While I'm on holidays, I've scheduled a bunch of posts to get you thinking about the everday things that we do in the course of our lives that reduce our costs or that waste money. Please leave your comments, tips, ideas and tricks everyday, so I can marathon read every single one of them when I return on Sunday. :)
Questions:
How do you reduce your food costs overall? Are you prone to picking something up from a fast food joint while you're running errands or during a workday? Do you have creative ideas to reduce how much food you are wasting? What is the most inexpensive meal you serve to your family?
Is there more that you could do to reduce your overall spending on food?
Every other Sunday I make an extremely large batch of red sauce. We use that sauce over the course of two weeks in several different meals like baked ziti, pasta and sauce, chicken parm. For the cost of about two jars of sauce I make enough for five or six meals.
ReplyDeleteI'm a couponer, so I stack coupons with sale items to get them cheap. I also use coupons to get free health and beauty items like toothpaste, floss, shampoo, etc... that saves a ton of money so I can spend a bit more for food. It's not easy, but it's worth it.
ReplyDeleteWe rarely get "fast food", maybe once every few months, so that's not much. I keep costs down by cooking as much as I can from scratch & buying a few extra items that we use when they're on sale!
ReplyDeleteI always make a sandwich before I leave the house, even if I'm just running errands. No exceptions. This keeps the "oh I'll just get some unhealthy fast food..." temptation in check.
ReplyDeleteI make DH's lunch almost every day. He's barely functional in the morning, so this way he's got food, and less of an excuse to eat out. what kills my food bill is the 'oh, I'll just stop and get...at the grocery store on the way home'. "On the way home" is evil, because I essentially nickle and dime our budget into oblivion!
ReplyDeleteWe buy a lot of stuff from the Bulk Barn: cereal, rice, lentils, split peas, soup mix, all kinds of dried beans, quinoa etc so that we can stretch our meat out over a few days by making soups and stews, or as Michael likes to call them - "medleys". It really works and its good for us too. We also have at least two meatless meals a week and get our protein from lentils/beans/eggs.
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