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Happy Ad…Wednesday?

After last week’s mishap, I’d intended on posting last night after making sure the ads I was looking at were the right ones.  Sadly, the internet gods were not on board with this plan. Having never made a concerted effort to collect all this information as soon as it was available so I could tell all my Cheeps, I was unaware that grocery store flyers are apparently only posted on the store websites when the prices take effect.

Midnight postings of grocery sales, people! How have I missed this late night fun all these years? It kind of makes me want to walk into Randalls at midnight and start checking to see if they’ve got all the signs switched over yet, and people watch. Randalls at midnight is a great slice of life.

So, last night I decided I would post on Wednesday mornings. Because of an ongoing conflict I maintain with the sun, this means 11am. Since Wednesday is the shopping day for a lot of folks, that means the Happy Ad post would be too late! This is a Sitcom Level 3 Dilemma, and I’m still trying to sort it out.

In the meantime, here are the sales this week, with my fun color coding and commentary. I’ll be shopping later this week, and will tweet any new deals I find! So go ahead and click that little ‘follow’ link off to the right, and if I find a deal, you’ll know about it when I do.

Cheep Cheep!

HEB

green pears, jonagold apples                    88c/lb

boneless skinless chicken breasts           $1.99/lb

large navel oranges                                  98c/lb

Fiesta

large avocados                                   79c/ea

chicken drumsticks and thighs           88c/lb  (limit 2, w/$10 additional purchase)

Sarita brand long grain rice                79c/2lb sack

large navel oranges                            97c/lb

key limes                                             99c/2lb sack

Randalls

large navel oranges                                     97c/lb

green grapes                                               99c/lb

boneless skinless chicken breasts           $1.99/lb                                                            (note: thighs are also this price, but that is not their low. wait for another day to buy those, or go buy drumsticks/thighs/legs at Sprouts or Fiesta!)

Sprouts

blackberries, 5.6oz                            $1.25 ea

asparagus                                          $1.99/lb

peaches                                                99c/lb

whole seedless watermelons             $3.99 ea

green bell peppers                              50c/ea

chicken drumsticks or whole legs       99c/lb

But wait! Aren’t chicken legs cheaper over at Fiesta? Yes, yes they are. But Fiesta has the limit, and the also-buy requirement, and my personal rule is 99c/lb is a stock-up price for chicken leg parts. So it gets listed twice this week.

That’s the round-up for this week! Tomorrow I’ll be posting ideas for storing and using one of these items that you might stock up on.  If you notice a deal I’ve missed, post in the comments, so we can all share the deal!

Cheep Cheep!

For My First Four Readers

It’s a simple fact of life, that mistakes will be made (Mrs. Garrett taught me that! And if you got my 80s tv reference, good for you!).

Despite quite a lot of double checking, when I did the ad post this week, I managed to look at the incorrect Fiesta and HEB ads. Which is impressive, because I waited on that post until Randalls put theirs up on their site pretty late on Tuesday. So I was physically not posting, but also not managing to see what was right there at the bottom of the .pdf files I was looking at, an excellent achievement in missing the obvious, indeed.

So, if any of my readers so far went ahead and shopped based on my post, I apologize. It won’t happen again.

I’m sure there will be more blunders as I get things rolling here at CheepieAustin.  Helpfully, here in the very first week I’ve already gotten to create an ‘apologies and retractions’ tag! I can check that right off my to-do list. Whew!

Coming up this week will be another Grocery Theory post, Happy Ad Tuesday, and a discussion of what we’ll be calling Alternate Grocers. Unless I think of something better and/or funnier to call them by then.

Cheep Cheep!

Great, 20lbs of Chicken, Now What?

It’s all well and good to find yourself able to stock up on chicken drumsticks at $1/lb. You can have that happy glow all the way home, knowing you’ve secured enough protein for many meals, similar to hunters of yore. What the hunters didn’t have to worry about so much was where all that chicken was going, because the clan was going to pretty much eat it all as soon as he dragged it back and threw it on the fire.

Depending on your needs and kitchen, you have developed storage solutions of your own. I’ve got a vacuum sealer and a deep freeze, as well as a pantry with a reasonable amount of space. You might have a huge pantry, or be one of those coupon people with an entire store of stuff in the basement. Most likely, you wish you had more space, but don’t, and you don’t want to spend hours fussing with this chicken that was supposed to be a deal.

Fear not. This is easily sorted.

First, decide how you want to break this up. Some of it will need to go into the freezer, in sizes that you would use for a meal–for me, that’s six legs in a bag. Do two to four of those. Depending on how much you bought, you might be already done.

If you’re still looking at more chicken on the counter, you can go two ways here: More Flavor, or More Soup.  They will both take time, but if you break it up you’ll have put up enough chicken for several quick weeknight meals.

For More Flavor, season chicken with salt and pepper, put it on a baking sheet or in a roasting pan, and put it in the oven at 350 degrees. Roast it until it gets to 165 degrees, then let it rest a bit. If you’re out of time, wrap it up and put it in the fridge until you want to deal with it.  When that time comes, shred all the meat off the bones, and bag it up for the freezer.

For More Soup, put the drumsticks in a big pot that can hold them, and add water to cover. Salt the heck out of the water and boil the legs. There will be foam, which can be skimmed, but honestly isn’t going to hurt anyone. If you happen to have, say, old carrots hiding in the crisper, or half an onion, or celery that went limp about ten minutes after you bought it, wash and chop that roughly and toss that in, as well. Can’t hurt anything to add some vegetables here. Not kale though, this isn’t a kale time. 

Your last decision here is if you want to keep some of this soup–if you do, when the chicken is done, put a pot in the sink and put a colander in that pot.  If the pot with the chicken is very heavy, you can use tongs to fish the chicken out into the colander, then pour the soup stock over it, where it will then land neatly in the pot.  Cool the chicken and shred it off the bone, and freeze for later (as above, if you don’t want to do this now, wrap it up and do it tomorrow).  For the stock? I pour mine in old spaghetti sauce jars and put it in the fridge. Often, I don’t want this much stock, so some goes down the drain. Some people get super-ambitious and simmer the stock for hours to reduce it, then freeze it in ice cube trays to add to dishes later.  People that do this are mostly named Martha.

I realize you had to read a lot of words there, and that this isn’t how you like to see a recipe laid out, and the chicken is still on your counter. Here’s the haiku version:

Boil or roast the drumsticks.

Maybe save that broth.

Shred the meat. Freeze it in bags.

Happy Ad Tuesday!

I have a love/hate relationship with the store flyers. I love that they tell me what’s on sale, I hate that my mailman doesn’t bring them on Tuesdays any more. Well, that’s not true, sometimes he brings them on Tuesdays, but then other times I don’t get them until Thursday, which is upsetting. Generally, though, receiving my flyers late isn’t the most upsetting thing that happens on any given day, so I can work past it.  This is the kind of wisdom that comes with age, people.

Another hateable thing about the store flyers is that they’re store-location-specific. I live about equidistant between two HEBs. I didn’t know flyers were location-specific until I headed out once to buy some lobster tails on sale, and it turned out that the Brodie HEB was not the store I needed to be at, the one at Wm. Cannon and South First had  the lobster I was looking for.

It has occurred to me that I think too much about store flyers. Every relationship has problems, though.  I think we’ll eventually work this love triangle out, me, the flyers, and the postman.

Every week, each store has the loss-leaders for the week in the flyer, and the specials I will note each Tuesday in the ‘Happy Ad Tuesday!’ posts are the ones that are the rock-bottom prices for those items.  I’d like to note that I’ve typed Tuesday five times in this post so far, and only gotten it right the first try one time.  Never say I’m not working hard to bring you helpful information!

Here are the specials, by store, for this week. Following the grocery store ‘week’ (which starts on Wednesday), these prices are good through next Tuesday, with the exception of Sprouts. Sprouts has ‘Double Ad Wednesday’ so I’ll note if a special is ending tomorrow, or beginning.

HEB

3lb. sack of Gala apples, $1.98

grapefruit, 98c/ea

drumsticks, $1/lb

Sprouts

ending tomorrow–                                                      

vine tomatoes, 48c/lb

black seedless grapes, 98c/lb

plums, peaches or nectarines, 98c/lb

brown rice, 69c/lb (bulk section)

butter toffee peanuts, $1.99/lb

ending next Wednesday–

6oz raspberries, 98c/each

peaches, 98c/lb

cucumbers, 49c/ea

large cantaloupes, $1.50/each

pork loin chops, $2.99/lb

Fiesta

large pears, 99c/lb

peaches, 99c/lb

1lb. sack of carrots, 66c/lb

boneless skinless chicken breast, $1.99/lb. (limit 2 with $10 additional purchase)

bone-in pork sirloin chops, $1.79/lb. (same limit)

drumsticks, 99c/lb

Randalls

gala apples, 79c/lb

6oz raspberries, 99c/ea

london broil, $3.99/lb

red, green or yellow bell peppers, 2/$1

WF, CM, WV, and TJs all had nothing of note on sale this week.  This doesn’t mean they don’t have a weekly sale happening–they all do! I’m simply stating that none of their prices are remarkable deals. It’s possible that the WF mussels for $4.99/lb are just your speed. If so, get over there! But I’m trying to hit the items that are big savings to a large number of people (and about those mussels, CM has them for that price all the time, in 2lb sacks).

For now, Happy Ad Tuesday posts will focus on groceries of the food sort. I’m going to incorporate more types of sales moving forward, like gluten-free and organic prices.  After that, I’ll be adding household basics–toilet paper, fabric softener, dish soap, and other items.

Follow cheepieaustin on twitter to get real-time updates if I find an amazing deal! I found a grocery cart of loaves of day-old bread at Sprouts for just 50c–I felt badly I didn’t tweet about it. Next time, I’ll be sharing my good find with you.

Cheep Cheep!

Basic Grocery Theory

I’m out of phase this week, so can’t prep you for the Wednesday ads.  The plan, as much as there is of one, is to make Tuesdays ‘Tuesday Ad Days’ so that you know what the big bargains will be that week. Then you can assess your needs and decide what sort of shopping trips you’ll be making, with those deals in mind.

However, in this CheepieAustin Inaugural Week, that is not happening. Partly because I don’t get my mail until 7pm (wth, Post Office?) and don’t have the ads, partly because the web scraper that will help me collect all the information in a more 2000s kind of way isn’t written yet, and partly because I didn’t plan ahead much, but just decided to start this thing and hope for the best. So here we are, with Grocery Theory.

Here are the grocery stores in Austin, ranked:

Sprouts>HEB>Fiesta>Trader Joe’s>Central Market>Whole Foods>Randalls

Remain calm. I’m not saying you have to rank them this way, just that over years of shopping, this is my list.

I’m leaving off some other places that also have groceries (Target, Costco,etc.), that we’ll integrate as we go. If you do all your grocery shopping at Wal-Mart, don’t run away though–maybe I can steer you toward a simpler way to save and still cut down on trips to the store.  I’ve left Wheatsville off, as well, because I’ve only been in there once.

We all have a million things to think about when we shop, not just the grocery list. There’s traffic to consider, the grocery-to-household problem (I want to go to Central Market to get that shrimp on sale, but I need dish soap too!), the cost, and whether or not you can leave the parking lot in the direction you want to go when you leave. I’m looking at you, HEB on Brodie.

My ranking is based on those things, and more.  There’s the quality of the produce, how far I’m likely to have to walk to get what I need, whether they’ve got the meat cuts I want, how much they charge for milk, and will my kids behave or start asking for Cocoa Puffs even though I never, ever buy them? It’s an ongoing evaluation.

I hit all of the ones I’ve listed pretty regularly.  Most of them I’ve got in categories–TJs and Sprouts are produce and yogurt, while HEB is all-purpose. As part of the ongoing grocery discussion here, one of the things I’ll discuss is what each store does well and not-so-well.

Let me know what your rankings are. Do you only go to one store? Do you avoid Randalls like the plague? Put your list up in the comments! Cheep Cheep!

Grocery Wonderland, Grocery Hell

Have you ever been at Central Market, because you wanted their stuffed chicken breast, remembered you needed toilet paper (eleventy dollars a recycled green roll), and wound up not buying the milk you also meant to get because cereal without milk is less messy than toilets with no toilet paper?

Have you gone to HEB thinking you’d get everything for a barbecue, and realized their pork shoulders were twice as much per pound than they are at Fiesta that week?

If this sort of thing happens to you? You have found the right blog.

I will sift through the many puzzles grocery shopping can present, with an eye toward Austin specifically. With the still-growing number of grocery stores and specialty markets, keeping up with where the best deals are is beyond most of us. ‘HEB is the cheapest, Whole Foods is not,’ is where many of us call our grocery analysis done and get on to figuring out what to cook for dinner. We can do better!

If you’re not in Austin, you can enjoy a laugh at the number of stores, and use the strategies we discuss here in your own town.

My goal is to collect all the store ad info, and let readers know where the good deals are that week, like the freezer stock-up items, or the loss leaders that make a trip to a store you might not usually visit worth your time.

Also, I’ll be tweeting about deals I come across: the racks of seasonal clearance, or a discontinued item at a steep discount. You can follow cheepieaustin and get info about real-time deals.

Last, each week I’ll focus on a certain kind of shopping (pantry shopping, freezer shopping, household shopping, as examples) and post about how each one can be approached in a practical manner.

If you’ve ever needed to grocery shopping, and couldn’t decide if you should just go to HEB, or go to Sprouts and Target, or head to Costco and hope for the best, CheepieAustin is the place for you.

Cheep Cheep!