6am is amazing! Maybe I could do it if the store offered free coffee and bagels

Vegetarian dishes would be good to try in 2009. We have a friend who shares some great recipes with us and I actually enjoyed eating a quiche she had prepared. It wasn’t the traditional quiche, but had some great potatoes and other veggies in it.

@Mark

I can’t agree more that we shouldn’t shop while hungry. I always make poor choices and buy more cookies, crackers, or bread when I’m starving. We have a friend that goes grocery shopping at 2am and says that he can get most items as they have just stocked the store. I can’t imagine staying up until 2am to go shopping, but it works for them.

We try to plan out meals a bit in advance around the Sunday paper deals & coupons. We rarely buy prepared or overly processed foods (however there are exceptions, my wife likes to have a pile of frozen microwave meals on hand in case she has nothing ready for lunch at work, frozen pizza is a good expedient and since we have many friends who work at a national pizza manufacturer we can get rejects on the cheap).

We do a lot of our own cooking & baking and do so in bulk.

I noticed too when tracking expenses our grocery spending fluctuates fairly wildly. We go and drop some good coin at the grocery store one week and then we are set for the next two – three weeks and are a fair amount under our weekly budget. I need to do a better job of expense tracking this year, though.

All the best for 2009 from the UK!