This looks like an interesting series to follow re: food cost, shopping & planning:

The Slate.com food blogger asks the question "How much should I spend per week for food for my family?"  She starts out with a discussion of the higher cost of nutitious foods and graph of USDA and nutitionist estimates of weekly spending (hint--not the same).  She then sets up an experiment and requests for some audience-participation: 

The challenge for this week is to see how little I can spend on food and still fulfill my dietary requirements (I'm not allowed to subsist simply on rice or oats for a week). How low can I go? This likely means no organic foods, no convenience foods, no Starbucks, no sugar or coffee unless it's already in the house. It means buying groceries and eating foods from home only.
I'll blog about how the week is going, so be sure to check in periodically to see how looking at eating through the lens of cost changes my perceptions, awareness, and especially expenditures and to offer me advice on the dilemmas I face.
Also, let me know your thoughts on money and food. If you are comfortable sharing, tell me where you live (generally), how many people you buy food for, and what you spend each week. How much would you like to spend? Can you afford everything you want? Are there foods you want but don't buy? Are there foods you buy but wish you didn't?

There is already some feed-back in the comments, including some folks who are certainly spending less than I am and touting the infamous 'planning ahead' (and sounding a little smug--or maybe it's just me).  Thought this might be something the Sistren might find interesting to follow or participate in.

I have to say--making two large meals out of my shopping trip last week worked out rather well (although I have been to the grocery store since due to 1) bad planning/not paying attention, 2) the little dinner party we had last night).  But anyway, Wednesday night I made the stir fry and the pasta dish, and we'll have two meals out of both (still have the pasta leftovers).  This weekend I made a huge pot of rotisserie chicken soup, and we have left-over quiche from last night, so I'm set for probably at least 4 meals of non-frozen left-overs (and may still end up having to freeze some of the soup--still have the ham and bean soup in the freezer that I made after Christmas too).  One thing is clear--if I'm going to continue to focus on creating large amounts of left-overs AND stocking up on a lot of produce, it would behoove us to have an extra freezer...right now my freezer has three containers of Edy's light ice cream in my favorite holiday flavors (and if I had an extra freezer now, I'd buy more before they go out of stock, b/c I could eat the pumpkin flavor year round), two frozen thin-crust pizzas, some frozen fish fillets, two packages of ground turkey for the chili and/or meatballs that I just didn't get around to...nor need to have...last week, lots of frozen veggies, some Lean Cuisines for my or Himself's lunches, Nutri-grain Eggo waffles (our Sunday staple), and what looks like two or three (at least) containers of left-overs.  Honestly, there is no room for ANYTHING else, let alone another Tupperware, so we may end up having to eat the soup until it's gone--at which point we'll be pretty sick of it.  There's actually an outlet for an extra fridge or freezer in our basement storage room, and although I'll have to move things around to make room, I think a small-size extra freezer may be in order.  Now I'm kicking myself for not getting one at the end of this summer when everyone had them out on sale, and we actually talked about it.