Now-a-days money is tight for almost all of us. Inflation has made the cost of living skyrocket over the past few years, hitting food prices especially hard. Plus, there’s the growing awareness around how the quality of food we eat affects our health. So, if we are going to save money on groceries, while still preparing good, nourishing food for our family, we need to get creative.
The average American spends about $270/week on groceries! Guys, that’s insane! So much that we’ve grown accustomed to buying at the store can easily be made at home. And no, making food from scratch does not mean you are constantly slaving away in the kitchen. That’s where strategy comes in ;).
Here are some practical tips to help you save money on groceries every month. Let’s see if we can’t cut that national average in half!
Buy In Bulk
I’m sure a lot of you already have a membership to your local membership warehouse. That’s certainly a great place to start! Buying in bulk does cost more up front, but over the course of the month you can save quite a bit of money. You can also choose to buy from companies such as Azure standard, where a truck comes once a month to a drop point where you go to pick up your food.
These stores also have a lot of traps in them, snacks that look delicious, premade foods you think you have to have and so on. Always go in with a list of items to get to help you keep focused. Also, try to buy everything you need for the month in one trip. Limiting how often you go to the store helps save gas money, too.
Buy whole chicken instead of it’s parts
Cooking with whole chickens was intimidating to me at first. A lot of the recipes I followed before used only specific parts of chickens and never the whole thing. Plus I hadn’t ever attempted to break down a chicken. Once finally confronting that fear I discovered it’s really not hard at all. Roasting a chicken is one of the easiest dinners to prepare, and breaking down a chicken only takes a few minutes.
The chickens we typically buy at the store or from farmers are double breasted Cornish cross. The breasts on these birds are large and can be cut up smaller to go further to feed a family. You can also save the thighs and drumsticks for another recipe. Any recipe that calls for thighs can be made with the drumsticks as well. Save the wings for a dedicated wing night.
You can also cook two chickens at once (or more if your family is large), use one for dinner and save the other for shredding meat to use in another recipe. That shredded, pre-cooked chicken can be used to make chicken salad, white chicken chili, taco’s, and so much more.
Plus when you buy whole chickens, you get to keep all the bones. Which leads us to my next tip.
Make your own bone broths
Buy your meat with the bone in and save the bones for making broth. Broth is so easy to make and such a great way to use up what would otherwise be wasted. To make broth add bones, veggie scraps, water and salt to a large pot or crockpot and simmer on low for 24 hours. Strain out the broth, add more water to the pot and cook for another 24 hours.
After that you’ve got yourself homemade bone broth that literally only required you to dump bones and water in a pot and then strain it out a day later. No matter how busy your schedule, you can absolutely start making your own broths.
Make your own yogurt
Yogurt is an easy way to get probiotics into picky eaters. You can add it to so many things and it’s positively delicious with some homemade granola on top. (Hint, start making your own granola, too. Oh, and cereal is a money pit as well.) But it’s no secret that good quality yogurt comes with a pretty high price. Especially if you eat it almost daily.
The good news is that yogurt is so easy to make! If you’ve got an Instant Pot, yogurt is practically as easy as breathing. I make yogurt using whole milk so that one gallon of milk becomes one gallon of yogurt. It takes only a few minutes of hands-on-work. You do need to make sure you’ll be home for a few hours at least to be able to check on the temperature of the milk at the beginning. Once you’ve adding the yogurt culture and the milk is incubating you can walk away until the next morning.
Buy cheese in blocks, not shredded or sliced.
Making cheese is something I haven’t tackled yet. The milk needed to make it is just hard to source in my area. However, we love cheese and eat lots of it but buying shredded cheese or cheese slices adds up fast. A two pound cheddar cheese block is about $8 at Costco. The shredded cheese at two pounds five ounces is about $18. That’s almost a ten dollar difference for the nearly the same amount of cheese.
Shredded cheese can also be coated with anticaking agents to prevent the cheese from clumping together so that it looks nicer on display. If you want to avoid unnecessary ingredients, and save money, buy blocks of cheese.
Start baking bread
If you’ve never made bread before, don’t worry it’s not hard at all! With bread baking you will need at least 3 hours at home, but with that much time you can make several weeks worth of bread. (Also, those three hours isn’t all hands on work, in fact most of it it waiting for the dough to rise.) All you really need to make your own homemade bread is flour, yeast, water, and salt. You don’t even need yeast if you decide to bake with sourdough.
Find a bread recipe that you can scale up to make large batches at once. Also something basic that can be used for anything from sandwich bread to cinnamon rolls will help save you a lot of time in the kitchen. If you decide to bake a lot of bread at once, store extra’s in the freezer. Bread freezes well and tastes just as fresh after thawed, especially if you throw it in the oven for a few minutes to warm up.
Utilize leftovers as snacks, breakfasts, lunches, or repurposed dinners
It’s so easy to make a big batch of food, put the leftovers in the fridge and completely forget about it. Guilty as charged… So, if you want to save money on groceries, and stop wasting food, start using your leftovers.
Establish a system where you can see all of the leftover food in the fridge every time you open the doors. Choose one day every week where one meal will be only leftovers. And one day every week clean out all the leftovers from your fridge. Find a way to eat what’s there or freeze it for later.
In fact, doubling up a recipe and freezing the extra half is a great way to avoid the temptation to buy out on a day when you have no time to cook. That helps save money on groceries and restaurants. Win, win.
Buy tomato sauce instead of pasta or pizza sauce
Growing up we used to always have jars of pasta sauce that we could quickly warm up and pour over our noodles. Early on in my marriage we would buy pasta sauce but we always ended up adding more seasonings to it. It made much more sense to buy tomato sauce, which can be used for all sorts of things, and make our own spaghetti sauce.
Some recipes will require only half a can of tomato sauce. You can turn the other half into pizza sauce buy adding some Italian herbs, garlic powder, salt and pepper. Save that in the freezer for when you want to make some pizza’s.
Tomato sauce is a much more versatile ingredient that also saves you a decent amount of money compared to dedicated pasta and pizza sauces.
The simplest way to save money on groceries, is to start cooking more
That’s basically what it comes down to. The more time you are willing to work at home, the more money you will save. While that work doesn’t get paid with a check every two weeks, it does make the money you do have stretch further. If you are a stay at home mom, your work does provide an insane amount of value to the home economy.
What tips have helped you save money at the store? How much have you been able to cut off your grocery lists? I’d love to hear it in the comments below.
P.S. Are any of you just as shocked as I was to learn how much American’s spend on groceries every week?
Leave a Reply