The Kroger receipt from Sunday, August 3, was 27 inches long. Nora held one end at the peninsula and walked the other end down the hallway like she was measuring a fish. The total at the bottom said $231.
That one receipt was the whole week: dinners, breakfasts, the first round of lunch-box food, a box of zip bags and a jug of laundry detergent, because I count basic household things in my grocery spreadsheet too. I didn't walk into a store again until the next Sunday, which is a personal record for the first week of school.
Here's what the week looked like. My in-service days started July 30, so I'd already had a week of meetings and classroom setup. Both kids started back Wednesday, August 6: Nora into 6th grade, her first year of middle school, and Jack into 3rd. I started teaching the same day. Ryan picked up overtime at the plant, two long weekdays and a Saturday shift. And Friday night the oven belonged to Nora, who was baking three loaves of banana bread for her first bake-sale table at our church's yard sale.
The week before, we'd done two Costco runs to stock the pantry and the chest freezer. That turned out to matter more than anything I planned.
What we ate
- Sunday: chicken thighs on the Weber, sweet corn my dad sent home from Lewisburg and sliced Cherokee Purples from the raised bed. About $9, because the corn and tomatoes were free.
- Monday: sheet-pan chicken fajitas, our most-made dinner, with extra chicken for two of my lunches. About $20.
- Tuesday: BLTs on toasted white bread with more Cherokee Purples and plenty of Duke's. About $8, nearly all of it bacon.
- Wednesday, the first day: the kids pick. They picked tacos, ground beef and crunchy shells, with every topping we owned. About $13.
- Thursday: pulled pork sandwiches from a bag of Fourth of July leftovers in the chest freezer, with coleslaw. About $5 for buns and a bag of slaw mix.
- Friday: frozen pizza from the Costco run, because the oven was full of banana bread. About $8.
- Saturday: leftovers night. Fajita filling, two slices of pizza, half a bowl of slaw and some creative plating. Close to free.
Dinners came to about $63 of that $231, or roughly $2.25 a plate. That number looks better than my planning deserves. The chest freezer and the garden did a lot of quiet work: the pulled pork, the pizza, Dad's corn and the tomatoes all came from somewhere other than that receipt. The other $168 went to breakfasts, three lunch boxes' worth of food, after-school snacks for two kids who come home starving, and the detergent.
The best decision of the week was letting the kids pick the first-day dinner. Jack talked about the tacos at breakfast, at the bus stop and, by his own report, during the pledge. Nobody complained about a single thing on that table. Waylon got the shell Jack dropped, which he now considers his own first-day tradition.
What I'd change
- Cook one big pot on Sunday. By Thursday I was more tired than I've been since May. A pot of chicken and rice or chili on Sunday would have covered Thursday and Saturday and given me one evening back.
- Don't plan an oven dinner on a baking night. I knew Nora's bake sale was Saturday and still put frozen pizza on Friday. Banana bread bakes at 350°F; pizza wants 425°F. The pizza waited until the last loaf came out at 8:10, and we ate at 8:30 with two very hungry kids.
- Buy more fruit than seems reasonable. We ran out of apples Thursday morning, and Jack's lunch got a fruit cup from the back of the pantry. Two kids back in school eat about twice the fruit they eat in July.
- Write the plan on the fridge before in-service starts. I wrote this week's menu on Sunday afternoon in the Kroger parking lot. It worked, but barely.
Ryan's verdict, when I read him the totals at the table on Saturday: "We didn't eat out once. Write that down." So I did. The second week cost a little less, mostly because I bought fruit like a person who had learned something.
