Iron Chef Mom Challenge

Meredith, over at Like Merchant Ships, emailed me to tell me how much she has enjoyed my new blog. For her though, Aldi Supermarket is a bit of a hike and she believes that she can do just as well by buying the loss leaders at her local grocery stores and planning her menu around the sale options. She decided to offer up a friendly challenge and see who could save the most money, an Aldi Shopper or a Sales Shopper. I told her I was up for the challenge and am excited to see how well we both can do.

The game will begin this Monday and I will be posting my meals each day, but include a daily total for the day versus the weekly totals that I normally do. I will also include some tips for shopping on that particular day, as part of the challenge. Meredith will also be doing the same thing on her blog and I will include a link to her entry too.

Here are the rules of the game:

I will purchase everything from Aldi Supermarket.

Meredith will be doing a freestyle menu with no coupons and only using the grocery sales current from that week. She will not be using any items from her stockpile, only items purchased that week.

A daily breakdown will be given each day. The breakdown will include the menu, recipe, and cost breakdown.

The menu will serve four people. In larger recipes, we will be adjusting the cost to estimate a four person meal, or split the cost if one meal actually will be used in two different ways.

The menu will include a main dish and sides. Desserts and drinks will not be included in this challenge.

Staple ingredients under a ½ cup are “negligible,” for example in the case of flour, sugar, salt or pepper. Otherwise, these will be figured in as price per ounce and multiplied by the number of ounces used.

There will be a wrap-up at the end of the week and you, as readers, can feel free to critique our strategies, or offer up some of your own strategies.

Just for the record, I do want to say that this is just a fun and friendly competition. The idea behind it is not to see who will do better than the other, but more to share techniques for two different ways to shop. Both of these options do not require any coupon cutting and will show you ways that you can plan affordable meals for your family using two other types of techniques.

We are both very excited to be doing this contest and our families are excited to be eating so well this week.

Thanks to Meredith for posing such a great challenge! I hope that it will be as much fun for you as it is for us!