Our Grocery Budget

BACKGROUND
My wife and I had a good discussion last evening about our grocery budget. We do our best to budget all of our spending with some of it actually controlled with cash in envelopes. However, my wife says that we buy things we don't need that aren't in our budget. I agree. It seems we eat out alot more than we can afford. Which kinda sucks considering we can't afford a budget category for eating out. I probably share a larger portion of the blame for blowing the grocery/dining budget but we both at times buy grub out. Sometime it's a necessity b/c we're hungry and not at home. Often though it is not a necessity and we agree that better planning would help us stick closer to our budget.
We budget about $280/month; $70/week for groceries. It is very difficult to manage such a tight budget but my wife does a fantastic job. She invests alot of energy into planning our evening meals and buying ingredients for those meals a week in advance. She also does this so she only has to make one trip to the grocery store (usually just one store) each week. Now, if our pantry was a warehouse of parts for a thingy Wifey would get an A+ for keeping her inventory low. However, buying groceries on a such a short cycle is more costly because we are forced to pay full price for some items we need that probably aren't on sale.

THE BEEF
This weakness in our sytem was exposed this week when we sat down to what seemed to me was a pretty meager meal: a tossed salad and a "cheddar wurst" hotdog-type-thingy on bread. The reason for the meagerness was, "it was all we had". If this was truly all we had then either groceries have gotten super expensive or we need to do a better job of buying.

A PROPOSAL
It seemed to me that buying groceries on this weekly cycle may not be the best way to stretch our food dollars. Primarily b/c of the amount energy it takes to plan meals, then the grocery list and then spend (what sometimes is) too much $$ on the items we need.

• What if we could try to plan a little further ahead (say 2-4 weeks) by keeping our pantry and freezer stocked with items we typically use but that were purchased when they were on sale?
• What if, everytime we (I say we here but Wifey is the one who does the work) prepare a fresh meal we prepare twice as much as we need and freeze or refrigerate half of it? This way we get two meals out of the same amount of preparation time and are able to buy larger quantities/packages of required ingredients. These meals can then be relied upon for busy or lazy days; days we might be tempted to blow our budget and eat out.

THE KICKER
The kicker for us is we don't have enough freezer space. We are max'd out now with our fridge freezer and smallish chest freezer. I think we are in agreement that we need another freezer; probably an upright.

What do you think?