Weekly Low-Buy Recap: 1.16.26

What I spent money on this week:

• Additional groceries: I stopped at Safeway on Wednesday to buy fruit and veggies (and the frozen hashbrowns my husband requested) to get through the rest of the week. I’ve recently resolved to make half of my plate vegetables at each meal (even breakfast!), so this week I found myself needing to buy a lot more. We also purposefully held off on buying kale for the white bean and kale soup we made tonight so it wouldn’t wilt before we used it, so that was part of the trip too. $45

• A cinnamon roll at the cafe by my kid’s preschool. Is this the opposite of spending on extra veggies? I dropped my kid off at preschool and went to the nearby cafe to work on some writing. I had intended to buy a mint tea (one of the cheaper menu items, zero calories, and zero caffeine since I’d already had my morning coffee) but the cinnamon roll spoke to me. I’m not mad about it. $8.50
• A ten-pound bag of brown basmati rice from the chef supply store. We buy staples like rice, beans, oats and lentils from the chef supply store in bulk. I used up all the rice this week so I went out to buy more. I think this is what people envision Costco being for, but in my experience Costco mostly has large quantities of convenience foods. For example, ours doesn’t have uncooked lentils, but they have pouches of pre-cooked lentils. That’s just not how we cook. So for us, the chef store is where we buy our bulk food. $13
• Bread to go with the soup we’ll be eating all weekend, from the local bakery. $11.50

Pretty good! I go to the cafe by the preschool almost every week because I have nowhere else to go on the one day each week I get to drop my kid off and leave. We walk or bike to preschool, so I have to go somewhere nearby, and it’s the only place to go. I consider it a necessary preschool expense.

What I Wanted to Buy but Didn’t:

I don’t really have a laptop/commuter backpack. I just have a few travel backpacks, and they’re bigger than this. I’ve been running into instances where it would be nice to have something smaller and less “I just left a hostel,” such as taking my kid to preschool and then spending a couple hours at a cafe writing. I might buy it eventually, but not right now.

Frugal Wins:

• A while back I tried a recipe for pho broth that tasted decent on its own but, with noodles and veggies added, was far too bland. We didn’t like it as soup, but I had a ton left over so I froze the rest. I’ve been meaning to fish it out of the deep freeze and just throw it out. But this past week I decided to use some of it as cooking liquid for rice, and it made pretty tasty rice.