Part of the mantra of groceries on the cheap assumes we are all busy and have a limited amount of time to spend on kitchen management and providing meals for the family. Is one of the most important part of keeping a noise besides paying the bills. Everything else can wait-- a little while anyway. LOL.
With a limited amount of time, making planning a shopping trip and purchasing groceries a priority and cooking efficiently to make up the difference in time consumed by cooking efficiently pays in the long run. The basic need is to feed your family good nutrition that they will eat. Doing it on the cheap means you can have more food for less money. It's even more important ofmyoumhave limited resources.
That's a long winded way of saying this is an article about efficient cooking. It took me a long time to figure out that cooking the thing that takes the longest time to cook first is more efficient. It took even longer for me to figure out that if I cooked met in batches and portion controlled it, dinner time would be less hectic.
You can scratch cook fast. It takes prepping when the house is more quiet and planning, You can plan almost anywhere , all it takes is a piece of paper and a pen -- waiting for the kind do to get out of school......waiting in the doctors office..waiting for anything-- soccer practice!
Bullet time: things you can do quickly to make meals more efficient. Many can be done while you do the dishes.
- Bake eggs. Just place eggs in a muffin tin and bake in a 350 degree preheated oven for 30 minutes. Dump in an ice bath and dry off and put in refrigerator.
- Wash veggies in vinegar water. Doing all of them at the same time makes one mess to clean up and preps you for the entire week.
- Frying hamburger or ground sausage or both when you get home from the store or shortly thereafter , means the meat can't get away from you and be stuck on the back of the fridge, and it's cooked and ready for any number of meals. It also means you can take the time to de-fat it and make it healthier. The meat is usually the part of dinner that takes the longest to cook. It makes the busy meal hour less hectic.
- Cooking a whole chicken or chickens when they are less than a dollar a pound can be super easy, take almost no time and save a lot of money. Cut up the cooked,chicken into the dark meat, the breasts, and bag the vines for soup stock. To cook a whole chicken fast: place a quartered, peeled onion in the bottom of a slow cooker. Rinse the chicken and clean out the insides. Rub the outside with a slice rub that you have pre made, and put the chicken in the pot over the onion, Cover, amd cook for 1 hour a pound on high heat. Non- passive time. About five minutes. Clean and disinfect everything that raw meat has touched including everything you touch with chicken hands. Prepping your work station helps. Place slow cooker insert on the counter beside the sink, place the slice rub in a disposable coffee filter. You can place the onion on the slow cooker. Wash the chicken, place ot on the slow cooker insert, and dry rib it. Wash your hands and disinfect the sink and counter., place the insert in the slow cooker and cover and program the slow cooker. Five minutes tops!
- Make your own mixes when you have free time. Children can help , it can be a good lesson in counting or fractions. Smaller children just like to stir or push the food processor or blender buttons. It's good for them to see what things have in them. Food doesn't have to come out of a box or bag.
- Non fried re-fried beans are a fraction of the cost of refried beans in a can and have no fat! They can be made in a slow cooker with a potato masher or with a pressure cooker and a food processor.
- Save bread heels and either grate them on the largest side of a box grater or in a food processor. Why pay someone upwards of 2.00 a pound for their dry bread and throw yours away!
- Minutes to make a cream soup base mix. Many dollars and less preservatives ahead.
- It takes minutes to make oatmeal in the microwave and it's a lot less expensive and more nutritious than the packaged mixes. Leaving a measuring cup in some things saves a lot of time. Measuring cups are at the dollar store. A 1/2 cup measure is always in my oatmeal canister. I buy oatmeal by the ten pound box at Costco. It's also a dollar a lime at the dollar tree. Good source of fiber and protein.
- I cook pasta in the microwave. Anything that has little non- passive cooking helps. A watched pot never boils? Set it and forget it means you can make the rest of the dinner while the noodles cook. Sauce in a jar or can (cheaper than scratch on sale ) and pre made by you meatballs or crumbles and a salad or green beans makes dinner.
- Or cook elbows in the microwave while you make cream soup mix on the stove and add grated cheese. Homemade Mac and cheese not from a box. More nutrition and better taste. Remember cheese whey is what my grandmother used to sell to the farmers to slop the hogs. You add the milk to make it back to cheese-- just eat the cheese! FYI. Annie's box of Mac and cheese has exactly the same nutrition as the Kraft box. But, Annie's has more fat! Because pasta comes in a pound box doesn't mean you have to cook the pound box.
- Which brings me to......hambirger helper I tested had just over four ounces of pasta in it. I never pay more than a dollar a pound for pasta and frequently pay .75 or less. I have paid .38 before. You can also get pasta with a serving of veggies in it and double Dover for discounted prices too. Pasta is a buck for 1.5 pounds at the tree. It's not necessarily the best quality. I prefer the blue box or rotini.
- By the way, the "cheese sauce that had no cholesterol in it was 1.57 ounces. It calculated out to 13.00 a pound. I never met a cheese I didn't like, and I never met a cheese that didn't have cholesterol. LOL. You can buy mighty good cheese for 13.00 a pound.
- Put your macaroni in the microwave to cook. Put already fried hamburger in a pan. Add some frozen mixed veggies or peas and carrots, and a can of drained chopped tomatoes, reserving the juice. Drain the cooked macaroni, add to the pan and stir add in enough reserved tomato juice to make the right consistency heat to warm it up and add grated cheese. Turn off the heat and cover to let the cheese melt. Stir. More food, better taste, less money.
Groceries on the cheap is looking at the "put the meal on the table train" from a different perspectives.
The emphasis is on purchasing good shelf stable or frozen food for a RBP in quantity - enough to last you until it goes on sale again or to keep a controlled non-perishable stock of the things you use on a weekly basis.
This means that instead of shopping daily or weekly for just the things you need to cook your meals for the week. You go to two stores and buy :
1) a protein that is a RBP - enough to make that meal for x number of days. (I.e.: if you eat it once a week, buy enough for 4 meals.)
2) produce and dairy you will need to fill in the meals for the week.
3) a stock item, if you need to and it is on a RBP - enough to fill in to your self imposed stock level.
You often are paying 1/2 price for your food. This allows you to put well-balanced meals on the table consistently on a four dollar a day per person budget. You spend more time on the locomotive ( planning and shopping ) end of the train, and less time in the caboose ( kitchen )by
cooking more efficiently.
Four dollars a day is the target amount for people on snap. My premise is that of you can do it on 4 dollars a day, spending more is not difficult and you still get more nutrition for your buck.
No comments:
Post a Comment