb. My god, those things are pricey! But they supposedly last 25,000 hours, which is probably longer than the remaining lifetime of the 56-year-old lamp it went into. Opinion, now that it’s in the fixture: better than a damn fluorescent but not as good as an incandescent; not worth 16 bucks if you care about the quality of light in your home. If blue-green skin tones are OK, it’s a good buy because of its longevity and energy-efficiency.
Got a package of frozen wild-caught salmon. Farmed would have been cheaper, but once you know what goes on in fish farms and you understand that farm-raised salmon is dyed red and contains less nutritional value than wild, you will stick to your irresponsible preference for wild-caught. At 8 pieces per bag, that’s about two months’ worth of once-a-week fish dinners at $4.24 per serving.
Was running low on pine nuts. I put these in everything: salads,
soups, veggies, slumgullion, fruit bowls, whatever. The price of pine nuts has gone so far into the ridiculous range as to rival that of the LED lightbulb. However, a package lasts six months or more and I like them a lot, so I buy them anyway.
Had to buy a bottle of olive oil. I use it to cook in as well as to flavor salads and many other foods; rarely use butter. Keeps the “good” cholesterol levels up…and that keeps the quacks quiet. Over the long run, it’s probably cheaper than butter, or at least no pricier.
I also favor maple syrup over honey, because it doesn’t turn into sludge or sugar up, it tastes better, and it packs an enormous wallop of calcium. In a grocery store, maple syrup is unaffordable. Costco, however, sells it in large containers for an almost reasonable per-ounce cost. Again, this is something that will last four to six months.
I bought a rack of lamb with 8 ribs on it. This, I’ll cut into four pieces, providing ultra-premium meat for four meals to the tune of $3.92 per meal.
Ran out of shredded Parmesan and crumbled feta at the same time, a rare occurrence. Normally I would buy only one of these at a time — but they also are a key staple, as another source of calcium. Milk makes me throw up, and I do not scarf down pills by way of obtaining nutrients that should come to me in food. The feta will last about four or five months; the Parmesan, probably two or three.
Bought a package of hard-boiled eggs to feed the puppy, who simply is NOT getting enough to eat as she’s growing. Eggs have the same effect on me as milk, I can’t abide the smell of them cooking, and I hate cleaning up the mess they make in a pan, so when I buy a half-dozen eggs in the shell, they usually sit in the fridge till they spoil. This will be an easy way to slip an extra 70 to 140 calories/day into Ruby as well as giving her a slew of extra nutrients. It’ll extend the pricey “natural” food I’ve been buying her and make feeding her at mid-day easier. Two dozen hard-boiled eggs will last her 24 days, assuming they don’t spoil and I don’t feed them to Cassie, too.
Since Cassie also throws up eggs, I expect these will last Ruby about three weeks.
Impulse buy!!!! Found a package of Medjool dates, which I could not resist. Expensive.
I did buy a bottle of wine, but it was very cheap. Even cheap, though, wine is a bad buy, because I tend to drink too much of it at a time. It’s like soda pop for me.
At any rate, other than the LED lightbulb and the OTC nostrum, everything was food.
I’ll need to buy some lettuce at a grocery store sometime in the next couple of days, because I can’t even get halfway through a package of Costco’s lettuce before it spoils. And like you, I will buy things like potatoes, onions, and the like at a Sprouts, because Costco’s lifetime supply of those kinds of produce will rot before I can eat it. And, other than those wonderful campari tomatoes, Costco doesn’t do well when it comes to salad makings — a lot of those have to be bought at a grocery store or farmer’s market.
But otherwise, since there was already some cut-up steak in the freezer, I shouldn’t need to buy many other groceries for the better part of a month. Certainly not any staples or meat.
What about feeding Ruby raw eggs?
Salmonella.
Though dogs can carry it without getting noticeably sick — or at least not very much so — they can transmit it to humans. Licking or various toileting habits can deposit the pathogen on their fur, and you ca then pick it up by petting or grooming the dog. Got enough problems already…don’t need that one.
Looks like my typical Costco shopping haul. We love that frozen wild salmon. Seems pricy but is actually quite reasonable considering how many meals you get from one bag. If you like Cilantro, make a pesto with your pine nuts, garlic, olive oil and cilantro (instead of the traditional basil), cover the top of your salmon with this pesto and cook in the oven for about a half hour at 4o0 degrees. I usually use almonds in the pesto instead of pine nuts then sprinkle some sliced almonds on top before putting it in the oven.
So it seems you are set for a while in the grocery department. I went grocery shopping this morning and will tell you red meat is gonna be something for special occasions…VERY special occasions. Just bought some New York Strips….Usually $10.99 a pound….with discount and coupons….$5.99 a pound….Soooo three decent sized steaks went from $45 to $25 for the pack…. And they are beautiful but this is crazy. Sorry to hear about the intolerance for milk and eggs….MAN …
oooooo! That sounds really good. Definitely will try that!
edit: GRRR! Why has WP started sticking “replies” at the end of the wrong message? It does this all the time now. Make this one @ DeeDee, re the delicious-sounding cilantro pesto.
Yup. I’ve given up on trying to save money on meat. Instead, I’ve flung myself in exactly the opposite direction: LESS meat but BETTER meat. Lots less. Some days I don’t eat meat (including fish, chicken, etc.) at all.
One New York Strip or Ribeye can be cut into three or four portions for me. A Porterhouse with a large tenderloin: ditto.
Because one steak provides meat for several meals, I’m now buying grass-fed, hormone-free, antibiotic-free beef and pork at Whole Foods, Sprouts, and AJs. That cheapo chicken purchased at Costco is, as we scribble, being boiled to feed the dogs.
For those New Zealand and Australian lamb racks available at Costco, I’ll make an exception. But everything else: try to get it as clean, as pure, and as close to Prime as possible.
Hah some dogs eat as well as or better than we do. I know of a dog that eats premium meats from the btucher to the tune of thousands a year; we stick to the cheap chicken or pork on sale and skip red meat entirely except for a couple times a year. We’re awful with eating normal serving sizes so this is one way to afford it.
PiC took the hit for us and went to Costco alone for our biweekly supply run; we go through an amazing two loaves of bread every two weeks if not sooner and it’s cheaper to get the good nutritious stuff from them.
We didn’t realize til very recently discover how expensive pine nuts were; asked PiC to grab some from Trader Joe’s but they were so $$$ we skipped them this time.
Yah, I noticed some time back that they’re really outrageous at TJs. I think the price per unit is better — possibly much better — at Costco. I paid $24 for 1.5 pounds…hmmm…only slightly more than the price of gold, I reckon.
It was $13 for 1 litre of maple syrup (33.8 oz): 38 cents an ounce. More than the price of gasoline: at $3.35 a gallon, gas would run you 2 cents an ounce. (http://www.answers.com/Q/How_many_ounces_make_a_gallon)