I went grocery shopping over the weekend and sticker shock got me. Grapes used to be 79 cents a pound, and they were now $2.49 a pound. Shrimp was often $5.99 a pound, but those little crustaceans were now $8.99 a pound.

Our mom somehow made sure her seven children had cereal, lunch and dinner every day, and we weren’t rich. My sisters and I reminisce often about the things she did we resented as kids but appreciate as adults.

She usually went to the grocery store without us because kids are needy in the grocery store. Mom learned early that a trip without kids was a lot cheaper, so she’d stop at Winn-Dixie after working all day.

Her Saturdays were spent shopping for the week, but we usually went with her. We’d start out at Globe, a discount store similar to Wal-Mart, where we’d get what we absolutely had to have for clothes or shoes.

Then it was a trip to the day-old bakery store. We liked going there because there were usually doughnuts or some type of pastries on sale, and she’d let us pick those out.

The last stop with all of us was to the meat market, a place we hated. It was a bare-bones butcher shop where the prices were good and the meat cuts were usually the tougher ones.

But Mom was a good cook and we never complained about the roasts she made every Sunday for after-church dinner. She had a way to make them tender and we never thought we were eating on a shoestring.

Every day, I grow more in awe of how my mom managed to feed and take care of seven kids while working full time. None of us felt neglected and we were never hungry.

So during these inflationary times, I thought about the ways I learned to economize from her. Some lessons I mastered. Some I have not.

My grandmother taught me how to cut up a chicken, a skill I’m thankful to have. While looking in the meat section this weekend, four chicken thigh-and-leg sections were $9.50. A whole chicken was $6.

Now I’m a little rusty when it comes to slicing up that chicken, despite watching Gordon Ramsey do it before I hauled out the knives. The cuts aren’t clean, but you can tell which one’s is a leg and which one’s is a wing, so that’s a success.

I also learned how to make spaghetti sauce from scratch. For less than $10, I can make a big pot of spaghetti sauce that’ll feed all of my grandchildren a couple of times.

Cajun cooks know a pot of red beans and rice costs less than $10 and can feed a crowd for days. Some of us Cajun girls, however, never learned how to make red beans and rice, so it’s leftover spaghetti for us.

Teenage girls like clothes, and I didn’t have the money to buy what was in style when I was a teenager. So my Grandma Marguerite taught me how to sew. Back then a McCall’s pattern was 75 cents. I looked at patterns at the local fabric store and was flabbergasted to see patterns are now $20 to $15 and that’s a digital pattern, not even printed on tissue paper.

Fabric is $13 a yard, and that’s just basic, plain cotton fabric. A dress usually requires three yards of fabric, plus thread, zippers and buttons and we’re now up to over $60 for a dress.

I can bargain shop at the resale shops for less than that.

I have rationalized how to save money. If I don’t dust, I don’t have to buy Pledge. A bottle of Dawn dishwashing liquid replaces almost all of the cleaning products in my cabinet, and, as my Aunt Domina used to say, elbow grease doesn’t cost a dime.

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.