Christopher Curley
The author, right, and his wife.
- My wife and I love to eat out a few times per month, but still do the majority of our cooking at home.
- That includes breakfast and lunch for her each day before she goes to work and for myself, who works from home.
- Here's what we usually buy each week from two Louisiana grocery stores, Rouses and Canseco's, as well as the national chain Winn-Dixie.
I love cooking. My wife loves cooking.
More than almost any other single quality, our mutual love of food and the camaraderie of the kitchen is the thing that brought us together. It's still our favorite space in the house.
We have a line item in our budget for groceries set at $450. We've rarely met that budget, and when we do it's because the "restaurants" line item has ballooned in unseemly fashion.
Still, we try to cook 95% of our meals at home, including the prepared lunches my wife takes to work, and we largely succeed. But we still average $480.40 per month!
There isn't a lot of meat on our grocery list, not because we're vegetarian, but because we tend to focus on fish or high-quality meat from the local butcher - which we therefore eat more infrequently because of the expense.
Here's what we buy on a regular basis from the grocery stores nearest to us in New Orleans.
Canseco's - weekly: $37
Canseco's Markets
Canseco's is a grocery store with multiple locations in New Orleans. The one we frequent isn't the largest, but the smaller market has the benefit of being a quarter mile from our house, even if it doesn't always have the best prices. Distance wins out.
Here's what we buy each week:
- Whole milk - $1.79
- Unsalted butter - $2.79
- Salmon fillets - $13.81
- Yellow onions (3-lb. bag) - $1.79 (these actually are the cheapest onions in town by a wide margin, and yes, I know I'm weird for keeping track)
- Baby spinach - $2.99
- Farm House cage free large brown eggs - $3.49
- Kraft cheddar cheese 8-oz. block - $3.59
- Bell pepper - $0.99/each
Rouses Markets - weekly: $71
Rouses Markets
Rouses is a local Louisiana chain that we've frequented for years. We like that it stocks a lot of very local items in addition to the usual grocery fare:
- Kellogg's Special K cereal - $3.99
- La Bonne Vie plain brie - $4.34
- Lemons (2) - $1.59
- Red mangoes (4) - $6.00
- Turnip greens - $2.00
- Collard greens - $2.00
- Green cabbage - $2.21
- Bananas - $1.89
- Yukon gold potatoes - $0.71
- Garlic bulb - $0.69
- Mustard greens - $2.00
- Red beets - $3.99
- Frozen gulf shrimp 21/35 - $8.99
- Cajun fresh sausage - $5.35
- Smoked sausage - $5.99
Winn-Dixie - 2 to 4 times monthly: $22
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What Winn-Dixie lacks in local offerings it makes up for in deals and prices. It's a great store for buy-one, get-one and other deals, so we increasingly go here for our staple non-perishables when our schedules allow:
- Breyer's chocolate ice cream - $5.49
- Whole frozen strawberries - $3.50
- Frozen pineapple chunks - $3.99
- Mahatma white rice - $3.99
- Garden rotini - $1.49
- Bush's reduced sodium black beans - $0.99
- Avocados (2) - $2.00
- Flour tortillas medium - $2.49
- Honeycrisp apples - $2.49/lb.