Thursday was a long day. I know that grocery shopping is not all that grueling (unless you have three small children attached to you), but this was more than the usual outing to procure nourishment. I was on a mission to feed the fam without bringing home any plastic. I would call today’s foray a success, but also a shock. Although I’ve been looking at what to buy or not to buy as I mentally prepped for the Plastic Purge, I was unprepared for the lack of available foodstuffs sans plastic…or the cost of those rare items, either. I looked through my coupons before shopping today — yes, I am a coupon lady…

Yep. That’s my husband, getting the tiki bar ready for his Father’s Day bash. Today has been a day — of lots of cleaning and prep work for tomorrow’s somewhat challenging BBQ. This morning, I saw that Mr. Husband’s shopping list (he needed to go to the hardware store) included more potato chips. He bought a bushel of tortilla chips yesterday (great price, but it’s a boatload of chips — seriously), and I also haggled over which kind to buy. But what I didn’t buy was ruffled dip chips. After an earnest conversation, guess what? I won the toss, we’ll live with the unruffled chips, and we shall stick to…

A postscript to today’s shopping adventures. Mr. Husband did the party shopping for our Sunday BBQ and although he kept strictly to the list, and got great buys, nonetheless, we are left with a mere $65.97 to finish the month. With 12 days left, nearly two weeks with three meals per day for five people, that could get interesting. I have asked my family members to bear with it and let’s see how we do. They are, needless to say, already planning where they will go out to eat when this “thing” is over. Changing the world, one family at a time. Or not.

Monday MenuBreakfast (very early today): Julia: raisin bran and milk, coffee; The Boy: Hot Pocket; girls not at home; Patrick: oatmeal, grapefruit, hardboiled egg (at work, same every day)Snack (second breakfast!): Hardboiled egg, grapefruitLunch: Julia/Simone: pasta salad, carrot and celery sticks, coffee; Patrick: green salad, leftover sliced ham and tomatoes.Snack: Iced coffee (

A third of the way into our June Food Stamp Challenge… Thursday I made a point to stop at the nonprofit with extra bread and found that there was a delivery of day-old artisanal and sandwich bread and pastries. I filled a shopping bag with sliced bread and sourdough. Some of the sliced bread went into the freezer; some thick-cut bread I set aside to make French toast this weekend. There were a few dinner rolls, which one daughter and I ate in the afternoon for lunch. Odds and ends and scraps of stale bread go into our chicken feed bucket — I take broken and stale pieces from the…