the
immediate
sticker price of food as well.
Here are ten steps toward reducing the overall cost of food in your life without reducing the taste of it:
Learn to cook for yourself. Many people—my sister-in-law, Vicky, included—argue that cooking meals from scratch is too challenging and takes too much time when compared to other convenient food options. In truth, most food options you prepare yourself are actually surprisingly fast—often faster than the time one spends waiting at a restaurant. In terms of skill, yes, it does take some time to learn how to cook properly. The best way to learn, though, is not to start off tackling coq au vin or something else that’s difficult and time consuming. Start with scrambled eggs or chili—dishes that are very simple to prepare in their basic form. Pick up a cookbook that teaches technique along with the recipes—Mark Bittman’s
How to CookEverything
and Irma Rombauer’s
Joy of Cooking
are two great options for this. With even a little practice, you’ll find that making a meal for yourself at home isn’t all that time-consuming—and, quite often, the flavors are such that you’ll never want to return to convenience foods.
Prepare a meal plan and a grocery list each week. At our home, Saturday morning usually finds one of us making a list of the meals we intend to eat over the next week, digging through the cupboards to make sure we have all the ingredients, and then making a list of those items we don’t have. This simple process takes about twenty minutes and usually results in a surprisingly short grocery list. At the grocery store, we earn those twenty minutes back by shopping for much less time—instead of wandering from aisle to aisle trying to decide what to get, we just follow that short list. The money we save by avoiding tons of impulse buys is substantial and, in the end, it doesn’t take us any extra time.
Use a simple price list strategy to figure out which store to shop at. One common technique for minimizing grocery costs is the price list. First popularized by Amy Dacyczyn in her
Tightwad Gazette
newsletter, a price list is merely a listing of the cost of most of your commonly-purchased items at several different stores. So, for example, you might have a gallon of milk in your price book—next to it, you’d find the price of that gallon at several different stores. This way, you could use that price book to plan which store (orstores) to shop at for groceries that week, minimizing your cost.
Today, with stores constantly shifting food prices and the selection seemingly changing on a daily basis, a price book doesn’t work as well. Instead, I’ve substituted what I call a “price list”—a much simpler method of doing the same thing.
For a few weeks out of each year, I’ll shop at several different local grocery stores. At each store, I’ll get the price of the 25 items I buy most frequently—bread, milk, eggs, lettuce, and so on. I just do this as part of my weekly shopping trip. After visiting several stores, I go home and add up the cost of the 25 items from each store, giving myself a total cost of buying all those items from each of the local stores. Whichever store has the cheapest total wins my business for the next year or so.
This simple method helps me to always dig out what the least-expensive store in the area is. Because I update the list annually, I can also keep track of changes in pricing policies of different stores and also identify whether or not a new store is worth shopping at. Doing this once a year saves me about $15 a week in groceries, according to my figures.
Use the weekly fliers. Many grocery store chains distribute fliers in local newspapers and on their websites describing the special deals the store is offering this week. Use these fliers to your advantage. Each week, as you begin to plan your meals,download the flier from your store of choice and use the discounted fresh items—meats and
immediate
sticker price of food as well.
Here are ten steps toward reducing the overall cost of food in your life without reducing the taste of it:
Learn to cook for yourself. Many people—my sister-in-law, Vicky, included—argue that cooking meals from scratch is too challenging and takes too much time when compared to other convenient food options. In truth, most food options you prepare yourself are actually surprisingly fast—often faster than the time one spends waiting at a restaurant. In terms of skill, yes, it does take some time to learn how to cook properly. The best way to learn, though, is not to start off tackling coq au vin or something else that’s difficult and time consuming. Start with scrambled eggs or chili—dishes that are very simple to prepare in their basic form. Pick up a cookbook that teaches technique along with the recipes—Mark Bittman’s
How to CookEverything
and Irma Rombauer’s
Joy of Cooking
are two great options for this. With even a little practice, you’ll find that making a meal for yourself at home isn’t all that time-consuming—and, quite often, the flavors are such that you’ll never want to return to convenience foods.
Prepare a meal plan and a grocery list each week. At our home, Saturday morning usually finds one of us making a list of the meals we intend to eat over the next week, digging through the cupboards to make sure we have all the ingredients, and then making a list of those items we don’t have. This simple process takes about twenty minutes and usually results in a surprisingly short grocery list. At the grocery store, we earn those twenty minutes back by shopping for much less time—instead of wandering from aisle to aisle trying to decide what to get, we just follow that short list. The money we save by avoiding tons of impulse buys is substantial and, in the end, it doesn’t take us any extra time.
Use a simple price list strategy to figure out which store to shop at. One common technique for minimizing grocery costs is the price list. First popularized by Amy Dacyczyn in her
Tightwad Gazette
newsletter, a price list is merely a listing of the cost of most of your commonly-purchased items at several different stores. So, for example, you might have a gallon of milk in your price book—next to it, you’d find the price of that gallon at several different stores. This way, you could use that price book to plan which store (orstores) to shop at for groceries that week, minimizing your cost.
Today, with stores constantly shifting food prices and the selection seemingly changing on a daily basis, a price book doesn’t work as well. Instead, I’ve substituted what I call a “price list”—a much simpler method of doing the same thing.
For a few weeks out of each year, I’ll shop at several different local grocery stores. At each store, I’ll get the price of the 25 items I buy most frequently—bread, milk, eggs, lettuce, and so on. I just do this as part of my weekly shopping trip. After visiting several stores, I go home and add up the cost of the 25 items from each store, giving myself a total cost of buying all those items from each of the local stores. Whichever store has the cheapest total wins my business for the next year or so.
This simple method helps me to always dig out what the least-expensive store in the area is. Because I update the list annually, I can also keep track of changes in pricing policies of different stores and also identify whether or not a new store is worth shopping at. Doing this once a year saves me about $15 a week in groceries, according to my figures.
Use the weekly fliers. Many grocery store chains distribute fliers in local newspapers and on their websites describing the special deals the store is offering this week. Use these fliers to your advantage. Each week, as you begin to plan your meals,download the flier from your store of choice and use the discounted fresh items—meats and
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