Feeding Your Family for Less

Thanks to all the women who braved the icy roads to come out last night! We really enjoyed being able to share with you our ideas and practices that we've found effective. This post is really the same stuff we went over last night -- we just wanted to make sure you could send it out to anyone who wasn't there, or a sister or friend. Keep in mind that these are just our recommendations. Please, please, please, do whatever works for you....but it won't hurt to try something new once in a while too!

By the way, we got the idea for this outline here

1) Make a meal plan.

• Plan around grocery store sales – Look through the grocery fliers and plan out what meals you can make with what you purchase while it’s on sale (If you like/use a product that is on sale, by all means stock up!)
• Plan around your pantry – take an inventory of what is in your freezer and use it! Plan out what meals you can make with what is in your pantry/freezer/fridge, and only buy the other ingredients that you’ll need to make those meals
• Making a multi-week meal plan (3 weeks works best for Sarah) reduces the number of trips to the store and will free up money in your budget to buy and extra bottle of wine,
  go out to dinner, or make an extra-special dinner.

2) Choose recipes with a low price per serving.

• Build meals around less expensive meats like split chicken breasts, pork chops and stew meat.
• Check out $5 Dinners (www.5dollardinners.com) for meals that can be made for $5 or less
• Eat your leftovers! If you can’t eat the actual leftover, then recycle them (if you make a roasted chicken one day, later in the week you can make chicken soft tacos or chicken salad)
• Try vegetarian once a week. Without meat, a meal automatically becomes cheaper. Rice and beans as a side dish is an easy addition to any meal that fills you up and keeps money in your pocket. Be creative with rice and beans. Another great inexpensive vegetarian option is omelet’s – you still get your protein, but without the expensive meat.

3) Use coupons for your entire meal.

• Seek out coupons for every component of your meals-main dish, sides, veggies and dessert.-before deciding check your coupons for something that might work!
  You can find coupons in many places.
  o Sunday Paper
  o Websites/Blogs (some stores do NOT take printed coupons, you need to ASK first)
  o Magazines
  o Grocery Stores
  o Coupons Swaps (asking neighbors/relatives for their Sunday coupons will help you obtain multiples)
  · You can even do this for going out to eat!
  Entertainment books are great (lots of B1G1 free meals) after you’re done with dinner go somewhere else for dessert and use a coupon there too! Also try http://www.restaraunts.com/

4) Opt for frozen foods.

• Frozen chicken & veggies are cost effective & nutritional.
• Frozen food on sale are great to stock up on and easy to whip up when you are short on time
• Frozen convenience foods (TV dinners, prepared meals) and NOT cost effective and generally not cost effective.
• Buying large quantities of meat on sale separating into smaller portions at home and freezing is cost effective and fills the freezer!
• Learn which stores sell which products you like and buy what tastes good to you. Aldi’s sells delicious chicken breasts – 5 lbs for $7. Target usually has the cheapest on Tyson frozen chicken products.

5) Be smart about private label items. In many cases you can save by opting for the private label over a brand name, but by being smart about coupons, you can often get the brand name for less than the private label.

• Use coupons whenever possible. Remember that Giant Eagle and Dave’s Supermarkets both double coupons up to $1.00, which can greatly reduce the price.
• If an item is on sale for buy-one-get-one-free, you can use two coupons – which brings the price down a lot!
• Be brand flexible – for example, if you love Colgate Max Fresh toothpaste, but a store has Crest toothpaste on sale for $2, how much is the extra cost for Colgate at that point? Many grocery stores will have sales on Health and Beauty products, whereas stores like Marc’s/Target/Walmart typically offer the cheapest prices.
• Avoid buying Health & Beauty, cleaning and paper products from drugstores or grocery stores – Unless there is a great sale that makes it cost effective. If you normally buy everything from one store, consider buying grocery items from grocery stores, and personal /household items from Marc’s/Target/Walmart . The extra trip will be worth the savings.