While shopping for the groceries featured in our cover story on 10, I realized something: I'm a lousy grocery shopper. Or, put another way, I'm the grocery stores' dream customer.

For one thing, I'm very attached to certain brand names: My bologna does have a first name.

For another, I rarely think in terms of cost, not because I'm a spendthrift, but because I also weigh the amount of time involved in checking prices versus the money I'd save. Doing this article was a revelation: My time turns out not to be so valuable after all.

Take the pine nuts in the recipe on 12, as a case in point. I walked into the grocery store and there was, coincidentally, a display right in front of me with bags of pine nuts. I had to slap my own hand to keep the old me from reaching for them - the easy, quick, expensive option - instead of pricing them in the bulk bins. I didn't even know you could get pine nuts in the bulk bins until I walked my body over there.

The old me would have avoided the bins anyway, because of that dreaded disease, bin-a-phobia, in which you fear spilling nuts - or flour or oatmeal - all over the floor.

Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about. First you have to wrestle with the plastic bag, then you have to stop the chute at just the right moment. Otherwise you end up with six times what you wanted or with stuff spilled all over the floor. Then there's finding the twistie things, writing down the price - it all seems like a lot of work. Until you get to the checkout counter and find out that the pine nuts cost $1.11 as opposed to $4 or $5 for a package. So, maybe it's not so bad to make an idiot out of yourself.

When it came to shopping for the cheese for the recipe, I had to be bold and ask the deli counter staff for 1 ounce, which is a very small amount of cheese. I knew cheese was expensive, generally speaking, but I didn't realize how savvy you have to be.

Take Parmesan cheese. It's located in about five different areas of the store, so you could spend the day pricing it. The old me: Buy something expensive because the cheese counter is prominent in the store. The new me: Walk around for a few minutes more and check the price. The biggest surprise is that Kraft now makes a combination of Parmesan cheese and the trendy Grana Padano in a package. Who knew?

Last week I wrote about some of my other grocery shopping habits, like buying a super-size package of meat because it's the right price, and then freezing it, only to turn it up some years later at the back of the freezer. I got this helpful hint from Mary Morris of Park Hill that I'd like to pass along. She keeps a 9-by-12-inch wet-erase board on top of her chest freezer.

"Any time I add something to the freezer," she writes, "I write it on the board, with the date. When I take something out, I cross it off . . . When I plan my menu, I look at the board to see what is oldest."

It's a good, simple idea that takes a minimum of fuss and avoids the ice-crystal-coated mystery meat.

If you have practical secrets for saving money at the grocery, we'd like to hear them. E-mail me at meitusm@RockyMountainNews.com and we'll share them with other readers.