A Lunch Lady Only Needs 23 Groceries Every Week - Stop Buying the Rest

📕 Get the full cookbook - The Lunch Lady's $3,600-a-Year Grocery Cut (175 recipes & tricks, scaled for 1, 2 or a family): www.dorislunchlady.com/ Twenty-three things, written on the back of an envelope in my purse. That list has hardly changed since 2019. It comes to around sixty dollars a week, and with a short monthly shelf of staples, it is every meal I eat. For my last twenty-three years as head cook, I planned a school kitchen a month at a time, starting from what was in the storeroom. Every item on my envelope pulls its weight, and most of them pull it three ways. In this video I go down the whole list, and for each one I tell you which suppers it lands in, how long it keeps and how to store it so nothing goes in the trash. On the envelope: bananas bought on a schedule, a bag of apples, whole carrots, a head of cabbage, potatoes, garlic, a head of romaine, the cheapest fruit of the week, frozen peas, a big can of tomatoes, two cans of beans, two cans of tuna, a half gallon of milk, a block of cheddar, a tub of plain yogurt, butter, one loaf of bread, a dozen eggs, cottage cheese, one pound of ground beef, bone-in chicken legs, bacon ends and pieces, and at number one, the thing I chopped by the sackful every school morning for thirty-five years. I am Mrs. Doris. A school kitchen in Scioto County, Ohio, on a dollar and five cents a tray. Prices are U.S. averages from August 2026 and store prices I saw in the fall of 2026. They change by store and by season, so check the shelf tag where you shop. Safety notes from the video: raw ground beef keeps only a day or two in the refrigerator, so cook it the day after you buy it and freeze what you will not eat soon. Cooked chicken keeps three to four days, so freeze the leftovers for soup later in the week. Keep saved bacon fat covered in the refrigerator. And if mold shows up on a hard cheese like cheddar, cut away at least an inch around and below the spot. Which one thing on your list do you buy every single week, no matter what? Tell me below. #grocerylist #frugalliving #over60