Large Family Grocery Haul: |One Month of Healthy Meals

Come along to see what we buy at the grocery store for our large family grocery haul. Can we really make one month of healthy meals after one trip to the grocery store? See what we buy for our paleo meal plan.

WHAT KIND OF THINGS DO we BUY AT THE GROCERY STORE?

We like to buy most of our groceries from local farmers or grow them myself in our backyard. During the winter and early spring (It is almost planting time!), we have to buy a lot more at the store.

PRODUCE

Every year we plant a vegetable garden, and it does well. However, we never plant enough to make it through until the following spring. We don’t think we'll be planting more this year to try! With the kids, animals, and life in general, gardening can be put on the back burner. We will definitely be planting, but we don’t think we are ready to live off the land fully! The main thing we buy from the grocery store is produce.

On a normal grocery trip, we buy lots of organic frozen vegetables, sweet potatoes, whole carrots, celery, butternut squash, organic potatoes, peppers, and onions.

We also buy a good amount of fruit. The kids are always looking for a snack, so we like to keep fresh fruit on hand for that. We refer to the clean 15 and dirty dozen list to decide what needs to be bought organic.

AVOCADOS

We buy a ton of avocados! Like, 50 at a time a lot. Most people think we am crazy and wonder how we can eat them all before they go bad. We do eat them really quickly, but avocados also preserve well.

We just take a few out at a time and place them on our counter. They ripen quickly at room temperature. As soon as we are running low on ripe avocados, we just set a few out. If you buy rock-solid hard avocados and put them in the refrigerator, they won’t ripen.

We serve avocados with everything! It is the best side dish and filler for every meal. We jokingly say (though it is true) that avocados are our fast food.

MEAT

We love having a freezer full of healthy meats. We have a local, grass-fed cattle farmer that we get our beef from. It is a great price, and we can buy it in bulk. Our sister and we usually split half of a cow, and it is enough meat to fill the deep freezer.

We do use the bones for homemade beef bone broth. We get all the cuts: steaks, roasts, ribs, round steaks, and even the organs and bones. We haven’t quite figured out what to do with all the organs other than the liver, and our family isn’t too fond of it.

It is nothing for me to buy 10 whole chickens in one trip to the grocery store, believe me, it definitely won’t go to waste. We buy organic whole chickens from the local grocery store, and again, we like to stock up! We really hate going to the grocery store with 4 kids, so the less we have to go, the better!

DAIRY

It is the best! We always thought it would be fun to have a dairy cow, but having it right up the road is the next best thing, maybe even better. No work required, yet we still get fresh, local, raw milk. Similar to the meat, we have a local dairy farmer; when we say local, we mean right up the road!

We usually visit the dairy farm once a week. Our husband will use the cream off the top of the milk for his coffee. We make one gallon into yogurt.

Again, we buy in bulk when we visit them! Usually, we will take all the butter they have made and split it with our sister. We store it in the freezer and defrost it as needed. Thankfully, we also live really close to an Amish community that sells butter.

ODDS AND INS

You know all the random things you get from the grocery store? Things like avocado oil, apple cider vinegar, chips, and pasta sauce.

We mainly use coconut oil in the kitchen, which is another thing we buy in bulk from the Amish community. We like to keep avocado oil or olive oil on hand for salad dressings, homemade mayo, or things that we don’t want the coconut flavor in.

Other than the harmful oils that we mostly avoid, they aren’t too bad of a snack, and our kids love them. We don’t buy many processed or snack foods really. However, every once in a while, we will buy vegetable chips from Aldi. They are root vegetables baked with oil and salt.

We like to keep canned tomatoes on hand for soups and stews. Once we run out of tomatoes from the garden, we start buying organic canned tomatoes.

EGGS

Little girl in dress holding farm fresh eggs.

We have a flock of backyard chickens and get almost all of our eggs from them. We say “almost” because this past winter, we did have to buy a few dozen from the store.

Last month, we added 10 new chicks to our flock, so next winter, we should be good to go! During the colder months, hens don’t lay as well, mainly because of the short days and less light. We also had some older hens that aren’t laying as well as they use to.

DO we REALLY ONLY SHOP ONCE A MONTH?

It isn’t like we have a set date or anything, but it is about once a month. Every so often, we have to run in for a thing or two for a recipe or a journal note. But we always do buy in major bulk to make it where we don’t have to do a big grocery haul more than once a month! Yes, nearly.

If you have the room to store it and if you have a deep freezer, why not? Fresh veggies and meet in brown paper shopping bag and on table.

DO we BUY ANY FOOD RELATED ITEMS ON AMAZON?

We didn’t even notice that almost everything we bought online was in the coconut family until we typed that. Oh, yes, definitely! We have a few staple items that we get shipped straight to our door — things like coconut flour, almond flour, coconut sugar, coconut milk, and coconut aminos. Apparently, we like coconut!

We do a lot of gluten-free and dairy-free baking around here. We found that those specialty items are cheaper on Amazon than at the grocery store.