Planning for dinners requires a bit more thought, because while I’m perfectly fine with eating sandwiches or the like for lunch every single day, I crave a bit more variety with my evening meal. Since I always cook heaps more than two servings worth, and since I'm sure I'll have leftover remnants of various ingredients near the end of the week, I estimate that I should be able to get away with planning for a mere five entrees this week. I come up with the following tentative menu: garlicky spinach rice, Mediterranean veggie stew with garlic bread, steamed scallion chicken with rice, fried rice with zucchini and peas, and my old stand-by, roasted bell pepper sauce over pasta. 

With shopping list in hand, it’s time now to make that trip to the supermarket.

The shopping cart …
At the supermarket, we do an admirable job of sticking to our list. Eating that wilted salad – blah as it may have been to the tastebuds – was decidedly a good call, since we possess the unfortunate inability to exercise any sort of self-control in the grocery store when buying on empty stomachs (ooo – ice cream sandwiches – we need those! Fig Newtons … sure, those too! Peanut M&Ms; of course, they’re on sale!) Still, I’m no slave to lists, and when I see that there are some good sales going on – canned tuna at 3 for $1, canned chickpeas at 2/$0.59, Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice (the yummy, not-from-concentrate sort) at 2 for the price of one – I toss those items in the cart, even though they weren’t on the list. I'm also replenishing our supply of rice, flour and sugar -- due to the horrifying discovery several weeks ago that our supplies of those items had been infested by nasty little beetles, we are currently completely without any of those essentials. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that we also buy 3 cans of Wolfgang Puck brand canned soup; it’s on sale and for some reason, I find I’m suddenly craving the immediate satisfaction of heat-and-serve chicken and rice soup, to be enjoyed as soon as we return home from our little shopping expedition.