Archive for January, 2010

Meal Planning 101: A Guide for the Lost

Friday, January 8th, 2010

Today is pizza day and I just put the dough in the oven to rise under the baking light. While the yeast works its magic, I thought I would talk a little bit about meal planning.

Last night I was perusing a selection of frugal cookbooks and all of them hyped meal planning, but none of them actually told readers how to do it. So here’s how to meal plan, according to moi. (Please add your tips, tricks, and techniques in the comments.)

1.List out every recipe you make regularly and that your family likes. Hopefully, you come up with about 14-20 recipes. Here’s my list…

1.Pizza
2.Calzones
3.Steak
4.Italian chicken
5.BBQ chicken
6.BBQ pork
7.Hamburgers
8.Unstuffed cabbage casserole
9.Haulshki (E. European recipe with cabbage, bacon and noodles)
10.Vienerschnitzl with pork chops
11.Kielbasa on the grill
12.Kielbasa in the slow cooker with veggies and kraut
13.Goulash
14.Chicken Soup
15.White Chili with Chicken
16.Red Chili
17.Bean and bacon soup
18.Zuppa Tuscana soup
19.Split pea and ham soup
20.Julia Child’s butter lubed chicken
21.Pepper Steak
22.Meatballs and spaghetti
23.Asian lettuce wrap salad
24.Roast turkey breast w/ veggies
25.Roast chicken w/ veggies
26.Frozen ravioli
27.Frozen cheese tortellini
28.Chicken enchiladas
29.Tacos or taco salad
30.Roast beef with veggies

2.List out recipes you would like to master but haven’t had a chance to try for one reason or another. This step gives you and your family some variety and this is how you’ll discover new family favorites. Here are some I would like to try:

1.Honey spice chicken
2.Chicken Piccata (I keep trying and it just doesn’t want to turn out for me)
3.Lemon chicken

Now between 1&2 you should be able to create a rotational menu. Since I have over 30 recipes, I could, in theory, plan out a month’s worth of meals at one sitting. Typically, however, I only plan out 2 weeks at a time because real life doesn’t respect menu plans and has a way of mixing things up.

For example, last night I overcooked the steak. I found it delicious still, but my husband wouldn’t touch it so he ran out for a quick burger. Life happens and because of that I don’t bother to try and forecast meals too far into the future.

3.Don’t forget to check the sales ads before finalizing any meal plans. If it’s buy-one-get-one chicken week at the grocery store, you would, of course, want to take advantage of those savings.

You can also visit couponmom.com and see what deals they show for your area. Couponmom.com is free and if you have several grocery chain stores in your area, it can be a quick way to find the best deals. It doesn’t work so well for me because, as I mentioned in another post, we only have 1 chain in the area which limits the comparison shopping.

4.So now you have a list of recipes (I hope! If not, time to hit the cookbooks for inspiration) and you know what is on sale right now this very moment at your local grocery store. Between these two facts, create a menu plan that accommodates what you know how to cook well (and what your family will eat) as well as taking into account the lowest available prices on food.

5.This is an optional step, but one that I think is important. Once you have a set repertoire of recipes, it’s time to bulk buy common ingredients and keep them handy in the pantry and freezer. This article on food storage calculation gives a simple formula on how to do this.

6.The other important component of meal planning is ‘feeding the freezer’. I try to take 1-2 servings of all my casseroles right off the top, before serving anyone else, and put them in the freezer. This freezer stash is your new ‘take out’ menu for days you can’t cook or for when illness strikes (don’t forget to freeze some chicken soup!).

Sometimes I even include a meal to make just for the freezer as part of my menu plan.

And that’s it. The core basics of meal planning.

Now please realize it takes time to master meal planning. You are going to make mistakes. Over buy, under buy, pay too much, forget to freeze, forget to thaw, get in a rut and try a new recipe that ends in disaster etc… Learning from your mistakes is what improves your meal planning skills so don’t get too frustrated.

In a way, cheap meals aren’t cheap. They may cost less money, but they tend to take more time. Especially when people are first learning how to cook and shop more frugally. Once you are past the worst of the learning curve, you should see substantial savings and things will run much more smoothly in the kitchen.

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Homemade Yogurt 101: What You Need to Know About Homemade Yogurt

Friday, January 8th, 2010

My toddler only eats two food groups; yogurt and cottage cheese. That’s it. So we go through a lot of yogurt and cottage cheese. And since we do organic, well, you can imagine how expensive that gets  (I would buy ‘regular’ yogurt if it wasn’t full of so much sugar and junk– Coke has something like 25 grams of sugar. So does Yoplait. Look at the label sometime. We buy a higher protein greek yogurt which only comes in organic).

So I bought a yogurt maker and am making my own yogurt at a huge cost savings for our family. FYI if you want to buy a yogurt maker, get it online because you won’t find these things in stores. Also, they all kind of suck. A few reviewers had their yogurt makers catch on fire. So I recommend close supervision and maybe not spending top dollar.

I know some people make yogurt in coolers, in the oven with the baking light on and in slow cookers. I tested the temps for all the do-it-yourself yogurt making options and everything ran too hot or too cold so cheap yogurt making didn’t appear to be in the cards for us. (And I literally spent hours reading blogs and recipes and product reviews and running around my kitchen sticking a thermometer in all sorts of nooks and crannies. My husband thought I was nuts.)

This is the yogurt maker I bought. I like it. Except it did kind of melt when I boiled some water next to it so we actually have bought it twice. Just learn from my experience and keep it away from all heat sources.

What I liked about it was that it comes with glass jars. We are sort of eco-conscious over here and I don’t want any plastic jars if it can be helped. The first yogurt maker we ordered had jars made of plastic type 7 which is known to leach all sorts of chemicals. I returned it.

The other thing to look for in a yogurt maker is an auto shut off feature. This is helpful so that it stops by itself if you should happen to forget about it. Which I did (I’m not really rocking the yogurt making over here, can you tell?). Also, I hope the auto shut off cuts down on the fire hazard.

Aside from the fact I keep going on and on about making yogurt (who knew this topic could get so wordy?), it’s actually quick and easy to set up. Very low maintenance. Takes about 30 minutes of prep and 10 hours of ‘cooking’. All you need is milk and a starter, that’s it.

Boil the milk. Cool the milk. Add the starter. Put it in the yogurt maker and let it smolder for 10ish hours. Voila! You have smooth and creamy  yogurt and you know what is in it. We sweeten ours with honey or nutella (yum! Chocolate yogurt) or jam.

Homemade yogurt is 50% cheaper and better for you than what the grocery store is selling. So if you have people in your family who would starve without multiple servings of yogurt each day, yogurt making will save you gobs of money. Really.

Just don’t melt your yogurt maker like I did.

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Cheap Grocery Shopping – Saving Money on Groceries

Friday, January 8th, 2010

I think the only thing higher than unemployment this year, is the cost of food. I am reeling from sticker shock over here. Food is just so expensive, particularly if you want to eat fresh fruit and vegetables.

So I thought it would be a good time to share strategies for cheap grocery shopping. I’ll tell you what I do, you tell me what you do, okay?

1. Make my own. I make my own pizza, my own bread, my own yogurt etc… ad nauseum. The yogurt making is a new thing and should be a huge cost savings.My next post will talk in more detail about making your own yogurt, so stay tuned!

2.Meal planning is the other big way to save money on groceries. You have plan the work and work the plan. As I mentioned in my meal planning post, look at sales and what recipes you like to make and concoct a meal plan between those two data points.

If you aren’t making a meal plan, you are spending too much money at the grocery store.

3.Net price versus purchase price. I have only just started looking at net price the last six months or so. It has been a revelation. Buying in bulk is sometimes more expensive than buying in smaller quantities. The world of  food pricing turns upside down and inside out the second you start looking at net price instead of purchase price.

Find the net price on the shelf tag in very small print. As if they don’t want you to know. Which I’m sure they don’t. Laws should be passed making that font bigger and requiring neon ink.

4. Keep your eyes on the ground. I’m serious. Do not even look at things at eye level. That is all the expensive stuff. The really good stuff–the stuff you can afford– is on the very bottom shelf.  For years, I have bought the shredded cheese at eye level. Just this year, as a result of financial desperation, have I figured out that the cheap cheese is in the bin below the eye level stuff.

If you have to get on your knees to see what is on the bottom shelf, then do it. You can’t afford not to.

5. Go to more than one store. Now this is one I have resisted tooth and nail for a looooong time. In fact, I am just now caving in. The fact is, food is such a significant portion of our budget that the cost of gas is not an issue. I need to get my food receipts down. Period. If I have to go to three stores, so be it.

That being said I do google all the stores and look at their ads to see what the big deals are. This way I’m not guessing and going someplace without knowing what I’ll find.

6. Calculate the cost of meals. This is why I started this blog. I want to track what things are actually costing us and see what is really cheap. I haven’t yet started a price book, but I keep saving my receipts with the intent of doing so. At some point, a formal price book will be done. I procrastinate because that really isn’t how I want to spend my time. But it needs to happen. We are buying stuff at Sam’s Club, getting it home and running the numbers to find we saved less than a dollar on something. A price book will tell us if we should even bother to renew the Sam’s Club membership. Right now I’m unimpressed with bulk buying clubs in our area.

7.Explore alternatives such as the Dollar Store. I keep hearing good things about the Dollar Store so I’m hoping to stop in with the toddler sometime when I’m not swamped with Stuff To Do. I’m happy with our Farmer’s Market–the produce is cheaper than the grocery store, but I would love to find a truly cheap source of staples like spaghetti sauce in glass jars (to avoid chemicals leached from metal cans).

So that’s my advice. What’s yours?

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Making Pizza at Home: A Tutorial on ‘Frugalizing’ Pizza

Friday, January 8th, 2010

Every single frugal blogger espouses the merits of making your own pizza, but no one that I’ve found ever seems to go into detail on how to make a great pizza at home. At most, you get a crust recipe which is only half the battle.

We’ve been making our own pizza now for six months and it’s taken a while to sort out how to do it well. I think we’ve gotten to the point where we are making better pizza than we can buy. I fed the neighbors some pizza last night and there was absolute silence while they ate except for the times they turned to look at me and mumbled through full mouths, “This is really good. Really good.”

Here are some tips that will help you not only save money but make ‘really good’ pizza as well. Be sure to check out my pizza sauce cost saving trick.

Ingredients Matter- ‘Frugalizing’ Pizza Flavor

The crust and the cheese, in my opinion, are what makes or breaks a homemade pizza. You need a good quality pizza cheese which can take some hunting, especially when you are on a budget. We buy our pizza cheese at Sam’s Club in bulk. It’s delicious and (slightly) less expensive than the grocery store’s cheap cheese that has zero flavor. Cheese also keeps well in the freezer making a bulk purchase possible.

The basic ingredients of a pizza dough are; hot water, a bit of sugar or honey, salt, olive oil, yeast and flour.The neat thing about pizza crust is all these ingredients can be purchased in bulk at a decent savings.

Yeast is expensive at the grocery store, but super cheap at warehouse clubs. A year’s supply of yeast will run you about $4.

Flour is also markedly less expensive when purchased in bulk, but hold off on that until a) you are happy with your pizza recipe and are sure making your own pie is going to fit into your lifestyle and b) you are ready to store bulk flour properly to avoid bugs.

Sugar is much cheaper in bulk as are honey and salt. Further these three ingredients will keep almost indefinitely.

Olive oil could be cheaper at the warehouse stores, but since you’re already there, it makes sense to buy it there instead of making a special run someplace else. You might save a few cents if you’re lucky. So exciting, I know. Try to contain yourself. You’ll be saving much more on the other pizza ingredients though.

Okay, so now that we have the crust ingredients and cheese sorted out, it’s time to look at frugalizing the pizza sauce.

‘Frugalizing’ Pizza Sauce Costs – My Secret Cost Cutting Trick

Pizza sauce can be expensive or frugal. We buy Ragu’s Traditional Style Pizza Sauce for $1.39 which is a small jar and the perfect size for saucing a pizza. Canned sauces are even cheaper, but come with a side of chemical additives like Bisphenol A which we try to avoid.

Pizza sauce is actually on my list of things I buy in bulk whenever it’s on sale for 99 cents, although everyone else does the same thing so stores often sell out (Believe it or not, buying cheap pizza sauce can get competitive.). Anyway, my frugal trick to save money on pizza sauce is to schedule a pasta dish for the next night and just use some spaghetti sauce for the pizza, saving the rest of the jar for the next night. This nets two meals for the price of 1 jar of pasta sauce which is much less expensive than buying a ’special’ sauce just for the pizza.

So that’s how you ‘frugalize’ the pizza sauce. Read on to find out how to economize when it comes to pizza toppings.

Economical Pizza Topping

I have to confess, this is one area I have not done a lot of price comparison. I just buy the $4 pack of pepperoni at the grocery store. Please don’t report me to the frugal police!

I do stretch that $4 pepperoni to cover at least 3 pizzas, which brings my cost down to $1.25 a pizza. The trick is to be sure I use up the pepperoni once I open the package within a week or so to avoid spoilage. If pizza isn’t in the cards, I will make calzones for my hubby to take to work and stuff them with pepperoni.

For us, the key has been to ration out our pizza toppings. No one has noticed or complained so I think we’re good here.

We don’t really use anything else on our pizzas. We’ve done onions and banana peppers on occasion, but in reality, the more you put on a pizza, the more it costs to make. If you don’t have to have extra toppings, stick with pepperoni for the lowest cost.

Okay, so that’s about all I have to say on pizza ingredients. It’s time to learn how to make pizza crust.

Our Pizza Crust Recipe

Making pizza crust is not hard. It may take you a few times to feel comfortable, but it really is not difficult. The thing about making bread of any kind is that you can’t rely on rigid measurements, you have to assess the dough as you go and make adjustments. The goal is a soft, but dry-to-the-touch dough.

1 cup hot tap water
Sprinkling of salt
Dash of olive oil
Healthy pinch of sugar or generous dollop of honey
2 tsps yeast

Combine all ingredients in order listed (add yeast last) in a bowl and let yeast ‘bloom’ for a few minutes (i.e. the yeast begins to foam). Then mix in 2 cups of flour. Once that is incorporated, touch the dough. If it’s sticky, add 1/2 cup of flour and mix–repeat this step as necessary until the dough is not sticky. Typically you will not need more than 3 cups total of flour.

Place dough in oven with oven light on to rise for at least 1 hour and no longer than 4 hours. (It’s important to start the dough well before you plan on eating!)

Prepare pizza pan as follows for a crispy, crunchy pizza crust. Grease pan liberally with olive oil. Sprinkle with garlic salt (adds really yummy flavor!).

Roll out pizza dough. Top pizza as desired and bake at 350-375F until done (20-30 minutes).

Special Tools

Up until now, I have used no special tools or equipment to make my pizza. Just a mixer to make the dough. I don’t even roll out the crust with a rolling pin, I use my hands. The ‘pizza pan’ is a cookie sheet. Yep, I don’t even own a pizza stone.

However, I do notice, as I spend more time in the kitchen, that I lack quality tools and aids. This year, a pizza stone made it’s way onto my Christmas list (along with some high quality measuring cups and spoons). With a pizza stone, I can make a round pizza and a more authentic crust, whatever that means. Actually, I think it means I might be able to skip the olive oil I use to grease the cookie sheet which will reduce cost and calories.

So, you may want to consider a pizza stone. Eventually. Once you have mastered the art of the frugal pizza to the point where you think yours tastes better than anything that could be delivered.

Are you making pizza at home? How do you make pizza frugal?

photo credit: Jdurham via morguefile

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It’s a Food Carnival!

Friday, January 8th, 2010

Cheap Meals, Good Food is pleased to host this week’s food carnival. These links will get your stomach growling!

Got pork? Then you need some pork chop recipes for the other white meat.

It’s January and everyone is trying to detox from all the Christmas cookies. Here’s some great information on low carb bread that will help you meet your weight loss goals.

If you’re not into low carb, how about some fantastic and tangy sourdough bread?

Sourdough is a great complement for delicious shrimp recipes. Or what about a homemade beef stew? It all sounds good to me!

To finish off our virtual meal, for the coffee connisseur we have the best small coffee maker.

And to store all this week’s goodies, how about some bulk food storage containers?

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