Shopping trip to the city

We're thirty miles from Costco.  There's no way I can tell you that we save money going there, as many trips as we make... possible twice a month.  We probably burn enough gas to suck away any savings we're getting.  But, as I told Cliff yesterday, the only places we go are places we shop these days.  So if I'm getting cabin fever and our little girl's daddy happens to be home with her due to weather issues, I suddenly decide we need to go to Costco, and we'll stop by Aldi on the way there.  Of course it goes without saying that we'll go by Walmart on the way home, because that's just the best place for buying certain things.  

I'd like to tell you we spend hours out there shopping, but we can leave home at 9, hit all three of those stores, and be home shortly after noon.  That's because I'm a really fast shopper, from years of being a non-driver and having a husband waiting in the car for me.  Now it's the only way I know how to shop.  

Aldi is my favorite place for good-quality, reasonably-priced produce.  I always get a three-pound bag of Fuji apples there:  They're smaller apples than most stores sell, a size we much prefer these days.  I usually get a head of cauliflower and some fresh broccoli, too, and some huge sweet peppers that would cost twice as much at any other store.  I always buy eggs there (large eggs at 59 cents a dozen, and Aldi "large" is equal to Walmart's "extra-large".  If we aren't going on to Costco, I get milk there too.    

We buy whole-bean coffee at Costco, and butter.  I hardly ever purchase more than five or six items, so you see there's no justifying the trip.  Yesterday, as I often do, I bought one of their rotisserie chickens, which are noticeably larger than the ones at Walmart.  For $4.99, we bring it home still warm, I throw a couple of potatoes in the microwave and open a can of green beans, and dinner is ready in 15 minutes.  We get at least three meals out of one of those chickens.  The first day I take a leg and thigh, Cliff takes some of the breast meat, and we feel like we're eating out, but at our own table.  Then I dice up the rest of the chicken and freeze two 2-cup amounts of chicken to use in recipes I use regularly, like this one:

This recipe also calls for chicken broth, as well as the diced chicken, but I have that taken care of:  About once every other month we get one of those chickens.  I save all the bones in a bag in the freezer, and when I have quite a few of them, I make broth.  That's what I did with part of my afternoon yesterday.  This morning I bagged up my broth and got seven bags, each holding 1 1/2 cups.  The above recipe isn't the only one I use that calls for chicken broth, so it will get used before too long.  Meanwhile, I keep all it in the deep freeze.  

Cliff accused me of extreme frugality while I was making the broth yesterday, but saving money is just a small part of why I do this:  I hate the canned broth in the stores; that stuff hardly even smells like chicken, and it doesn't "gel" up in cool temperatures, like my home-made stuff.  It's an insult to pay so much for an inferior product.  But look at this rich stuff from those Costco bones:

   

The broth in the measuring cup goes into our jambalaya today.  I'll cook a couple of sweet potatoes in the Instant Pot to have with it, and that will be dinner (lunch, to you city folks).  

And there you have it:  A woman doing a blog entry about her trip to the city to grocery shop.  Isn't this exciting?  

Peace!