Saving 101: Cooking at Home Saves Money

Peruse FoodNetwork.com for a few minutes and you'll understand what I mean by the title above. I'm not aiming for blanket statements here, but just mere minutes of browsing through  the Quick and Easy Recipes section netted an article titled 100 + Italian Recipes, with everything from Italian Hummus to Italian Shaved Ice.

Cooking at home often garners two responses: A) Grocery shopping for fresh ingredients to cook with is expensive and B) I don't have the time. Pshaw. Folks, I understand that the daily grind of work, kids, bills, and so on makes cooking at the end of a long day about as appealing as filling cavities with super glue, and I'm certain that most of us are unable to grocery shop without either buying too much or staring at aisles without a clue as to what entails building a meal.

I've compiled a few tips over the past few months, mostly from my own experiences and a little reading here and there, that should at least give you a fighting chance at saving money by cooking at home. It's not the end all be all, nor do I consider myself a shopping guru, but it's a fresh start that could help you cut grocery costs each month.

• Produce is not your enemy. There tends to be a strange stigma surrounding fresh goods that implies expensive and wasteful when in actuality, aiming for sale items in the produce section can produce several small meals/snacks at a reasonable cost.Veggie dips, stir fry, mixed salads, etc. are a great way to eat healthy and stretch your meals out over a period of several days. Buy the sale veggies versus the ready-made salads and frozen mixed veggies.
• Boxed food is not necessarily cheaper. A rice pilaf in a box with seasonings that costs somewhere between $2-$3 nets a single meal, maybe two at max. Buying your base ingredients is a better option. A single bag of brown or long-grain rice, green pepper, an onion and some type of all-seasoning can net multiple, fresh meals that boxed food can't compete with. 
• Focus on core ingredients that provide a solid base of important nutrients. I suggest grains, pasta, fresh green veggies, eggs (use just the whites in a scramble if you want to cut saturated fat), lean meats and so on. Mix and match to create simple meals.
• Snacks are your best friend. Everything from fresh veggie salads to yogurt and granola to whole, unsalted almonds are a great way to bridge the gap between meals and keep your meal portions small and affordable.
• Shop weekly. The tendency is to buy in bulk for the month or multiple weeks which forces you to buy canned, boxed and frozen. Granted it's an extra trip each week to the store, but it's far easier to plan each meal for one week at a time and focus on finding core ingredients on sale than to buy for an entire month.

Obviously these are but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to advice on saving money by cooking at home. I'm a relatively simple cook, so I tend to focus on the core items that I know mix well together and can provide multiple meals. I've also found that shopping weekly prevents the inevitable waste of buying food in bulk that often goes bad or sits in pantry land before the next round of shopping. Weekly shopping challenges you to be extremely precise in what you are buying, so give it a shot and let me know your thoughts.

Comments

[dliang]

Cooking ROCKS!