I’m looking to have tasty and balanced food while maintaining a reasonable budget and being more organised.
I know how to cook. I already have tasty yet not complicated meals I’m use to make but I never needed to be organised about it before.
So I decided to start to write menu in advance, do a some meal prepping probably a bit of batch cooking.
I found resources online to start following a plan but maybe you have advices for the beginner that I am.
Thank you!
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I keep an excel spreadsheet of recipes. Every sheet focuses on a single ingredient, either produce or protien. I see what’s on sale each week and look for recipes that utilize those ingredients.
- Look at the grocery ad and pick one or two items on sale that you can use to cook a meal you’ll enjoy.
- Add all of the ingredients to your cart.
- Write down all of the ingredients that won’t be used entirely by your meal. For instance, maybe you need to buy milk but will only use 1C, or will buy an onion but only use half of it.
- Create a different meal that includes those ingredients. Add any additional ingredients you’ll need to your cart.
- Repeat steps 3-4 until you have a week’s worth of meals with zero waste.
Example: I want to make tacos, so I add:
- Ground turkey.
- Tortillas.
- Cheddar cheese.
- Romaine lettuce.
- Red onion.
I’ll have plenty of everything left over except the ground turkey. Maybe my 2nd meal will be a salad to use the romaine, red onion, and cheddar. But I would have to buy chicken breast and garlic bread.
So I’ll have tortillas, chicken breast, and garlic bread left. Maybe I can make spaghetti w/ garlic bread and chicken caesar wraps.
Rinse and repeat.
For frugality you might try shopping based on what is discounted at the store, rather than based on a pre-made menu. Go with what you can buy for cheap and creatively put together meals from what you can source for free (e.g. work with your local food not bombs or dumpster diving folks) or for cheap (what is discounted with coupons, clearance items, defective food, etc.).
Menus can still be a good idea, for example having a set list of items to buy helps me avoid over-buying or buying foods I don’t need.
Yep. It’s also good to figure out what your nonperishable staples are and stock up on those when they go on sale or buy in bulk if they price per pound is cheaper.
If you’re just getting into cooking, don’t do this before you have a pretty good idea of what your staples are. Pay attention to the recipes you go back to over and over, find other recipes that use similar ingredients and try those too. My personal staples are canned tomatoes (whole peeled and crushed), olive oil, dried beans (chickpeas, black beans, kidney beans, white beans), and rice (basmati and short grain). I cook with all of these things a ton (and they’re all pretty cheap, except for olive oil). If I see any of these things on sale I’ll almost always grab some. I always have a pretty deep stock of all of them in my pantry. You must have a good system for organizing by expiration date. For stuff like rice and beans I like to store in Mason jars with oxygen absorbers to extend the shelf life.
Having this stuff on hand in larger amounts can also save money as a hedge against inflation and supply chain issues. Can also keep you fed if you get laid off.
Again, know what you’ll use before you start with this approach. It doesn’t save money to buy food on sale that you won’t eat.
Oh, I usually think stocking up is a bad idea - it leads to meals that are less nutritious and tasty, and it’s easy to waste food that way.
When I meant buy what is discounted I didn’t mean buy more than you are going to use, I was talking more about not planning to make Thai curry and then paying extra $$ for bell peppers out of season, instead see what is discounted at the store - maybe turnips or rutabagas, and then make your meal plan based on that - e.g. pasties, baked winter vegetables, or a soup instead.
The point I was trying to make is that pre-determining the ingredients you need to buy will end up costing you money rather than making the meals based on what is currently discounted and cheap.
Regarding back-stock: you have good tips about extending the life of rice or beans, storing in mason jars also help reduce the likelihood of pests getting into the food. Oxygen absorbers are a good idea, too. However, if you are poor it can be a lot to buy mason jars - so saving glass like used pasta jars, or seeing if there are any free or cheap jars through Freecycle, Craigslist, etc. might be an option.
Though I will say dry beans don’t last as long as I originally thought, and whenever I stocked up on dry beans I found they were really hard to get soft when I eventually used them, even after cooking for more than 24 hours and soaking the night before. Old beans just stay hard. It’s better to treat beans as something you buy fresh, something that lasts months rather than years.
Similar issue with brown rice, or anything that isn’t super refined (e.g. whole wheat flour) - you want to buy those in small amounts and use them quickly, they are more likely to spoil in a short period and lose nutritional value and flavor.
Refined foods like white rice are easier to store for a long time, and I keep my all purpose flour in the freezer so I can have more on hand than just what I’m using - that works pretty well.
You can also buy whole wheat berries, then make flour from scratch, but when you’re poor it’s hard to have time for all that.
Canned foods are more expensive than buying dry stuff, though it is a way to always have some extra beans on hand that won’t go bad as quickly as dry beans, so if you have the extra cash it’s not a bad idea to buy some canned food, if you really will use it. Just don’t buy a lot - one or two cans and rotate them as you use them.
EDIT: to be honest, when I was poor I didn’t have the energy to cook or optimize my grocery habits. Mostly I ate whatever food waste was in the kitchen I was working at, and some days that meant I mostly ate a bunch of white rice and nothing else. My diet was fucked up and it wasn’t healthy, but it meant I rarely spent money on food. Being poor also meant I spent the money I would have spent on food mostly on beer so I could relax in the evening. I mostly cooked on weekends when I wasn’t working, and I mostly bought whatever sounded good like steak, but from places like Walmart. Poverty unfortunately makes it hard to optimize your life, as you rarely have the time or energy, let alone the will power or mental health, to be efficient.
Getting out of poverty ironically gave me more energy and leisure time to spend on cooking at home and so on. It also meant being able to escape living in ghetto apartments and moving into suburbs where I could grow food in a lawn, e.g. I didn’t have to buy garlic for an entire year just based on what I grew in one season - that’s something I could never do living in apartments.
All this to say, if you’re poor just survive and find a way out, don’t beat yourself up for being inefficient if you just can’t be.
The point I was trying to make is that pre-determining the ingredients you need to buy will end up costing you money rather than making the meals based on what is currently discounted and cheap.
Yep, I got your point! I was agreeing with it, then adding my own thoughts about what I think is a complementary technique of stocking up on staples.
Re: poverty, I definitely agree with the sentiment of not beating yourself up by trying to optimize grocery habits when you’re in survival mode. However, frugality is not lock-stepped with poverty. Since OP didn’t mention living in poverty but was asking for cheap and healthy meal planning tips, I shared my thoughts on that.
Storing extra food can easily become wasteful if you don’t do it mindfully. Buy what you use and use what you buy. Research take storage precautions to extend shelf life like I mentioned in my post (and your good point about pests!). In my experience, when you approach it like this, it’s a great way to live more frugally by taking advantage of bulk discounts and sales. So personally, I disagree with the idea that stocking up is a bad thing.
Aside from reasons of frugality, it’s nice to know you have a good amount of calories in your house in the case of, for example, a global pandemic. I know that’s not the topic here, but just pointing out that there are other good reasons to store food.
Yep, I got your point! I was agreeing with it, then adding my own thoughts about what I think is a complementary technique of stocking up on staples.
ah, my bad - sometimes I’m a bit socially clueless 😅 I thought there was a misunderstanding.
Since OP didn’t mention living in poverty but was asking for cheap and healthy meal planning tips, I shared my thoughts on that.
another good point - frugality is separate from poverty, I guess in some ways that even tracks my experiences with poverty - I am able to be more frugal out of poverty than in. Reminds me of that James Baldwin quote, “Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
In my experience, when you approach it like this, it’s a great way to live more frugally by taking advantage of bulk discounts and sales. So personally, I disagree with the idea that stocking up is a bad thing.
That makes sense! My own experiences with stocking up has been more fear-based than based on any actual calculus of what I use and at what rate, so I end up buying a huge bag of rice that goes unused for years, and I’m always just eating really old rice, lol.
So, yeah - stocking up in an unplanned and spontaneous way is a completely different approach than planning your food consumption and buying with bulk discounts at the right times.
Aside from reasons of frugality, it’s nice to know you have a good amount of calories in your house in the case of, for example, a global pandemic. I know that’s not the topic here, but just pointing out that there are other good reasons to store food.
This is a big concern I have had in the past, and a big reason for my stocking up as well. I went through periods of food insecurity in the past, so I would stockpile food almost as an emotional security blanket. It’s been a hard thing for me to finally let go, but I have been slowly working my way towards a more reasonable approach to my pantry.
Thanks for your good ideas and tolerance as I stumble through our interactions - I appreciate your patience ❤️
Hey, we’re all clueless about things sometimes right! 😅 💖
What you said about the fear-based stocking up is so real. It’s an easy way to try to feel like you’re in control when you have suffered from food insecurity in the past or when you’re nervous about the state of the world generally. It makes total sense that you had that experience!
Try cooking Indian and East Asian foods. Very affordable and healthy. Many don’t even require meat. If you get rice get easy Asian rice not south Asian, ie long grain. Personal opinion, it tastes much better.
Super easy meal is Japanese curry and rice. Get the premade curry packs that you put into your vegetable and water mix.
Fried rice is a good easy one.
Fun new snack I’ve done recently is seasoned then baked chickpeas.
Always have an easy breakfast and sandwich supplies. I just tomato or cucumber sandwiches.
I think the best thing is just to eat similar meals each week but can switch things up.
It can help to have designated meal types for each day. E.g. taco Tuesdays, pasta Wednesdays, etc.
Doesn’t have to be the same meal each week but narrows down the choices making decisions and planning easier.
Sorted food does a free trial. They have a bunch of meal packs. 3 dishes scaled to however many people you’re cooking for that share ingredients. The app even has a grocery list. You could go through, grab the recipes and grocery lists that look good, then cancel. I believe one of their goals is to save you enough money that it’s worth paying them.
I’m a food nerd, and use it weekly. Mostly for the grocery list. Pick a pack that sounds good, grab the grocery list, and know that I have 3 meals worth of food. The recipes I’ve tried have been solid, but mostly I just look at the ingredients that are sitting there and make something. It forces me into verity, instead of just grabbing the same shit at the store every time.
