Friggin Groceries
Sunday, June 27th, 2010I like systems. They make things easy. But food (grocery shopping, cooking, augh) typically defies systems, partially because the human appetite demands variety. Ideally I’d like to have a master inventory list of items that I always have in stock, and I’d like to have a fairly predictable rotation of things I can cook with those items that will use them all up before they spoil. Therefore, I avoid recipes calling for items that I couldn’t use in other recipes, or wouldn’t want to eat often. This usually means I just avoid recipes and put some cereal in a bowl and garnish it with some milk and call it dinner.
In an effort to make grocery shopping bearable, I’ve made a Google spreadsheet to keep track of things, because any task that requires filtering and sorting in a spreadsheet is pretty cool. One tab is the master inventory sorted by where the item is kept in the kitchen so I can easily run down the list and visualize if I still have any of that item left or not. (The drawback to this is that it’s highly dependent on memory if I’m not standing in the kitchen at the time, which I’d rather not trust. But, it might be most efficient.) There’s a column to record whether or not I need that item, the section it’s located in at the store, and which store I buy it at.
Then I have a tab for each store which only lists items that a) I need to buy and b) I buy at that store. So it’s an automatic shopping list, and it’s sorted by where it is in that store (so I grab all the cheeses at once, all the pastas, etc.). And I can just bookmark the spreadsheet on my phone so I can access it at the store.
That said, today is grocery shopping day, and this is how I’m procrastinating. Maybe I’ll go to Target instead first.