March 28, 2019

How I Determine the Amounts of Chicken, Fish, and Goat Meat for my Grocery List

Picture Credit: Red Acacia Lagos

The Basics:

Chicken: I favor the size XL or L as sold by Chi Shoppe. This is not to say I buy my chicken only from Chi Shoppe. This is just to give you an idea of the chicken size I buy since I don’t really take note of the weight marking. It's a see, feel, buy sort of thing. That’s the size I would eyeball and get at any shop I go to.

 

I cut one chicken up into 12 pieces.

 

Fish: We buy Titus fish by the Kg. I favor the bigger fishes. These usually add up to about 2 ½ fishes in a Kilogram (kg). I cut these up to 3 pieces (minus the head). We reserve the heads to include in our dogs’ feed. So, from a kilo, I’d probably get like 7 pieces of fish.

 

Goat Meat: We buy boneless Goat Meat from Oasis Supermarket in Ikeja. In a pack, they usually have about 49 to 50 pieces. TBH, I would prefer to just butcher a goat every once in a while, – It would be cheaper and you get more meat variety, and the freshness..Aaaaahhhhhhh.

 

But the work that goes with that is too much for my everyday schedule. So that’s reserved for Christmas time and when there’s less pressure on my time.

The Week’s Needs in a spreadsheet

There are 6 adults in the home represented by the letters J, D, N, C, B, and G. Then there’s VS, which stands for Visitors- We host every Sunday.

 

The spreadsheet is pretty straightforward – the figures represent requirements from a “pieces” perspective, with the resulting total weekly requirements at the bottom of each analysis.

Note: I used Excel Spreadsheet to create the spreadsheet, and included a number of calculations in the spreadsheet to easily and automatically calculate the amounts. You can use any spreadsheet of your choice or do your calculations manually. You'd still get your result - only this way is much quicker.

 

Chicken Requirements:

Chicken Weekly Spread

Fig 1: Chicken weekly spread

 

Goat Meat Requirements

Fig 2: Goat Meat Weekly Spread

 

Fish Requirements

Fig 3: Fish Weekly Spread

 

Weekly Grocery Needs for Chicken, Goat Meat, Fish

From this analysis, I was able to determine the weekly grocery needs as follows:

Fig 4: Weekly Needs for Chicken, Goat Meat, and Fish

 

For each household, the approach to determining the weekly requirements will mostly follow the same pattern. The differences would come from the number of individuals in the home, how you cut up your chicken/fish/meat, how many appearances the item makes on your meal plan, and how many pieces each individual takes.

 

Tell me, is this the general approach you use? If not, what works for you? Please do share in the comment section.