Heavenly Homemakers

Encouraging women in homemaking, healthy eating and parenting

Why I Buy in Bulk

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Hello my name is Laura and am obsessed with buying food in bulk. I love purchasing large quantities of food at one time – and then staring at it. Staring at bulk groceries makes me happy. Dreaming about all the delicious food I can make with my large food stores gives me a thrill. 

I’m pretty sure (pretty sure?) I am a little weird (only a little weird?) when it comes to my love of food. I know there are people who only give food a thought at the moment they become hungry and they think I’m strange for caring so much about my coconut flakes. They see my pantry and storage room and think I must have some weird phobia about losing our food supply, which must be why I buy up to 500 pounds of wheat at one time. They hear how many tomato plants we have in our garden and wonder if we know that we’ll have tomatoes coming out of our ears.

Yes, we’re aware. We did this last year too. And the year before that. We happen to like having tomatoes coming out of our ears. We think it tickles.

So why do we buy food (or preserve food) in such large quantities?

We do it because it’s practical for our family and saves us a good deal of money. Buying in bulk has made our real, whole food eating choices much more practical and affordable. We are blessed with a good amount of storage space, making the idea possible in the first place. Overall, I have found that purchasing food in bulk makes my kitchen duties much, much easier. Instead of buying a package of pasta every time we need a package of pasta (which is at least once each week), I buy a case of pasta once every two months and forget about it in between. When I need pasta, I go to my storage room and get pasta. 

Maybe I like bulk food so much because I don’t have to think so hard. Yes, that’s why I like it. I may like staring at my food and dreaming about our meals, but I’m not a big fan of thinking so hard every time I need to make a meal. I like buying ahead, buying in bulk, then having the capability to grab whatever food I need out of my storage and getting right to work in my kitchen. It’s all rather lovely.

I also really love that by having a large store of food, I can make bigger quantities of food if we have spur of the moment guests. It’s so nice to be able to say, “Stay for dinner – we have plenty!”

Buying in bulk (and preserving large quantities of food) just works for me. I love it.

During the next few weeks, I’ll share more about how buying in bulk works for our family, more about how we store our bulk, and most importantly, how we afford making bigger bulk purchases. I’m also working hard to put together a reference page sharing what food I always like to have on hand and what my favorite sources are for these items.

I know bulk purchasing doesn’t work for everyone. My intent with these posts isn’t to encourage everyone to buy in bulk. There may be just one of you in your household, making bulk purchasing impractical. Or you may have a small living space and then where are you supposed to store your bulk – on the roof?

So do share. If you buy in bulk, what are your reasons? And if you don’t buy in bulk, what are your reasons?  For all of you who have no interest in bulk food purchases, thank you for putting up with my obsession and embracing my “I smile at big bags of oats” insanity. 

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Healthy, Homemade Baby Food

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(No, this post is not a hint toward what our boys’ surprise was. Oh my. I simply get a lot of reader questions regarding what to feed baby. That’s it. Our surprise was much less exciting than a baby announcement – I’ll post about it tonight!)  :)

Pureed Bananas:  Ripe bananas run through my food processor until smooth – great for baby!

Ah, the memories. I used to always make food for my babies, back when my babies were babies. I still make food for my babies, but my oldest baby is 14 now. He prefers steak to pureed veggies. He’d also like to know when I’ll stop calling him my baby. (The answer is never, but I do try to avoid saying it in front of “the guys”. I’m not that uncool.)

Before I talk about making baby food, first I’ll quickly share what I don’t recommend feeding babies (but keep in mind I’m just a mom, not a doctor):

  • Any kind of sugar before age one and really, do they need much after that?
  • Salt, unless it’s a very pure form of sea salt and then, very little
  • Grains, even the baby cereal that’s usually recommended. It fills ’em up, but their little tummies have a hard time digesting rice, oats and other grains, which can cause digestive issues now or later. I say wait on the grains if you can.

Making baby food is super simple, very inexpensive and takes very little time. One of the easiest foods to make for baby is Pureed Squash. You can read how to make pureed squash here. Making sweet potatoes is just as simple:

To Make Sweet Potatoes: Scrub them, stab them, bake them in a covered dish for about an hour, then peel them and puree them. So easy!

Pureeing green beans or peas are a little trickier as the “skin” kinda hangs around and keeps the food from being smooth. After failed attempts at making pureed green beans and peas, I found it easier to wait a little while before offering these to my babes. They made the perfect “finger food”. Frozen peas, by the way, are yummy and great if Baby is teething!

The one way I found to get green beans and peas into my little guys before they were old enough for “finger food” was to use a Kidco Baby Food Grinder. Man, I loved that thing. Whatever I had cooked or fixed for the rest of us to eat – green beans, peas, potatoes, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, apples, pears, bananas, peaches, nectarines (do I need to keep listing them?) – I’d stick it in my Kidco Baby Food Grinder and have instant baby food that my boys would eat faster than I could make! The “skin” or any difficult to eat part of the food would be “ground out” and the soft baby food would rise to the top. If you have a baby and you don’t have a Kidco Baby Food Grinder, I really, really recommend getting one!

Also, one of my very smart cousins told me about the BabyCook, which appears to have been invented after my babies needed pureed food, hmph. I’ve seen the BabyCook in action and it’s about as cool as they come. With the BabyCook, you can very quickly steam veggies, reheat food – even defrost food to make a healthy, quick meal for baby. Once the food is steamed, you can use the BabyCook to puree it to any desired consistency. Babies nothin’. I’m thinking I need one of these for me!

I used to always freeze pre-made baby food in ice cube trays, pop them out and re-warm them for a quick meal. It worked pretty well, but I’d love to hear if anyone else has a more efficient method of making baby food ahead of time?!

And, while we’re on the subject of baby food, I wanted to mention what another smart cousin showed me last week. Homemade baby food is great, but sometimes a little convenience on the go is a good thing. Have you seen these cool little Baby Food Pouches from Ella’s Kitchen? (Or here are some other ones I found from HappyBaby). Really, where were these things when my babies were babies?

Share your favorite baby food making, freezing, storing and serving tricks!

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Healthy Snacks I Feed My Family

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Here is a big list of healthy snacks that I feed my family. This list is guaranteed to keep your children full and happily satisfied forever – or at least until the next time they need a snack (which may be within the next five minutes, so you may want to read quickly).

I obviously don’t have all of these snacks on hand at all times, but when my kids are hungry between meals, this is an idea of what I might offer.

vanilla_wafers

Whole Wheat Vanilla Wafers

What are your favorite healthy snacks to feed your kids?

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My Exciting Grocery Posts for the Week: Such a Yummy Snack

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My freezer (not the ugly one, the other one) still holds quite a few packages of frozen strawberries from last years picking. Yesterday, we made glasses of Strawberry-Peach Slushies, which are full of a very special (and maybe secret) ingredient that you can’t even taste but offer lots of good vitamins! I had ordered the freeze dried variety of this ingredient from Shelf Reliance, making it super easy and inexpensive to add it to these slushies!

What a great way to get extra nutrition into our kids (and ourselves). And since it was only in the 40’s yesterday at our house, it was also a great way to turn our lips blue. Spring really is coming to Nebraska, right?

What’s one of your favorite snacks to feed your kids that offers lots of nutrition?

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My Exciting Grocery Posts for the Week: The Storage Room is ORGANIZED!

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After hours and hours of work, plus a back ache and a lot of dirty grime on my clothes, the food storage part of our storage room is now ORGANIZED!!! You can walk in and not trip or get scared or feel depressed. I’m not sure why I waited so long to get this done, but I do need to say thank you for making me do this! If I hadn’t had the motivation from you all, that room would still be messy. There’s a little something to this “tell your blog readers what you need to do” that holds you accountable to getting something done. :)

Here’s one more look at the mess, just so that the pictures to follow make you say a louder “ooooohhh…..ahhhh…”

And nowwwwwww………

Everyone together now, “Ooohhh…Ahhhhh….”

Here’s a different angle of that area, so that you can see that the ugly refrigerator looks even worse now that it’s in a clean room. And also so that you can see my two big blue Rubbermaid tubs which I am using to store cereal, corn chips, raisins, whole wheat pasta and a few other random dried foods that don’t fit well in other containers.

If you look real close at the wooden shelves, you’ll see that they are incredibly crooked. So, don’t look too close.  Those were a project the boys and I tackled a few years ago when Matt was out of town and I desperately wanted shelves. They are pretty much pitiful, but they work. And they remind me of the day when my boys were all little and I was trying to have them help me with this manly project, allthewhile working to keep the babies from eating nails. Ah, the good ol’ days.

My big (free) buckets fit nicely between the shelves. Most of those are filled with my year’s supply of wheat, but some of them contain a huge amount of Sea Salt, or Millet. If you haven’t read about how I acquire free or almost free buckets with lids, hasten to click here and read. (That may be the first time I’ve ever used the word “hasten” on my blog. Or ever.)

Here are some specifics of what is on each shelf because I’m sure you want to know about every square inch of my storage room. (In that case I will hasten to tell you.)  In a lovely see-through Rubbermaid container, I put all my nuts that just came in from Braga Farm. I believe there are a few packs of dried fruit in there too. I went to a lot of trouble to scribble the word “Nuts” on a label, even though you can see right through the container because shucks, labels are cute.

Under the nuts are my buckets of palm shortening, expeller pressed coconut oil and shredded coconut from Tropical Traditions. The buckets under those buckets are actually not what they say they are. I have my bulk cocoa and I can’t remember what else in those buckets…but it’s okay that I can’t remember…I have labels on the top for those too.

Then on the bottom shelf I have some boxes of Natural Value plastic wrap and baggies. I bought a case of each of those about five years ago, I kid you not. That’s what I still have left. I guess now you know how quickly we go through plastic wrap and baggies.

Moving over to the corner shelves that I swiped from my kids’ lego room (without asking)…

Top shelf is tomato paste, organic ketchup, coconut chips, Larabars and tuna. It’s a random assortment, but it works. The next shelf is my bulk popcorn and some rye grain. The next shelf is my bulk Sucanat divided into containers, some oats and my new maple syrup. The bottom shelf is my Ecover dish washing liquid and Ecover dishwasher powder. LOVE that stuff.

To the left of that shelf is one of the pitiful shelves. On top is all the excess canned tomato sauce and applesauce that won’t fit into my pantry in the kitchen. Under that is coconut oil and my mom’s salsa. I’ve had it on my list to tell you the story of my mom’s salsa and I’ve just GOT to get around to doing that. It’s such a wonderful story {sniff}.

The bottom two shelves are random spices and citric acid for making cheese. The spices are not for making cheese, just the citric acid…just in case that wasn’t clear, because spices in cheese, yuck.

Moving over to the pegboard wall and the shelf with jars…JOY! I took your advice and put all my canning rings on the wall. If that wasn’t fun, I don’t know what was. And there on the shelf are some of my empty canning jars waiting for harvest time in the fall.

Oh look, a different view of this area. There are more coconut products from Tropical Traditions. I think we are all aware that I love Tropical Traditions. In a basket on top of the coconut products are some boxes of unbleached muffin liners. Not sure why they ended up there, but I liked propping the basket like that.

And now the other side of the room. Again, let’s see the before picture, shall we?

Yikes, and now the after picture:

It’s much better, but not as impressive perhaps as the other side. I was at least able to clean out and organize my storage containers, as well as put together a shelf of containers I use for taking meals to others. Our window air conditioner is on the floor back there and will stay there until July. And that table right there in front needs to be dusted. Eh, I’ll get to it eventually.

Shew, so there you go. I am not so much in a state of chaos anymore, thankyouverymuch.  Unless you count some of the other areas of our home that kind of fell apart while I was cleaning the storage room this week.

Total money spent on this project:  $0. I had everything I needed on hand for this, including pitiful, crooked shelves and plenty of rubbermaid tubs.

And can I get three cheers for my beautiful red carpet? Yes, I’m sure you’ve been admiring that. And if you’ve been wondering if I’m going to vacuum in there, I’m gonna have say…um no. It’s a storage room and it is overall just a nasty room. I’ll save my housecleaning efforts for the rooms that matter.

Okay, so what have you been working on this week? Show us what you’ve done or share about it in the comments!

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My Exciting Grocery Posts for the Week: In Which I Received a Lot of Bonus Groceries

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I may have forgotten to place my Azure Standard order, but just wait until I tell you about all the great food that has been delivered to my doorstep during the last few days!!!

I often order organic groceries from Amazon, using my saved up Swagbuck earnings, or simply when I find great deals on food we are sure to use. Remember when I told you about these great deals on Maple Syrup and Cereal? I cashed in on those too, because that was a great deal on Maple Syrup!

Anyway, when I order from Amazon, I’m never quite sure when to expect the food to come in. Some of this food was ordered several weeks ago (and I’d almost forgotten about it). Isn’t God cool?    Suddenly, it’s all been coming in right during my organizational hooplah…as well as right at the time I felt like I was missing out on a few item. I’ve been able to get all of these great groceries put away neatly in my “new” storage room, as well as expand our menu a bit since I have a little more to work with!

I’ve been having a great time playing with new grains like millet, and I just can’t tell you how much fun I’m having making these Coconut Flour Muffins. I have new coconut flour muffin varieties to share with you soon (because yes, I’ve been playing!). I’m excited now to have a nice supply of coconut flour on hand. A little goes a long way, which makes the investment in this healthy flour very worth it!

Here are a few snapshots of my UPS man deliveries:

Bob’s Red Mill Coconut Flour, Organic Brown Rice,
Nature’s Path Honey’d Cornflakes, 25 Pounds of Organic Millet

I’d also ordered several packages of organic nuts from Braga Farms so I can make more Larabars. LOVED it when that box came! Gluten Free Oats came in that same day from Amazon.

Bob’s Red Mill Gluten Free Oats, Pistachios, Almonds and Cashews from Braga Organic Farms 

Here’s my syrup, along with some organic popcorn…

Arrowhead Mills Organic Popcorn and Grade B Maple Syrup

I happily used some of the freshly washed plastic containers I’d found during my clean-up in the storage room. I filled a big container with popcorn for the storage room, then filled a jar with the rest to keep in the kitchen to grab easily.
(Here’s a full post about how I store and use my bulk food purchases.)

This last picture I have is of my trip to Walmart last weekend. I usually order quite a bit of produce and frozen veggies from Azure Standard, but since I forgot to order this month, we had to have some sort of fresh fruits and veggies. I filled my cart (most of this has been eaten already!). I compromised a little bit on some of these items. I don’t normally like to feed my kids apples that aren’t organic. But, they weren’t an option this month, so I bought a couple of bags of regular ol’ apples. Better than no apples, right? I think. Maybe. What are your feelings about compromising on non-organic foods?

The grocery store run purchase included:  broccoli, bananas, cantaloupe,
asparagus, pineapple, carrots, lettuce, apples, cheese sticks and Tinkyada Brown Rice Pasta.

I hope you had fun looking at my grocery pictures. I mean, it’s a total blast staring at a 25 Pounds of Organic Millet, in which you can’t even see the millet inside the bag. I’m sure you all got a big kick out of that.

Final storage room pictures are coming up Friday…can’t wait to show you the progress!

How’s your cleaning coming? Wanna tell me about any of the groceries you got this week?

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My Exciting Grocery Posts for the Week: Today’s Breakfast

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With Turkey Sausage and prepared Hashbrowns in the freezer, breakfast this morning was a feast…yet very easy to put together! 

Turkey Sausage, Hashbrowns, Creamy Orange Coolers , Fried Eggs and Apple Slices

I’m almost out of potatoes, so it was great to find one more bag of Hashbrowns in the bottom of the freezer! And I just can’t say enough about making up a bunch of Turkey Sausage for quick meals. Once they’re mixed up and frozen into patties, I just throw them in the pan to cook. SO EASY.

You should see my storage room now!!! So close to being finished and organized! What a great feeling. And now, I’m going outside to line up my boys for hair cuts.

By the way, you’ve probably noticed by now that I don’t always stick to my menu plan exactly. Some weeks I do…this week I’m not. It’s just working out that way. I had this turkey sausage/hashbrown meal scheduled for yesterday’s lunch, but we had it this morning instead. I figure if I at least have a meal plan, I can adjust as I need to. With my busy cleaning/organizing week…our menu plan is a little topsy-turvy. :)

Yesterday, I had so much fun hearing what you had for lunch (because I just get a big kick out of food and hearing what others are eating). So…you know what we had for breakfast…what did you have?

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My Exciting Grocery Posts for the Week: THE MESS REVEALED (Share Yours Too!)

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Let me just say it again:  NOBODY gets to go into my storage room. You have no idea how shocking it is that I’m slapping these pictures all over the Internet. Ask anyone who’s ever been to my house. That room is OFF LIMITS.

After you see these pictures, some of you are going to shake your head in dismay. Or you might giggle because you’ll see that Laura actually has a bottle of vegetable oil in her food storage (it was for a science experiment, I’ll have you know).

I have several excuses for how scary this room is, like:

  • This room is unheated, therefore freezing during the winter, so ain’t no way no how I’m going in there for longer than the time it takes to grab something out of the freezer or throw down an empty box.
  • Our recyclable items hang out in here waiting to be taken to the recycle center every few weeks. (Yes, we have to take all of our recycling to a recycle center – it doesn’t get picked up here.)  This clutters up the room very quickly.
  • The boys go into the room to get one box out of our pile of boxes so they can make a project, but they usually pull from the bottom of the pile, making all of the boxes fall down.
  • It’s a storage room. We don’t live in there. I can close the door and walk away and forget about it.

Here’s the view when you first walk into the room. Don’t you love how UGLY the front of my big freezer is? That’s how I got it for super cheap – the poor thing was ugly. :)  Putting an ugly freezer into my ugly storage room just makes sense, don’t you think? It was a great price, and it works just fine – ugly door or not! (Notice how I’m trying to distract you from the mess of the room by pointing out my freezer door?)

Here’s a closer-up picture of the food stash, and jars, and Walmart bags of canning rings. Now there’s a beautiful organizational method:  throw all unused canning rings into a Walmart bag and toss it onto a pile of bulk food. Adorable, tidy and practical. Yeah, right. (This is why we’re organizing this week!!!)

Here’s an even closer-up picture of the big shelf of food. And ice cream maker. And pressure cooker that doesn’t get used because I’m afraid of blowing up my kitchen.

Have you seen enough? Well…sorry, there’s more. If you turn around and look at the other side of the storage room, you’ll see this:

You know, when you go through six to eleven dozen eggs each week, you do accumulate a lot of egg cartons. Those need to be returned to our friends with chickens. And then all that other stuff really needs to be sorted through and taken to the recycling center or given away or thrown away or put away.

So there you have it. My mess revealed. 

And here’s what I’ve decided:  If I’m going down…I’m pulling you all down with me. :)  I wanna see your messes too…it’s only fair, right? 

Take a picture of the biggest messy spot in your house (or the one you want to tackle this week). Post it on your blog if you have one, and come link up here. Let’s make this the hub for all messes everywhere, shall we?  Show us your before pictures so we can all commiserate on how messy life gets.

On Friday (the 22nd), I’ll post my “After Pictures”, along with another link-up so you can show us your finished CLEAN and ORGANIZED pictures.

Just think about how many of us are going to get a scary mess under control this week! It’s inspiring, isn’t it? And yes, just a little bit intimidating. But c’mon…if I can do it, so can you! Show us those pictures!

(If you don’t have a blog and want to email me your before and after pictures just for fun, I’d love that too!)

So do tell…what’s the messiest spot in your house?

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My Exciting Grocery Posts for the Week, Part 1

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I made a big mistake this month in the grocery shopping arena. I completely missed my April Azure Standard Food Co-op ordering date, which means that I was unable to order groceries for my family and I can’t order again until May so in the meantime my family will have nothing at all to eat for four entire weeks!!!!

Okay, not really.  Not even close.  I did have to talk myself down from a panic once I realized I’d missed ordering, though. I have ordered from Azure Standard every single month for the past four or five years. My menus revolve around what I’m able to order and I very much rely on them for fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables.

But as you may recall, I always order in bulk, keeping a nice supply of food on hand at any given time. Plus, we still have quite a bit of preserved garden produce we canned or froze last summer/fall. Our freezers still have plenty of meat. So, just because I made a big goof-up this month, are we gonna starve? No.  I would imagine that even if I forgot to order from Azure for several months in a row, we’d still have plenty to eat (although we might have to get very creative with our tomato sauce and flax seeds after a while).

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I also still have a lot of fruit leather.
So we’d have tomato sauce, flax seeds and fruit leather.  :)

As I began to look around at all the food I have stored to get us through until our next Azure Standard order, I realized two things:

  1. We really have a lot of food.
  2. My storage room is a complete and total scary mess.

And so…this week I have decided to clean and reorganize our storage room and my pantry and all my food storage places, because enough is enough already with all the disorganized messes, and because without my normal Azure Standard grocery order this month, I’m going to have to be a little more creative.

I take this as a challenge to myself.  I don’t get to rely on having absolutely everything in stock like I usually have. I didn’t get to order the yeast I needed or the frozen broccoli I like to get or the white cheddar cheese I am almost out of.

And yes, I could go get some of this stuff at the store (because wow, we do have grocery stores around here), but how about I just work on using the abundance of food that we have been blessed with and what I have in storage?

Therefore, I hereby declare that I am going to get a shovel and dig out my storage room. Then I will reorganize it and make it nice and workable again.

What you need to know is that I hardly let ANYBODY into my storage room. It’s completely embarassing and a total disaster, and I’m not one bit proud of that room.

But if you scream loud enough, and say some really nice things about how you’ll still like me even after you see that my storage room looks 200 times worse that a boy’s dorm room…I may get over myself and take a picture to show you.

And then I’ll update you with my progress throughout the week and show you before and after pictures, as well as share with you some of the tasty things we’re eating with our stored food.

So, whatdoyasay? You wanna see the room? (Please say no.)

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Whole Foods Couponing…and a Thank You!

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As you may remember, I used to be a Coupon Queen. I was the one who would be in front of you in the check out line with 47 coupons and a cart full of groceries. After the cashier spent ten minutes subtracting out my coupons, my receipt total would be somewhere in the $24 range for a cart full of food.

If indeed we can call it food. I wasn’t exactly using coupons to get fruits and vegetables, you know?  But shucks…most of it was free! Free poptarts are great, right?

Learn to make healthier, homemade poptarts if you need a poptart fix!

Well, as you know, we’ve changed our ways a little bit entirely and now I shop completely differently. (You can read this post to learn how I grocery shop. And you can read this entire series to learn about our Healthy Eating Journey.)  I now recognize that spending money on good, whole foods is a perfect investment in our overall health.

But I still love finding great deals on great groceries!

This is where the “Thank You!” part of this post comes in. Remember how I mentioned that if you sign up for Shop it to Me…I could earn free gift cards?  Well…several of you signed up, which means that I earned several free gift cards. I appreciate it so much!  There were several gift card choices…but of course…I chose the cards for Whole Foods!! Who can pass up free groceries at Whole Foods??!

Matt and I were able to hit a Whole Foods store while we were away for the weekend at the Weekend to Remember conference. (Yes, part of our romantic weekend was spent shopping for asparagus. You know your relationship is solid when you can lovingly gaze at organic produce together.)

Not only did I have a few Shop it to Me Whole Foods cards to use…I had been doing my homework and had put together some coupons to use during our outing. It brought back memories and I have to admit that I felt quite giddy as I actually put coupons into an envelope again. I really haven’t done that (to this extent) for a long time. (Yeah I know…I’m a geek.)

The kids were pretty happy to see us when we got home…especially when they saw we had brought home cereal and yogurt!! (Hey guys…didn’t you even miss us just a little bit?)

We stocked up on chicken wings and boneless, skinless chicken breasts because I just don’t have a great source for those nearby. We found great deals on lettuce, asparagus, apples, pears and zucchini…Larabars, yogurt, butter and cheese.

And then, because they were on sale, because I had coupons and because they are gluten free…we splurged on a few items I lovingly call “organic junk food” that we’ll save for a rainy day. Cereal and chips…woohoo! Malachi sure does look disappointed with our loot, huh? :)

I had also been sent a Brat Hans Sausages coupon so that I could try them for free! We cashed in on that and WOW, you should have seen the boys when they found those in the bag! I thought they were going to eat me when they saw them! They must feel they have a brat deficiency or something?

So thank you to all who signed up for Shop it to Me …you made our Whole Foods shopping trip very fun!! If you haven’t signed up for Shop it to Me , you certainly can and it wouldn’t hurt my feelings even a little bit. :)  NOBODY  has to spend any money unless you want to – that’s the beauty of it!!! AND, more importantly, after you sign up, you can tell YOUR friends and family about Shop it to Me  so that YOU can receive free gift cards!!!

I did want to note:  I normally do the majority of this type of shopping through Azure Standard…Whole Foods is two hours away and I’m blessed to have an Azure Standard drop point right here in my town!! Azure is much less expensive and has everything I need. This Whole Foods trip was a fun splurge, gave me a “grocery store shopping fix” and well…I had gift cards. And coupons. And needed to get Brats, apparently. :)

Do you shop at Whole Foods? Do you have one close to you, or do you have to drive pretty far like I do? What do you like to get at Whole Foods?

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