This is Vanese Ferguson with Coffee Talk. I was at the grocery store this week and it has been some time since I bought anything in store bakery in terms of sweets because I am not going to pay those prices. It was $9.99 for a box of cookies. I think there was a dozen but frankly that’s still not enough cookies for me to be able to justify the expense. The latest Food Price Report projects an average family of four will pay an estimated $995.00 more for food in 2026. I just keep thinking – are the inputs really that much more expensive to justify those kinds of prices? And then I think back about a month ago when I was shopping for chocolate chips. I was in a flurry of baking to use up a ginormous zucchini gifted to me by a co-worker. I haven’t baked using chocolate chips in quite some time so the fact that they were over six bucks – pretty much anywhere you go – definitely caught me off guard. I don’t want to leave the zucchini just frozen because it will end up at the bottom of one of my freezers and that will be the end of that. I despise food waste. I’m a hardcore figure out what to do with the leftover’s person. I’m also a stock up when it’s on sale – person.  But I recognize I’m very fortunate with just two of us and I have two freezers and when my husband asks what I’d like to have for supper, I tell him to go shopping in the basement. In other words, go take a gander in those overstuffed freezers full of every kind of food. The problem in this age of purchasing deli chickens and precut vegetables and premade salads, you can get stuck in a rut of not investing the time buy grocery staples when they are on sale, to plan a meal, take the items out of the freezer in advance and then cook it. I know families are busy, many with activities be it hockey, soccer, dance…but maybe another great activity could be cooking together.