Guest blogger: Henry tells us how to cook on the cheap.
Posted on March 24th, 2009 – 1:05 PMBy Kara McGuire
I love when readers shoot me emails with great tips. Some even write articles on topics that they’re passionate about. Like Henry, who lives in Woodbury and works for Northwest Airlines. “I enjoy cooking and finding creative and inexpensive ways to spice up everyday dishes. And when that fails, I open a bottle of wine and it makes it all good.”
Here is his tip for saving money on preparing meals. I hope you’ll share your own tricks too.
Every day it seems like the stock market is heading in the wrong direction. I even stopped looking at my 401K because it only mockingly informs me that retirement is getting further and further away. And like most families, I too am cutting back on as many expenses as I can, and one way I found is to look within my kitchen cupboard to lower my food bill.
The previous night I had made an entire ham. Although it was a great meal as well as an economical lunch the next day, I was not sure that I could take having ham one more time without repackaging it into something a little different. But what could I possibly do with it?
I decided to see what the Internet had to offer, so I Googled “leftover ham” and in .24 seconds I had 283,000 results at my finger tips. I scanned through the results taking into consideration what ingredients I had in my kitchen as well as what would be simple to make.
Since then I have used Google several times to piece together a meal with ingredients that I already had in my kitchen. Sometimes I have to venture to the store to pick up a few things. Sometimes the meals are good and sometimes they are not so good, but in either case it saves a little money and gets my culinary juices flowing. By simply searching for ingredients that I had in my cupboard, I have been able to prepare inexpensive dinner alternatives.
No more do I open the cupboard and stare into the abyss of cans, boxes, and jars wondering what I can make for a meal. Now I let Google help me plan mealtime.
4 Responses to "Guest blogger: Henry tells us how to cook on the cheap."
For my daughter’s 5th birthday in February, I was out of work and we’d already committed to Chuck E Cheese, so I had to cut other costs where I could. She wanted a Little Mermaid cake and I couldn’t find one at the stores even if I wanted to buy one. So I googled for ideas and found some that I adapted - I used an Ariel barbie doll in the middle of a tiered layer cake. I made my own buttercream frosting from a recipe on allrecipes.com. It was so much better than the cheap sugary frosting at most bakeries! We ended up making two cakes for her (one for the actual birth DAY, and one for the day of her party) simply because we could. And she was just thrilled.
Before our weekly grocery shopping trip, we clip coupons and take inventory of what we have, what we need and what we want. Then, we plan out a menu for the coming week.
These few simple steps help in many ways. We’re not wasting the groceries we buy. We buy only what we need (or what can be frozen and used later). We avoid extra trips to the store. And we limit the number of dine-out or take-out nights. Depending on what food we make in a given week, how often my wife or I have evening obligations or lunch meetings, we will also plan specific dinners to be “leftovers night.”
A little planning goes a long way.
I love this topic! My 2008 new year’s resolution was to try to eat good quality foods (organic, hormone free meat, etc) and reduce my grocery bill. I invested in two cookbooks that were amazingly helpful: Don’t Panic, Dinner’s In the Freezer & Trim and Terrific Freezer Friendly Meals. Check them out at your library!
The first taught me how to shop grocery store sale ads to determine what big ticket item (usually the meat) was on sale, then find a recipe to use that item and prepare it in bulk. Freezing individual portions (or dinner for two portions in our case) allows you to eat the meals over time.
I turned Saturdays into meal prep day and would do the grocery shopping and make 2 of the recipes, which typically produced 6 to 8 meals. Over time we had built up quite the arsenol of meals in the freezer. I maintained a grocery bill of less than $100 per week throughout the process (2 of us). Some weeks it was down to $40.00 because all the meals were already at home.
I haven’t been as diligent lately about freezing prepared meals, but I have learned the lesson about planning meals for the week (just as CSE writes) and making one grocery trip. Having the right food in the house limits the temptations as well. (”Honey, I have to make this pork roast tonight or it will go bad.”)
They have a specific “ingredient search” where you can type in things you want and things you don’t want (or that you’re out of). Next comes up a list of all the recipes on file that have those ingredients. I find it less cumbersome and more specific than google because I can also look at what else I have that I need to use up.
