Breakfast Isn’t Just for Breakfast Anymore
I don’t think that the “downturn” in the economy is what’s killing the finances in my home. Rather, I think that what’s been pinching my wallet most acutely is the continually rising cost of food. Ever try to average the cost of each bag of groceries that you take away from the store? Used to be, say ten years ago, that if you kept your per bag average below ten dollars you were doing well. Yeah, try that today. Not that it’s completely impossible, but let’s face it, as soon as you chuck that 2 lb. block of cheddar into a bag you’ve already used up 50-80% of that ten dollar limit. Go ahead, there’s still room in that bag for more groceries, and the good news is that by employing a good food purchasing strategy you may yet get your per bag average to fifteen dollars or below.
In the last six months, my wife and I have worked quite consciously at reducing the food costs in our house. My two teenage boys spend 2-3 days a week at our house; that’s right, teenage boys—like two small locust hordes, passing through the kitchen in awfully regular cycles, say every forty minutes, swiping any food silly enough to remain in sight and executing swift raids in and out of the fridge with extreme prejudice. But I digress. The point here is that in the last six months we have been able to reduce our family food budget from about $450-$500 to around $300 per month.
Given that food prices have jumped 60% globally in the past year alone due to crazy weather patterns, market instabilities, and the soaring cost of oil, getting your food costs under control can seem both highly unlikely and highly necessary. So how have we done that around here? Well, there are a few basic answers to that question, and each of those basic answers has some fairly important components.
What to Do
There are the basic common sense adjustments like planning meals based on what’s on sale instead of what you’re craving. When I go to the store, there’s usually a list in my hand, but I’m ready to swap the chicken on my list for hamburger when I spot the ten pound log on sale for six bucks. I buy it, chop it in half, freeze half and use half of the other half immediately, saving the rest for later in the week. And by being flexible with what I “need” I can go a number of ways with the burger meat—if there are no bags of buns for less than two bucks, I’m looking for on sale tortillas and going with tacos.
First
Do a gut check on what you want versus what you need and inhabit your best pragmatist role. Now here’s a quick checklist to savings of up to 20-50%:
- Shop in bulk. This is especially true for granola, nuts, and spices (I save 60-80% on spices by buying bulk).
- Swap store brand for name brand. Many times, it’s made by the same company anyway.
- Try a new kind of lunchmeat or cereal when they’re on sale. I buy a particular brand of bread, which I originally found that I liked because my store had it on sale, and I watch for it now.
- Buy three times what you need of a product if it’s on sale. I buy lots of ham lunchmeat when it’s under $3 and eat it during the next week or two when the price has risen back up to the standard $5-6. And if I run out I won’t buy it until it goes back on sale, making tuna fish, egg salad, or PB & J instead.
- Freeze what you can to make sale items last. Bread keeps really well in the freezer. Perishables go on sale when they are nearing their end on the shelves. A freezer can extend the life of many fruits, vegetables, and meats.
Another tactic we’ve tried is having breakfast for dinner. Yep. Breakfast for dinner is the new black. All the cool kids are doing it; why not give it a try? Heck, it may be a gateway meal for you, drawing you into all kinds of cool food cost savings. Breakfast is the one meal a day that folks don’t expect meat or cheese, two big culprits in the soaring food cost battle. Eggs are much cheaper by comparison, and let’s face it, pancakes are downright inexpensive.
Be Creative
Dress up your breakfasts. My wife loves it when I slice a banana in quarter inch thick diagonal pieces and lay them on top of the pancake before flipping it over. Raisins, granola, bits of other fruit all work to make your meal unusually attractive and delicious. And potatoes. One of the ways I manage to feed my boys and keep the food good and the costs low is by boiling a pot of potatoes once a week and storing them in the fridge. Heating up a skillet, chopping half an onion and putting that in with some olive oil, salt and pepper, and potato pieces is a good side to a couple of eggs. And potatoes are really, really good for you (more potassium than a banana!), and really cheap by the five- or ten-pound bag. We do breakfast burritos as well. Menu Ideas
In fact, that brings me to another tactic—eat like they do in third and second world nations. Ever notice that the ingredients in most Mexican restaurants are usually low cost? Beans, eggs, skirt steak, corn tortillas. Let me share a quick recipe for you that illustrates some of these principles. The only tricky part about it is the name—chilaquiles (chill-a-key-ays).
Menu Ideas
One of the reasons that people don’t like corn tortillas is that they get dry and they break when they’re not super fresh. Do what traditionally is done with old tortillas in Mexico, put them in some other dish. To make chilaquiles simply heat some oil in a pan, throw in what you want, say onions, garlic, peppers, tomatoes, whatever, and as they begin to cook, rip up some tortillas (one or two per person) and let them cook, stirring, over medium to medium high heat. Once they get softer and begin to brown, turn the heat down to medium or just under and put in your eggs. Stir everything up, add anything else like cheese or salsa, and serve with maybe a bit of sour cream or hot sauce. Enjoy! One of the beautiful things here is that you can adjust what’s in the dish to what you happen to have in your fridge – a bit of left over produce, meat, etc.
Get back to the Basics
Another overlooked and cheap food that covers lots of basic nutritional requirements (loads of protein, for example) is beans. A can of refried beans goes for about 79 cents (on sale, when you can buy three of them!) and is much more versatile and better eating than you currently may believe. I put a few spoonfuls of beans with a little bit of cheese on top on the side of a plate, pop it in the microwave for a minute or two and then place eggs, potatoes, or chilaquiles on the rest of the plate, a piece of banana or other fruit and voila, a dish is born! Or for a cheap dinner or lunch, put about 1.5 to 2 inches of beans in a bowl, grate cheese on top, cook for two minutes in the microwave and finish it off under the broiler until it bubbles. Serve this with tortilla chips (usually about the cheapest of the chips in the store), sour cream, salsa, and maybe, when in season, a half of an avocado, or seasonal tomatoes, and it’s a really tasty and very cheap, no meat meal. This meal is really good with a cold pilsner or lager on the side (or, as in my case, a cold lager with chips, beans and salsa on the side!).
The other way to save with beans, albeit it’s a bit more work, is to make a stock (broth) with the bones, fat, and scraps of chicken, turkey, or other meats (ham) and lots of chopped veggies, especially onions, garlic, carrots, celery, and peppers, and salt and pepper and some oil. Brown it all at a medium high heat, add a couple bay leaves, thyme, and whatever other flavor you like, then add water and heat at medium, stirring, for a couple of hours. Soak some beans overnight (pintos, great northerns, navy, whatever) and add those to the stock, then cook it low for four to six hours. Make up some cornbread (substituting yogurt for half the milk for better moisture and consistency), serve and eat!
Along with potatoes, eggs, and beans, rice and pasta are your other low cost saviors. We buy mac-and-cheese or dollar boxes of four cheese pasta boxed foods and add stewed tomatoes, broccoli, polish sausage, tuna, etc., to spice it up, increase the nutrition astronomically, and still keep the total dish under three dollars for 2-4 people (and that is often the most expensive meal of the day-see eggs and potatoes and PB & J for the other two meals).
Rice can be dressed up any old way. Here’s an easy one that you can vary according to what you have in your house already. Jambalaya is the basic idea. Brown onions and garlic and whatever else with some cheap polish sausage (usually on sale for three bucks or less), chicken, etc., and add salt, pepper, thyme, maybe some red pepper, coriander or cumin, and any sauce such as soy, then add the rice and water and let it cook up! Cheap seasonal vegetables go a long way to making this a really good dish. My step-mom once told me that if your food is colorful (I’m sure she meant natural colors, not arctic blue energy drinks), it’s healthy. Orange peppers, for example, can be gotten for fifty cents to a dollar when in season – and most of us are willing to spend that much for a candy bar.
A last idea for you is to commit to eating a meal from your cupboards or pantry two or more meals per week. Seriously, folks, have you looked at those items in the back of your cupboards or on the top shelf in the last six months? That’s right, you can do it. There’s food up there that you paid good cash for. Get creative, people. Mix and match, add that item or two from your fridge, and the cost for the month is nada (since you put it on some other month’s budget from six years ago-good thing dried and canned goods keep!).
Look, folks, the means for eating both healthy and cheap food aren’t the really difficult part of this endeavor. We live in a culture in which we expect to be able to afford to eat most anything that we want, whenever we want to eat it. By remembering some basic principles involved you can save 20-50% of your food costs. Multiply that monthly savings times twelve and start thinking about what that will save you this year—thousands!
About the author: Pedro Bicchieri has had a passion for reading and writing. With the distinctive fame of being pulled over for reading while driving, he switched to reading, writing, and developing poetry while walking around his hometown of Ellensburg, Washington. Read more from this author
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