Food Hacks to Stretch Your Shopping Trip
This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Safeway. All opinions are 100% mine.
During these unprecedented times, it’s not ideal to be heading to the grocery store multiple times a week for dinner ingredients. That’s why implementing food and recipe “hacks” to help stretch your budget and extend your shopping trip during these times can be so important. Before you shopping trip, if you can make a list of the ingredients you’ll need by picking out a few staple items and planning your weekly dinner menu around them, it can help out a great deal. If you do just a bit of prep and planning before heading to the grocery store, it can actually help save you quite a lot of time and money. Just think to yourself, how can I make the most out of the items I’m purchasing? What food items do I love that can be used in multiple of our favorite family meals? Think of recipes that can stretch your favorite items to be used for several meals with simple ingredient swaps.
I headed to our local Safeway and picked up some of their Signature SELECT™, Signature Farms®, and Signature Cafe® items to help us accomplish our planned out week of meals to help us trim our store runs and budget. They offer a wide variety of products at a value. Signature Brands(Signature SELECT, Signature Farms, Signature Cafe) provides high-quality products for every meal and occasion, available at a value in the Denver area exclusively at Safeway stores. Like I said, I shopped at Safeway, but you can also find these products at the Albertsons Companies family of stores, including Albertsons, Safeway, ACME Markets, Jewel-Osco, Vons, Randalls, Shaw’s Supermarket, Star Market, Tom Thumb and Vons.
The main foods we got that would help us create several meals with simple ingredient swaps were a warm rotisserie chicken, a loaf of fresh french bread, a side of mashed potatoes, garden salad mix and pesto sauce. Using these as the main ingredients, we made four delicious dinner meals and one appetizer that is our absolute favorite.
The first meal we made started out with tomato salad and french bread. Tomato salad is one our our favorite appetizers, especially during the summer months when we grow tomatoes in the garden. Tomato salad is simple, it’s just olive oil and chopped garlic microwaved for a few minutes and then you add in fresh chopped up tomatoes. Simple and delicious, especially when you have fresh french bread to dip in the salad.
For the main course this night we had a plated meal of rotisserie chicken, garden salad and a side of mashed potatoes. All three of these food items are Signature Brands and they were all delicious! This was one of the quickest and easiest meals to prepare. There was more than enough for the whole family and enough leftovers to create all of the meals you’ll see featured in this post.
With the leftover chicken and french bread we made panini sandwiches. We also used the Signature SELECT pesto sauce, I am extremely picky about pesto and was shocked at how delicious this was! We’ve even eaten pesto in Cinque Terre, Italy (where pesto was created), so that’s saying a lot. If you want to make one of these paninis, it’s just french bread, chicken, pesto, spinach, tomato and mozzarella cheese.
For lunch the following day I had a huge bowl of salad. Using the Signature Farms garden salad as the base, I simply added sliced cherry tomatoes, slices cucumber, spinach and chicken. For the dressing I mixed together avocado mayonnaise and a bbq sauce! You could also top this with some avocado if you have some.
Believe it or not we still had a ton of chicken from the Signature Cafe rotisserie chicken! So of course we decided to make some chicken salad for the whole family to enjoy! Simply tare apart the rest of the remaining chicken that you still have left after all of those meals, mix in sliced celery, walnuts, sliced grapes, dried cranberries and mixed with avocado mayo. This meal is super flexible, so throw in extra ingredients that would be delicious if you’d like.
Moving forward I’m going to try and get creative and always brainstorm ways to stretch our shopping trips. I absolutely loved implementing this hack. I feel like it saved us money, saved us extra unnecessary grocery trips and the thing I loved most is I felt like we wasted less food. Everything got utilized but because each recipe was different we didn’t get sick of the same meal each day. Most of these meals had chicken in them, but because they were each such different meals it didn’t feel monotonous.
I’d absolutely suggest trying this out with your next shopping trip. It takes a bit of planning and creativity, but it’s absolutely worth it! Please comment below and share more ideas on how you’re stretching your shopping trip and how your favorite foods can be used in several meals.
This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Safeway. All opinions are 100% mine.
