10 hacks to save money and make life easier.

Part of Groceries on the cheap is that you may spend a little more time planning a grocery haul ( when you are dealing with a basket coupon or a buy xx, save xx sale. )  I am not going to tell you that it takes no time to make sure things are put in the pantry in some assemblance of order.   Or that studying  the ads and meal planning is not time consuming.

  I study the ads in our area and I meal plan on line.   You can use all kinds of ways to mealplan that doesn’t take time.   My mother used to schedule the same meal for a specific day.    We could tell what day of the week it was by what she was cooking when we hit a the door from school.    Other people write down 10 meals that they cook on a regular basis and rotate them three times a month.
There are , also, people that meal plan once a month.   All of these meal plans are flesxible.   We don’t necessarily eat Mondays meal on Monday.   It’s whatever works.

Because we all wear many hats, i make up the time I spend planning by cutting time on the cooking end.   I make money (save ) planning, I dont make money cooking.  

• Make your own bread crumbs with heels and dry bread.  Get it out of the plastic wrapper before it grows hair.   Before I had a good food processer,  I used to dry it by putting it in the cold oven until it was dry.   Then I put a grater on a sheetpan and went out on the deck and grated it.  
• Make your own cream soup base.   It saves a lot of money and doesn’t take much time. There are two receipts, one is low fat, the other low salt.   
• Making your own ranch dressing mix, onion soup mix, taco seasoning and seasoned rice mix saves bundles and you can make one a week easy.   Good way to teach children fractions and measurements. 
• Buy broken nuts in the bulk isle. (Winco) .   You don't have to chop them much and they are ready for coating chicken or to put in cookies. 

• Making a quick muffin is a way to feed children breakfast fast and it saves a lot of money.  Breakfast muffins can be made ahead and frozen if they last that long.  
• Buy pizza sauce from the DT.  Put it in a ice cube tray and freeze.  When frozen, dump the cubes in a zip lock bag and store in the door of the freezer.   2 “ice cubes” cover a home made pizza. 
• Pizza crusts are .19 when made with a bulk flour and yeast.   Flour, salt, yeast, water and 2 tsp of olive or veggie oil.   It takes about 3 minutes and pizza dough bought at the store is between 1.50 an 2.00/. 
• Homemade pizza (cheese) is 1.05 a pizza when made with sourced products.   One day next week cheese is 2.00 a lb at Fred Meyers.   I often get it for less than 2.50 a lb.    Pepperoni is a dollar at the dollar store.   Pepperoni coupons don't work for the small packages, but a few veggies added to the pizza and you can get away with 1/2 a package of pepperoni.   
• Hard cooked eggs are a snap when you bake them in the oven.   Put eggs , once each in muffin cups.   Bake  in a 350 degree oven for 30 minutes . Immediately, remove the eggs (a spoon works well) to an ice bath. The eggs cook perfectly every time and peel easy. 
• Doing a little prep when you have time and the house is 🤫 quiet can save a lot of time later.  You are doing things in batches and it takes less time with less clean up.

• Deli containers are .50 each at Amazon.  They stack and take less space .