Surprise!

As per usual, Lansing is hiding all of the cool stuff. There's a market we've driven by numerous times, but we never went in. From the outside it looks fairly small, and like a green house with a farmer's market attached. It looked interesting, but not like a place where we'd actually be able to shop for groceries on a regular basis. Well...we were wrong. Someone Anthony works with mentioned it so we decided to check it out last night. I was completely blown away, it totally made grocery shopping on a Friday night worthwhile. It was incredible.

I know a lot of people find fault with Whole Foods, but I'd kill to have one in this area. I'm lucky to have a mom who goes on a semi-regular basis and brings me things from there. It's hard to compete with the quality of their fish, and they charge MUCH less for certain products. Rip on them for their prices all you want, but when you go to buy Canola Mayonnaise, are you going to spend 3 dollars on their large jar or 4.50 for the small jar at a store up here? In this area, the only health food options are whatever Meijer happens to carry, which admittedly, is getting more numerous. Or the unbelievably over-priced things at the actual health food stores. It's a struggle to eat healthy balanced meals and not spend a ridiculously large amount of money.

Horrocks to the rescue! They're a gourmet market with incredibly good prices. Every two weeks I make up a menu and we shop for the two weeks of groceries. Typically, we spend about 125-150 dollars. That does include things like toothpaste, and paper towel, and litter for the rabbits and cats. But the majority of that is spent on food. Last night, we spent 44 dollars at Horrocks. Granted, that wasn't for everything, but we got all of our produce, some of our meats (we already had some in the freezer), dairy, and a few splurges. We got really incredible gourmet salami, and marinated feta with olives. Their prices are high on canned goods, so we went to Meijer for those. At Meijer we spent almost an equal amount on canned beans and tomatoes, whole grain pasta, a few frozen veggies, whole grain bread, rice, couscous and spices . Our new shopping plan is to stock up once a month at Save a Lot on all of our canned goods. They're significantly cheaper than Meijer, and the quality is comparable. We'll go to Meijer for the few things we can't get there, like whole grain bread and pasta, toiletries, litter, etc. And all of our fresh food we'll buy at Horrocks. I'm betting we can keep our bi-weekly grocery bill (including what we get at Save a Lot) under 100 dollars, and closer to 80.

Plus, I feel much better supporting a local, independent store as much as possible. As we left Horrocks and put our bags in the trunk of the car, we found a five dollar bill on the ground and no one around to claim it. Clearly a sign that buying healthy local food is the way to go.