While living alone, I always justified my prepared food purchases by saying that it was just tough to cook for one person. Even now that I have a roommate, I find myself doing a lot of quick cooking and eating a lot of frozen meals and sandwiches, just because it’s easier.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to do a bit more cooking, even if it’s just throwing together pasta, chicken, and veggies. It’s easy, fast, and cheap. But I’ve noticed that with all this cooking at home, my grocery bill is actually going up. Why? Because good quality ingredients aren’t cheap. Plus I’m not exactly planning my meals so as to make these meals cheap. Rather than buy one chicken and cooking it and using it for multiple meals, if I need chicken to chop up and put into something, I just buy chicken breasts. Plus I don’t have a fully stocked pantry, so I find that I’m buying things that most people already have in their cupboards. But I’m just easing into the cooking. I’m trying to pick recipes that sound good and that will make good leftovers.
Over the next few months, I’m going to try to work to get better at meal planning. It’s tough, since my roommate and I aren’t really into any sort of routine. Neither of us is regularly home for home for dinner any day of the week, so we can’t even cook together.
But even if it is more expensive, it’s fun to cook from scratch. Somehow, everything always tastes better when I worked to make it. Of course, that could have to do with the fresh ingredients as well. Plus I like knowing that I’m not putting all sorts of preservatives into my body.
So for now, I’m going to work on eating healthy and trying to make cooking at home a more frugal endeavor. I’m having fun going through all the cookbooks I have. I just struggle to decide what to cook next.
I’m with you on the cooking thing. It’s hard to make it happen all the time, but I prefer not to eat a lot of prepared stuff either. Trader Joe’s is really good for kind of “half way” things that don’t take much to finish preparing (and don’t break the bank). Also, I like their sauces – I keep red curry and BBQ on hand so plain old chicken and veggies have a little more excitement.
I also really like chicken thighs. You can buy them skinless/boneless and the calorie/fat difference from breasts is miniscule while they are significantly cheaper than breasts. I happen to just like them, too. Buying a whole chicken and using it for multiple meals is great (although my DH can punish a chicken so leftovers go out the window). We do better with the built in portion control of thighs! Don’t be afraid to buy economy/family packs. We wrap ours in tin foil and freeze them for later use.
I cook almost every night but often in a quick and dirty fashion. If at all possible, I make double and save the rest for our lunches the next day. Cooking a big vat of something (like chili, soup, a casserole) on the weekend is another good way to have ready to go lunches or dinners throughout the week when you don’t feel like cooking.
Good luck with your cooking and I hope you continue to have fun with it!
This also sounded like an awesome idea:
http://elasticwaist.com/2008/11/delicious-hot-pockets-that-won.php
I agree! I love to cook and it can be expensive. I do some Trader Joe’s things mixed with normal groceries. My pantry is rarely fully-stocked because when it is, I use it all! I try to meal-plan, but it’s mostly lunches that I make for the week (on Sundays, batch cooking) and then I scrounge stuff together for dinner. I rarely buy snacks anymore (except ice cream and the occasional bag of chips) since they can add up a LOT. So it’s a lot of fruit & veggies for me.
I’ve posted recipes on my blog before… I do a lot of ethnic cooking (Thai/Indian mostly) and it can keep the cost down by eating vegetarian meals sometimes, such as subbing garbanzo beans for chicken, etc.
Good luck!
I like to cook but hate the cleanup so our meals are very simple. But with this economy, we’re more dependent on what we grew this past Summer than grocery store produce. Good ideas for pinching pennies. Got an idea for preventing the gas from garbanzo beans?!? Vikki http://www.food-self-sufficiency.blogspot.com