I wrote this post a while back: http://iamelgringo.blogspot.com/2008/12/hacking-your-food-supply-perennial.html http://iamelgringo.blogspot.com/2008/12/hacking

I wrote this post a while back: http://iamelgringo.blogspot.com/2008/12/hacking-your-food-supply-perennial.html http://iamelgringo.blogspot.com/2008/12/hacking-your-food-su... I think that's one of the posts you were referring to. We haven't done once a month cooking for a while, though. We've actually outsourced a lot of our meal prep to Dream Dinners now. Link: http://www.dreamdinners.com/main.php?static=index http://www.dreamdinners.com/main.php?static=index You can either go there and prep the meals in a two hour period, or for an extra $20, they will actually prep the food for you. It's not really grad school budget, but we figure it saves us around 40-60 hours a month of cooking prep time. So, to us, the extra time is worth the expense. That takes care of our main courses and every weekend, we go to the local farmer's market, and get our produce for the week. We also stop by the local deli, and pick up some fresh bread. And, we recently discovered Trader Joe's wine selection. They have a bunch of wines for less than $10. A lot of them are undrinkable, but we've found a couple of $4 bottles of wine that we love, and we tend to buy several cases of them at the same time. That helps us keep the Mediterranean diet going. For a long time, we also went to Costco or Sam's club. We'd buy a whole bunch of food in bulk and then wrap it up into smaller portions and save it. I hate grocery shopping, and it really helped to only have to do it once every couple of months. The $200 mini freezer also helped a lot. It's move from Chicago, to New England, to the Bay Area with us. We love it. We also love SafeWay's grocery delivery. It's $10, or $8 if your order is over $100. It really helps cut down on spending time dealing with buying groceries. They keep track of the products that you buy and like, and it's really easy to reorder stuff. The prices are exactly the same as in store, too, so you're not paying hidden fees. I don't know why more people don't do that. We've been trying http://Alice.com http://Alice.com, too for non-grocery items. It's a pain to tell them what you purchase up front, but over all, after the initial hour of setting up the account and preferences, it makes recurring purchases of TP, deodorant, toothpaste, etc.. a cinch.