Health & Fitness
Six Ways to Keep Dinner From Ruining Your Budget
Quick, Cheap, Healthy, Easy, and Delicious! That's a lie. Here's 6 real ways to help you keep your food costs in line.
I really don’t like the word budget. It makes me think of scarcity. I feel so cooped up when I consider the budget. Besides, cooking is about creativity. Putting brilliance on a budget just seems so terrible. Add that to the popular notion that cheap food equals unhealthy food and even I don’t want to set foot in the kitchen. So when I see one headline after another baiting the unsuspecting, over worked, hungry general public with promises of “quick, cheap, healthy, easy and delicious” dinner, I cringe.
Here’s the reality; pick two.
I’m serious. You can not have Quick, Cheap, Healthy, Easy, and Delicious. Not at the same table, anyway. But you can pick two. If Cheap isn’t coming off the list, then we need to choose between the other four. That’s a tall order. Money and Time aren’t often available in abundance. So let’s say you have a little money, but still need to keep dinner within a budget. You have an hour or so to cook and eat, while serving and pleasing your family’s varied tastes. I’m concerned about making food that’s healthy, but if it isn’t delicious, it may as well be made of cardboard, because no one’s eating it. I’ve read a lot of these articles and have come to the conclusion that they lie. So today, my promise is 6 ways to keep dinner from killing your budget.
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Figure out what’s in season. Buy that. Asparagus is my favorite vegetable. I also love artichokes and Clementines. Don’t even get me started on heirloom tomatoes. I have come to realize that eating those things when they are in season, even if they aren’t local, is easier on my wallet. Not to mention that the tomato that looks so good in the grocery store in February tastes like mushy nothingness when I slice it up for a BLT. Asparagus is a spring treat, and when it’s in season, we eat it almost every day. Heirloom tomatoes are very expensive, even when they are plentiful, so we grow our own in the back yard. I buy the “uglies” or “canners” from the farmers market in August and September to can tomato sauce and soup. Clementines are a winter treat, and if a recipe calls for artichokes, you can bet I’m buying them frozen or canned, on sale.
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Make sure you have room to store a few things. No, I’m not suggesting you prepare for the apocalypse, but no one wants to stand in the FEMA line, either. Remember “the flood?” Yeah. Grocery shopping during the flood wouldn’t have been very much fun. I didn’t. I had a couple of week’s worth of normal every day food and bottled water in the house and was able to stay home, instead of rushing to the store searching for something to feed my kids on day two. Thinking ahead a bit will save you from being concerned about food during a time when there’s a lot worth worrying about. You might need that money for gas. Or peroxide.
Pay attention to what you buy a lot of and stock up. If your kids eat peanut butter and jelly every single day, then knowing that peanut butter and jelly go on sale every six weeks will allow you to buy six weeks worth the next time you see the price drop. Again, I’m not suggesting you land on the reality show, Hoarders, I’m just saying there’s a sales cycle. Use it to your advantage. Pick ten things you eat a lot of; maybe dried pasta, brown rice, black beans, or even hamburger. If you have a little space to store it, you’ll save the last minute super expensive trips to the store to buy staples.
Put eating out into your weekly plan. Even if that plan only exists in your head. This is really important. You can bring your grocery budget way down, and then in a tired, nearly in tears moment, when your hungry kids whine from the back seat about wanting to stop for pizza, or the prospect of cooking at home again seems like a complete nightmare, you’ll cave and shell out thirty bucks for what would have cost you five dollars to make at home. Do that twice a week and your small grocery budget just went up by as much as 30%. Kind of makes buying canned black beans for twenty cents less per can and feeling good about it pointless. If you know that Thursday Night is Pizza Night and Thursday Night You Are Off The Hook, then Wednesday night will be a lot easier to handle. “I know you are hungry. So am I. But tomorrow night is Pizza Night. Tonight, we are having spaghetti. At Home.”
If it’s a lot of work to make, go ahead and make twice as much. Yes, my kids love chicken enchiladas. No, I do not love to make chicken enchiladas. They are a pain in the asno. So when I do go to the trouble of roasting a chicken, making chili sauce, and chopping a lot of onions and peppers, I make twice as much. Next time they want chicken enchiladas, I pull the dish out of the freezer and write while supper makes itself.
Don’t keep the budget a secret from your family. Even if your family is in elementary school. Your job is to run the household, and if you are intent on doing well with your personal micro-economy, then it can’t be a secret. You need support, and in the absence of support, understanding will do just fine. It really is Ok to say, “That is not in the budget. We are having _______ tonight.” It might even be good for kids to know that their parents are paying attention to where the money goes.