Faith & God

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Cheap Eats: Membership Warehouses

The current issue of “Real Simple” magazine contains the statement, “… members-only markets can be an indispensable source for saving on essentials, such as steak, shrimp, and [washed and bagged] salad greens.”

OK, here’s mom’s advice: If you are trying at all to cut costs, steak, shrimp, and bagged salads are not essentials. They are special treats, maybe even reserved for occasions such as birthdays or anniversaries.

Buying groceries at Sam’s, Costco, or similar store can definitely save you money. But remember, just because something is cheaper doesn’t make it cheap. This brings us to the question: is a membership warehouse always cheaper?

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Bearing Fruit: Garden Musings

We’re taking a break from talking about food and budgets. I’m an avid gardener, and it’s time to start this year’s vegetable garden. A “blessed event” this morning inspired the following thoughts:

My lettuce seedlings are coming up! Seeing those tiny cotyledons spread under the plant lights always gives me a thrill. This year is no different. After months of stark leafless branches and brown fields, anything green is a treat. Plus, there’s the promise of salad in those tiny leaves.

In a strange way, this is my favorite time to garden. In my tiny indoor plot of germinating plants, there are no bugs. No hail comes to flatten the fragile seedlings. No dry winds, or freezing temperatures. My growing conditions are as close to perfect as I can make them. This is a great place to be if you’re a baby plant.

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Cheap Eats: Marketing tips

You want to eat like a king, but your budget is more on the peon level. What to do? Don’t despair. Help is on the way.

How you do your marketing can impact how much you spend on food, as well as how healthy your meals are. Now that you are learning to cook, you can skip those frozen dinners, boxes of mixes, and the tasty-but-expensive pre-made meals in the deli. Instead, look for staples that can be used in a number of different ways.

I have a number of ingredients that I keep on hand at all times. Granted, I live quite a distance from the nearest market, plus I have plenty of storage, which makes it more convenient for me to store stables, compared to someone with a closet-sized kitchen and ready access to groceries. But there are some basic foods that most cooks use often enough to stock. You can see my list on my Mom’s Pantry page. Yours will be different, of course. This is just a starting place.

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Cheap Eats: Learn to cook

So you would like to spend less on food. This is one of the easiest places to trim the budget, but it will require a little effort on your part.

The single best way to save money on food is to learn to cook!

It is usually much cheaper to purchase ingredients rather than prepared meals. The results are more nutritious and frequently lower in sodium, fat, and calories.[1] With a little bit of practice, your meals will taste a lot better than the packaged, frozen “convenience foods” available at the market. Cooking doesn’t have to use a lot of time or expensive ingredients. Plus, it just feels satisfying to serve a meal you made yourself.

Learning to cook isn’t hard. A recent Amazon search turned up 93,928 cookbooks, while a Google search turned up 98,400,000 hits for “recipe.”  Most functional adults are able to follow at least  simple directions for preparing a dish.

I never learned to cook when I was growing up, so I had to figure things out on my own. Since I was a college student at the time, it seemed totally logical to pick up a textbook and start reading. At the time, the most popular comprehensive cookbook was The Joy of Cooking, so that is what I read. It provided a solid foundation that still serves me today. The fun started when I got to the point where I could wing it, inventing my own recipes as I went along.

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