(Inspired by AmFam)
Our food bill for the week averages out to about $125 (including eating out). Sometimes more, very often less. I can feed us for a week on $75 without difficulty and have been able to do it for fifty when the budget was tight last summer. I spent $175 last Sunday and that will get us to this next Saturday and the only reason it was that high to begin with is that we had dog food ($14), laundry detergent and dishwasher detergent and toothpaste and hairbands, otherwise it’d have been closer to $150 or less. I also bought a dozen loaves of bread and snacks at the Pepperidge Farm discount store so that was an extra $30 (we also got goldfish crackers and Mint Milanos).
Here’s how I do this:
- I menu plan. I don’t understand how anyone grocery shops without a menu plan. I plan seven to eight meals, a general idea of lunch menus and one or two things I plan to bake for breakfasts or snacks.
- I am flexible but firm when planning. I look ahead to my week so I know how much time I expect to have in the kitchen. If work/homeschool is looking busy, I need to take that into account. For example, Thursdays are crazy around here. I know we’ll be leaving in the morning and that when we get back will be unpredictable. Either that will be a pizza or Chipotle night or I need to do the crockpot. If I’m going to do the crockpot, then I need to soak my beans on Tuesday or Wednesday. I rarely buy canned beans because I can get more for less if I soak and cook my own. I freeze the leftovers and there’s another dinner ready and waiting.
- I can also meal plan on the fly at the store. If I show up and there’s something unexpected on sale, I have enough recipes memorized that I can set aside one of my planned meals and shop for a different one. (When I shop I have a list and on the side I also have a list of the meals/snacks I’m going to be making so I can keep track of what ingredients go with what.)
- I add up the cost as I go through the store so I know how much we have to splurge on, say, string cheese or granola bars. There’s always room for splurging because what would life be like without that??
- We don’t eat red meat. We do eat fish and poultry.
- I keep a supply of staples on-hand that can let me create meals or snacks quickly and without much bother. This staple includes baking supplies, lentils, rice, oatmeal, maple syrup, eggs, cheese, pasta, onions, garlic, potatoes, canned tomatoes and frozen veggies. Stuff like that. So i can pretty much always make a batch of oatmeal cookies for a playdate or a fruit crumble for the pears no one is eating and are getting too soft. Also popcorn is a cheap, high-fiber snack that’s easy to make and pretty much everyone likes it (so it’s good for playdates, too). My mom recently bought us a Whirly-Pop and man, we use that thing ALL THE TIME. We love plain old popcorn but we also love caramel corn, which is a cinch to make on your stovetop.
- We don’t eat organic (because we can’t afford it, obviously) but this budget includes some organics like when Madison wants YoBaby and the really good turkey sausage we all like. I would much rather be able to afford eating fully organic and think it’s worth the extra money but it’s not in our life right now so I wince and buy conventional.
- I have learned to make something out of nothing. Our budget is low in part because I don’t always have time to shop. I try to shop Sundays (before I had a job it used to be Tuesdays). If I miss it, I don’t always know when I’ll get back out — it depends on work and homeschooling. So I’ve learned how to pull those staples out and make a good, nutritious meal. Meals like: Roasted potatoes with onions and garlic, Scrambled eggs with some cheddar and the left-over salsa; Pasta with butter and parmesan and frozen veggies; Rice with soysauce and frozen veggies, Lentils with sauteed onions and garlic; French toast with the stale bread in the freezer. And then you can, as Julia says, bitch these things up. Like the left-over cream cheese? Put it between slices of bread for your french toast. Add some frozen blueberries for the kids who like it. That breakfast sausage your kid refused might be good with the roasted potatoes. True frugality means you use everything so look around and see what might be tucked away and ready to use.
- I use my left-overs. I make meals in part to turn left-overs into lunches. For example, the meal I’m making tonight I’m making so that I have something to take in my lunch tomorrow. I also use the left-overs from recipes so if I’m buying chicken broth for one recipe then I make sure I’m going to have another recipe that uses the rest of the broth. I don’t let things go to waste. Heck, even left-over yogurt can be used in a muffin recipe. (It’s what I sometimes do with the kids’ half-eaten yogurts. Yes –it’s gross but then I only serve ‘em to the kids who left the half-eaten container in the ‘fridge anyway. Left-over yogurt also makes good homemade popsicles in the summer. And if the child is like Madison and prone to leaving many containers with just a few bites left, you can make them stripe-y and the child in question will happily eat the stuff she was refusing in its thawed state.)
- I am not hard core about buying stuff on sale the way the true frugal hosuewives are but there are certain things I won’t buy unless they cost X. Brett will budge from this but I won’t. (I won’t pay more than two bucks a box for cereal, for example.)
- I rely heavily on frozen veggies and frozen fruit. It doesn’t go bad, it can be used in a myriad of ways and it’s nutritious. (I especially love frozen fruit because the kids eat it alone as a snack, we can use it in smoothies if we’re running late and need a quick breakfast, I can use it baking and if I’m rushing dinner out to the table I can stir it into plain yogurt, add a little cinnamon and call it dessert.)
- I weigh my time against my budget and make allowances. There’s a lot I make homemade because it’s easy and I like to do it. There are other things I know I could make but don’t think it’s worth the bother (pasta, crackers, and lately I haven’t wanted to roast a whole chicken so I’ve been buying broth).
- The Pepperidge Farm store is my friend. I’m picky about bread (and again, here, I used to bake our bread every week but that’s not in the cards for me these days) and I buy whole wheat without high-fructose corn syrup or transfats and that stuff’s expensive. I can get stale-ish bread at Pepperidge Farm that’s just fine for PB&J and turkey sandwiches for much less than at the store. I can also buy goldfish crackers for about 1/3 of the grocery store price. I buy lots of boxes and dump ‘em out into big glass jars on our counter so the kids can scoop their own.
It takes a lot of planning but the planning has become second-nature. I keep an eye on our diet for the whole day so if the kids have, say, pancakes in the morning (just about every Wednesday I make pancakes or waffles because it’s Noah’s paper route day and it’s my way of sending him out into the wide, wide world well prepared) then I’m not going to make them pasta that night. Or if they have Mac & Cheese for lunch (as an aside, I do make boxed Mac & Cheese but I’ll buy extra macaroni pasta and add it to the box to double the pasta and make left-overs for the next day’s lunch) I’m going to fix something for dinner with more protein.
Sometimes I can stretch a meal plan beyond it’s limit by sending Brett out for a mini grocery shopping. I’ll give him a list and a $25 budget and he’ll come back with stuff to get us to when I have time to do a major shopping. There’s a lot you can do with eggs, milk and a chunk of cheese if you have the right staples in your cupboard.
I didn’t realize how hard this was to do out of the gate until our grocery bill shot up while Brett was in charge. I grew into cooking for our family but early on in our marriage with children, I knew that one of my jobs if I was home with our kids was to make money by saving money. I took it seriously and read a lot about it. I have had to be flexible about my limits — both monetarily and time-wise. For awhile I kept blowing our budget because I wanted to pretend we would never get take-out and that I’d always make everything — even crackers — from scratch. It wasn’t realistic. (However those homemade crackers were delicious!)
Now this is all second nature to me. The routine is easy and I’m teaching it to the kids. Noah usually votes to skip out on shopping these days but I’m training Madison like I trained Noah. They help me menu plan, weigh in on what sounds good, check the cupboards for what we’re missing and they help shop. I teach them how to read shelf tags, explain when the sale isn’t really a deal and we read labels. I explain when cheaper isn’t better and when it is and they are learning to pick out decent produce. Noah’s become really good at shopping and I imagine Madison will, too.
I talk to them the whole time I’m shopping about what I’m doing. I think out loud while I’m there so they know why I’m scrapping the eggplant dish (no good eggplants) and how I’m going to replace it. They also help scan at the self checkout and then unload the groceries. My kids? They have a lot of ownership about feeding the family because they participate in it. They don’t always want to eat what I cook (the big one is the picky one) but the saving money part is a game they want to win.
Further, they know how to wrap up their sandwiches for a snack later and Madison has learned how to scrape her left-0ver yogurt into a popsicle mold. Madison — like Noah before her — helps make the pancakes, waffles, muffins, etc. (As an aside? Left-over waffles on Wednesdays are Noah’s favorite afternoon snack.)
Probably they will grow up and want to eat out every single night and never, ever enter a grocery store or making any darn thing from scratch but at least they’ll be able to feed their families decently and within budget if they have to.
Possibly related posts:
We shop two weeks at a time and spend about the same. Menu planning is where its at. I do have to stop on the mid week and buy more milk and more fruit but that’s a cheap trip.
hey dawn, if you have the time and inclination, i would love it if you could go into more detail about the kinds of things you make for breakfast lunch and dinner! there was a period of time a couple of years ago where i tried learning to cook for myself.. with some success; but i dropped the habits since then.
i really would love to know what kind of common dishes people eat in their families; i get rather daunted whenever i look for recipes online — so many of them seem to have a whole host of not-often-used ingredients.
i am eating crapcrapcrap these days (lots of cheap fast food), in addition to my at-home staples of instant noodles (which is high in saturated fat, though!), cereal, french toast, and grilled cheese sandwhiches. i could use some more (cheap and easy?) ideas!
so it’d be /great/ to know what your family eats, esp what you all take in your lunch boxes, and what kinds of things you make for dinner?
David, I’ll do that and open up a post for people to comment with theirs, too. Renee’s below is a really good start!!
Amen. I have a lot of recipes in the back of my head that require only one fresh thing (pasta with white beans and tomatoes, black bean and red pepper burritos, udon soup with broccoli, etc.), so as long as my pantry is stocked, I can almost always make dinner with only one vegetable in the fridge. I also recommend keeping a magnetic list pad on the fridge so if anything runs out, it gets on next week’s list. (Training the husband to do this has been a struggle–but if I discover we don’t have soy sauce or something, I send him out for it.)
Once I had kids, I started buying a lot of stuff I used to make myself (salad dressing, pesto, hummus), but we still make chicken stock a few times a year. We keep all the chicken bones and floppy celery in a bag in the freezer until we get around to it.
renee, those three items you listed sound good!
students often make pasta, except i’ve never liked any of the storebought sauces (too salty for me). funny thing is, whenever i go to a restaurant and order the pasta, i always end up liking it… . does your pasta w/ beans and tomatoes use a sauce? and how do you prepare the filling for the burritos?
hope it’s okay that a complete stranger pick your brain like this! [if you even see this reply, that is
]
Thanks for sharing. I might have to do a post about this soon. We make an awful lot from scratch and participate in a couple of CSAs that allow us to go two or three weeks without grocery shopping.
We spend more to get organics usually, but it’s the same philosophy – use what you have in the pantry/fridge first, meal plan, use/freeze leftovers.
I LOVE that Noah is picking up on your shopping habits. Our daughter Lil sure knows how to make a lot from scratch (she can crack eggs with no shell pieces at 3.5 years old!) but hasn’t figured out the money/value stuff yet.
Do you go to a different store to get your staples? I struggle with this because it seems cheaper to get staples at Aldi’s… but then I might have to make 2 trips that week. Or poultry and produce is usually cheaper at The Andersons, but then you pay way too much for other stuff. And yeah, totally with you on the $2 cereal.
Sarah, it depends. I used to shop at a lot of different stores because I had time to do it. Now I do all my shopping at either Kroger’s or Giant Eagle (lately Kroger’s ‘cuz it’s cheaper). Then I do random shopping at other places like Trader Joe’s. I go to Aldi’s maybe twice a year, usually around the holidays to get cheap (but real) Vanilla. But so much of their easy stuff (like crackers, frozen meals) has transfats and/or high fructose corn syrup so then if I go to Aldi’s (on Sawmill) I very nearly end up cursing at myself because I know I’m going to end up driving down the road to Trader Joe’s, too. (Also Aldi’s doesn’t have unbleached white flour and rarely has whole wheat flour so lots of my staples I can’t get there anyway.)
Menu planning is absolutely critical. Without it I was constantly scrambling for dinner at 5 pm and making last minute trips to the store spending extra money and dragging cranky kids.
We have a share in a local organic CSA. It is a nice one in that it allows us to buy only a box every other week so we really use up and make the most of everything. It is $25 every other week and really is so worth the money.
I also have made an effort to use stuff up and use leftovers… Nothing pains me more than throwing away food!
Your kids will take this with them! (There are studies that show that family meals etc are passed down to children. They might have a mini-hiatus in college, but you are giving them such a wonderful gift!)
I Love this post, with details etc and will alert my blog readers. I agree about menu planning and the staples. Also, a chest freezer helps SO much. We moved into this house and the previous owner left the ancient, yet functional freezer. I can buy multiples, on sale of bread, English muffins, whole-wheat buns, make one trip to the butcher every 6 weeks or so (there is a natural one near us, we buy less but we do eat meat) storage for leftovers etc… I think since having a family, that freezer has saved so much money and when I don’t menu plan so well, or I don’t want what I’ve planned I usually have a left-over bag of pulled pork (BBQ sandwiches) I can rely on. Great practical tips. Frozen and canned are often as or more nutritious than “fresh,” so we use those too. As for recipes, I have lots on my blog, many for families who don’t cook often… http://www.familyfeedingdynamics.blogspot.com
These are my desperation dinners, not high cookery by any means, but since you asked…you can saute the tomatoes (fresh only, not canned) with garlic and maybe some rosemary, and add the beans (canned cannellini are fine, drained and RINSED if you don’t like salt!), then mix it all with the pasta. Or, if you’re too lazy even to do that (which I sometimes am) and if you have pesto in the fridge (which I always do, as my 3-year-old loves it), just mix the pesto (enough to coat the pasta), the can of rinsed beans, and 3 or 4 chopped tomatoes with the cooked pasta.
The burritos are something my husband and I made up in grad school and still eat every week or two. Saute one chopped onion and one chopped red pepper, add one can of black beans, and some cilantro, cumin (maybe 1tsp?), and chili powder (if your kids like it or if there are no kids). If you had an old piece of chicken you could shred it and throw it in too. If making rice isn’t a huge burden (we have a rice cooker),that makes a nice bed for the filling, and you can put salsa and/or shredded cheese on top. I also insist on steaming the tortillas, but the microwave works too.
Great, Renee, now I’m hungry. COME MAKE US BURRITOS! I use our Aroma rice cooker ALL THE TIME. I got it at a thrift store for four bucks, new in box. The check-out lady was insane with jealousy because she missed it. Hahahahahaha!!
renee, thanks for the info
and heh, desperation-type dinners [simple and easy] might be exactly the kind of thing that i can try building better eating habits around, given how .. you know, how foreign to me the idea of cooking food regularly for myself is!
I also use a CSA, although where I live it is only a 25-30 week season. For $25 a week I get more organic produce than my family of 4 can eat in the 7 days. We have a weekly potluck for my older daughter’s religious school, which I often use to off-load veggies we’re tired of or have a surplus of. I bought one of those freezer bag sealers on sale at Amazon, and we still have a little bit of green beans, zucchini, yellow squash, blackberries, and mashed pumpkin from last year. Very little left though. The one thing I learned is that mashed pumpkin is not worth it! I spent the better part of 8 hrs. prepping, cooking, and cleaning up for . . . .9lbs. of pumpkin. I think the canned stuff is about a dollar a can. Lesson learned! I can make a stew, soup, or pasta from just about any veggie, and we don’t eat any meat, so we save there. Our largest grocery expense is stuff like soaps and shampoo, and vegetarian burger patties.
At first I read this and decided that I am inadequate. Then I read that you studied it hard, and I felt better. Then I realized that I do a lot of this in a more slapdash fashion. We have veggies delivered, and we have a list on the fridge that we update during the week. Tom does the grocery shopping because he used to teach life skills to developmentally disabled adults, and he’s a great grocery shopper. I’m less frugal, slower, and more impulsive. Our difficulty is that we all like really different food. I was raised hippie vegetarian, Tom is totally meat and potatoes, and Clara is just really picky. So, I’m always searching for recipes that everyone will at least tolerate.
I’m going to try Renee’s pasta idea, and reinstate burritos, which have fallen by the wayside.
loved this. I am such a better menu planner and chef than the old days when Joseph and I ate out all the bloody time. Before Finn it was madness. I am doing about 120 a week…down from all time high of 200 a week in 2004. Nightmare- I bought everything organic I think then. Now I pick and choose (from a free download I will share when I find)
anyhoo. loved this. xo
Good post. We are working on the whole food/eating out budget lately. I’m not a big fan of cooking or baking, but I do find that when I meal plan before I grocery shop, I end up spending less.
I love the list of the staples you keep on hand. In fact, I may bookmark this post to come back to.
It is a work in progress for me….
This is a great post. I’m in the middle of a full kitchen inventory (also inspired by AmFam) because that is my weakest point–buying stuff and then not using it. I’m a foodie and am easily tempted by grocery items, so I always have way more on hand than I need. My goal for the next while is to use stuff up, and then work on simplifying my cooking. I’m really busy right now so I need to cook less elaborate stuff. I’m looking forward to your specific posts on what you cook.
Dawn, you’ve inspired me!
My husband and I are terrible about buying things with good intentions and then throwing away the wilted remains of them weeks later because we have no plan.
We do make huge batches of pasta sauce and freeze them and I have started telling him things like “Are you really going to spend $8 on a new kind of SALT?” Yes, I know, but he is a foodie and he loves all that boutique stuff. I’m working on him.
Next trip I think I will try meal planning and bring it along when we shop. I’ll let you know how my budget goes.
Wow. Great post. Our food budget (I’m minting, so I know this now) is 400-500 dollars a week. We eat out a lot, buy pretty randomly, and also shop and throw things away. Our kids are also supremely picky (well, and so are the adults).
I find the wholesale difference between the way you eat and the way we eat fascinating. I’d love to see an example of your menu plan, and shopping list, and perhaps a description of what you & the kids actually ate over a week. I hope to someday not be someone who eats the way we do (but don’t hold out particularly high hopes).
“Our difficulty is that we all like really different food. I was raised hippie vegetarian, Tom is totally meat and potatoes, and Clara is just really picky.”
We have this problem, too. I grew up in a vegetarian/ethnic household where everything was homemade (and required a fair amount of preparation). My husband grew up making things on the fly from when he was a very young age. My children inherited both of our pickiness. I think the differing food cultures has a significant effect on being able to combine food styles. That turns out to be one of the benefits of eating out — everyone picks their own food. But, it also means that you reinforce all the pickiness.
Dawn, this is a great post. Are any of the bean slow-cooker things you make vegetarian? If so, would you post or pass me the recipe? I’m just trying to really come to terms with my slow cooker and have made a couple of good things, but am handicapped by (a) food preferences in the family (b) we’re semi (fish-eating) vegetarian (c) I’m not that smart with it.
Allrecipes.com has a great feature where you can pop in a couple of ingredients and pull up whatever they have with those in it–very handy when I’ve got to use that leftover cauliflower in a moderately kid-friendly way.
we also get the veggies from a CSA and i plan around that. i find it easier because then i have fresh and healthy things around, and just buy mostly protein and grains. i find myself in the store less often, and can buy some of the items bulk in an outdoor market. i’ll also make the kids soup or stir fry or cut up veggies with hummus for a snack after school because we have the vegetables.
i love how you relate this post not only to your own menu and budget planning, but also to your kids and their future attitude. recently saw an article about the ‘food gatekeepers’ in families and how that really impacts how the whole family eats and thinks about eating. our kids are still talking about how they spent 3 hours weeding a row of carrots at ‘our farm’ recently.
as an aside – i recently made my own crackers – and got a request from a friend to make them for her celebratory open house after having a baby. (it was on purim, so i did more and used them for our ‘mishloach manot’ – food packages delivered to friends. )