Frugal Food
My boyfriend and I don’t eat cheaply. We believe in tasty food and we eat out far too often. We do cook dinner in about four nights a week but it can cost as much as eating out. After some discussion, we discovered that the real problem was that we weren’t planning ahead. Some nights we ate out because we were too tired to decide what to cook. Or we decided at the last minute and made an extra trip to the grocery store while we were hungry to get a missing ingredient.
There’s something about the grocery store that makes every trip cost at least $30. Even if you just go in for milk, somehow you come out with bread, cheese, an avocado and three pounds of bacon. Or if you’re hungry a bag of candy, three bags of chips, a box of frozen appetizers and a roll of refrigerated cookie dough.
But we don’t always know if we’ll be in the mood for a particular meal, so we’ve resisted doing any real meal planning. So this week we made a list of possible meals but left off the day. One shopping trip gets all the ingredients so no extra trips or random ingredients that go bad because we don’t get around to them. And each night we’ll pick from the list which gives us options but not too many options. Too many options when we’re tired and hungry is how we end up at the local brewpub.
And with a list of common dinners, I can start to plan ahead and shop sales. We’ve already been buying frozen boneless skinless chicken breasts in bulk from BJs, but I discovered they go on sale (fresh) at the grocery store for 30-40 cents less per pound. That’s worth buying some quartsize freezer bags and freezing them myself.
After a few weeks of this, we should know which types of dinners we enjoy and actually have time to make. Then I can stock up on common ingredients when they go on sale. I do stock up on sale items, but it often means I have a cupbord full of jello in the winter (jello is summer food around here).
November 12th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
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