Feeding four (or more) mouths can get expensive real quick! With food being one of the largest monthly expenses a family needs to budget for, it is important to maintain good grocery and cooking habits. This is especially true with a family since the effects of your food decisions is multiplicative in nature (i.e. multiply the added expense of eating out by the number of mouths to feed). In this guide, I’d like to share four tips to help you and your family stay on track with your grocery budget.
Become an Ingredients Household and not a Pre-Packaged Foods Household
The quickest way to rack up a large grocery bill is buying pre-packaged and frozen foods. This is true even when shopping at large wholesale clubs like Costco and BJ’s. Instead, opt to buy bulk ingredients to cook with. I will go into more detail later, but cooking meals with similar base ingredients helps in getting through bulk ingredients like rice, potatoes, and chicken before they go bad. Not only is this cheaper, but you will have a much healthier diet since you know exactly what is going into your food.
I will show you an example of how much you can save by buying ingredients instead of pre-packaged foods. Below, you will see a grocery bill breakdown for an ingredients household vs a pre-packaged foods household. Please note, the numbers were generated by ChatGPT, so the prices may not be completely accurate. Also, I swear this is the only AI-generated part of this post!
When grocery shopping, another thing I like to do is bulk buy meats, pre-portion them, and freeze them. This helps significantly in reducing food waste since meats can go bad in the refrigerator in a matter of days. With pre-portioned frozen meats, you just need to thaw meats the night before you want to cook them. Some recipes even give instructions for cooking frozen meats, eliminating the need to thaw them!
Establish a Rotation of Favorite Recipes for Easy Bulk Cooking
For me, the hardest part about cooking is deciding what to cook and the shopping/planning involved. For special occasions, this process can be fun, but for day-to-day cooking, it’s a huge hassle. It’s a big enough hassle that ordering take-out sounds much more enticing, which can derail your budget. Therefore, it’s important to establish a small rotation of meals to cook on a regular basis. It may take a bit of experimentation at first to decide what to keep in your rotation and what to exclude. Your rotation can also change over time as you get tired of eating certain meals. One thing I found helpful was saving recipes in a Google Sheet and keeping notes on taste, ease of cooking, etc.
Another important point to consider when choosing recipes for your rotation is overlap of ingredients. You want some overlap of base ingredients so you can buy these items in bulk. However, you don’t want too much overlap so the recipes aren’t too similar. You don’t want to get sick of your food after all.
Utilize One-Container Recipes to Minimize Cooking Hassle and Cleanup
One of my favorite and most-used appliances in the kitchen is the instant pot. I love how you can saute and cook everything in one easy-to-clean stainless steel pot. Additionally, you can save time by washing the dishes and cutting board while the instant pot is doing its pressure cooking magic. The instant pot is so versatile and ubiquitous that you can google search nearly any recipe, and you’ll find an instant pot version of it just by adding “instant pot” at the end of your google search.
Other popular cooking items you can use are crockpots, dutch ovens, casserole dishes, or even a gas grill (only on occasion for health reasons). The tools you decide to use will really depend on which recipes you want to cook the most. There may also be cultural aspects to what you use for cooking. For example, as a Korean, I cook lots of rice, so a pressure rice cooker is a must for me.
Build “Cheat Meals” into your Budget
Let’s face it, sticking to a budget is hard. It takes lots of planning, execution, and delayed gratification at a consistent level to be successful. Given we are humans with bad days and good days, we need to give ourselves some slack and reward ourselves for the effort we do put in. Therefore, you should budget for some take-out each month or some non-essential items from the supermarket like cookies and ice cream. If you have enough self-control, you can consider buying some pre-made frozen foods for those days where you can’t get yourself to cook.
There are really two reasons to build these cheat meals into your budget. One, adding them as part of your budget will allow you to enjoy this food guilt-free. Nothing ruins the taste of good food like guilt and feeling bad about yourself. Two, you are more likely to adhere to your budget. The biggest thing that could demotivate you from continuing budgeting is one bad month. So why not make it easier on yourself by setting goals that are realistic to attain every month?
In Summary
Plan meals ahead and buy bulk ingredients from the supermarket or wholesale club. Having a rotation of meals that utilize similar base ingredients will help with grocery shopping and reduce decision-making in what to cook. Utilize one-container recipes, like instant pot or casserole dishes, to minimize cook time and cleanup. This will save you lots of time over the long run. Finally, don’t forget to build in “Cheat Meals”, whether it’s ordering take-out or buying easy-to-cook meals, which will help you adhere to your grocery budget guilt-free.
Thank you for reading my blog post, and I hope you found this content informative and helpful. If there is anything else you’d like to see or if you’d like to share feedback, please leave a comment below. I am always looking for ways to improve my writing!