“Eat it or it’ll go to waste” she’d always say.

“If it’ll go to waste, what did you cook it for”? was my thought, even as a young kid. “Isn’t there a way to figure out exactly how much you should cook?” I didn’t actually say that sentence out loud…I never was fond of the taste of soap. But, it only took my 8th grade math skills to figure out what grandma hadn’t been able to for decades.

The precise portions you feed your family is the basis of cooking on a budget. When you know exactly how much each person will eat, you’ll know how much to buy, and how much to cook, eliminating over-buying, over-cooking, wasting leftovers, or letting food spoil while in your possession.

The average cooked portion is 4 ounces protein, 3 ounces vegetable, 5 ounces starch per person. If your husband is a big eater, adjust upward. If your wife is petite like mine, adjust downward. But, with a digital scale and keen observation, perhaps a notebook, you’ll arrive at the quantifiable amount that everyone in your house eats.

Now, you can begin saving money at the grocery store, or using the money you’ve saved by buying more wholesome, exotic, or expensive ingredients because you know there will be little waste. You’ll also be helping the health of your family buy controlling the amount of food they eat.

In her everyday cooking, Grandma offered you more and more of what she prepared and she did it out of love for you. Today, when you’re cooking at home, the best way to show love to your family is by preparing a wholesome meal that is an appropriate amount for all to enjoy, while still being able to cook on a budget.

This post provide courtesy of: My Weekly Menu Planner where you can find meal planning tips, recipes and more.

Can’t Cook On a Budget? It’s Grandma’s Fault

Previously, we’ve talked about saving food in purchasing, storing, and portioning to get the greatest effect if you’re cooking on a budget. But, many of these skills take time to develop and perfect. If you’re not cooking like a chef at home yet, the likelihood is that you have some over-purchasing, over-cooking, or over-portioning that has lead to leftovers.

How you use your leftovers can make a great impact on your everyday cooking budget, but there are few recipes that you can find dealing specifically with leftovers when cooking at home.

Here’s where you need basic cooking methods to be able to create something regardless of what the ingredients are. Our online cooking classes concentrate on the basic methods behind cooking that will empower you to create great meals from any of the ingredients you have on hand. This is especially useful when preparing something from the result of your everyday cooking leftovers.

For the best use of leftovers, try to keep ingredients separate before presentation. For example, cook a chicken breast and then top it with sauce, one plate at a time. This way, if you have leftover chicken, it doesn’t have tomato sauce on it and can be made into chicken salad for lunch the next day. Or, it can be shredded and rolled into a tortilla for a burrito, but it won’t taste like last night’s chicken.

You can even plan your leftovers in advance. Using the knowledge of your family’s portions, let’s say you purposely cook ½ pound of shrimp more than you need for tonight’s dinner. You set this over-cooking aside, prepared to make shrimp salad or shrimp tacos tomorrow evening. This not only saves time, but money also by making two satisfying meals, rather than one over-portioned meal and some leftovers that are discarded later.

When you’re cooking at home everyday and you’re left with leftovers, or have even planned for leftovers, HOW you treat the food afterward can double your savings and protect your cooking budget.

This post provide courtesy of: My Weekly Menu Planner where you can find meal planning tips, recipes and more.

Leftovers Are Like Finding Money When You Cook On a Budget

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Cooking on a Budget Part II

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Cooking on a Budget: Chicken Parmesan

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Cooking on a Budget in One Minute: Pasta Primavera

This post provide courtesy of: My Weekly Menu Planner where you can find meal planning tips, recipes and more.

Household Budget Worksheets.

The most important thing to do is to plan the meal ahead of time, before you go shopping. A typical meal consists of a main dish (fish, chicken, pork, beef), a starch (rice, pasta, potatoes), and a vegetable or salad. For example, you may go into a restaurant, and order a steak; typically, it will come with a potato and vegetables. You’ll want to keep the three elements in mind when you plan your meal. The main dish, should be the primary focus of your meal, after all, you don’t go into a restaurant and order a baked potato in order to get the steak. So, you’ll want to start by deciding what the main dish is going to be. Look in your newspaper for circulars from your local grocery stores, and find out what is on sale. Pork chops are usually a good deal. I know I commonly find pork loin chops for around $1.00 per serving, and they are thick enough to stuff with other ingredients. Keep in mind the price per serving when you’re shopping. $8.99 per pound for tuna steaks may seem like a lot, but 1 pound is 3-4 servings, meaning about $2.25-$3.00 per serving… not too bad.

Decide what you want to do with the main dish. If the meat is thick enough, you can add a lot of flavor by stuffing it. Here, you can add things like cheese or sausage, or use your favorite stuffing mix. This is an opportunity to add a lot of flavor without spending a lot of money. You can buy a jar of sun dried tomatoes for probably around $5.00. That may seem like a lot, but one jar can go a long way. You only need a little bit to add a lot of flavor to a meal. You can also whip up a quick marinade to add flavor to the meat.

The sides are probably the least expensive part of the meal. Grab a head of lettuce, a couple of tomatoes, and maybe a little bit of cheese, and you have a great salad. You can also chop up some of the sun dried tomatoes, mentioned earlier, and use them to add some flavor to the salad. You can find several varieties of frozen vegetables in the freezer section of the store that are just as good a fresh. Just heat them up and serve. For a starch, potatoes, rice, or pasta are all inexpensive, and you can find several ways to add variety to them. Add some roasted garlic and a little bit of olive oil, or you can use the aforementioned sun dried tomatoes.

It isn’t hard to cook a nice meal if you just use your imagination. Choose your meat, and then decide on how you want to add flavor, and what you can do to make something a little different than what you usually do. Choose a nice inexpensive vegetable or salad, and a side dish, and you’ve got a complete meal. You can do it in your own kitchen, and you can make it for less than $5.00 per serving.

This post provide courtesy of: My Weekly Menu Planner where you can find meal planning tips, recipes and more.

Ideas For Gourmet Cooking on a Budget

Save money and eat well with the healthful, delicious, and affordable recipes in Budget Meals Everyone is pinching pennies these days. But it’s hard to find the time (and the energy) to devise effective ways to slash your food bill. Now, Budget Meals comes to the rescue with more than 350 everyday and party-special recipes designed to save you money without scrimping on flavor. With recipes including entrees, soups and stews, skillet meals, pastas, salads, side dishes, and eve (more…)

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Better Homes and Gardens Budget Meals: Save big $$$ with smart ways to shop and efficient ways to cook

Here’s a cookbook perfect for budget conscious meal planners…

If you want to save a lot of money on your grocery bills, yet still serve delicious and nutritious meals, this cookbook is for you!

All of the recipes in this book were contributed by Nutrition Educators with your needs in mind. You’ll find breakfast dishes for as little as 4 cents per serving, and main dishes featuring meat for as little as 51 cents per serving.

With hundreds of recipes, you’ll find everything from breakfast; main dishes with meat, poultry, fish and a secti (more…)

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The Tight Budget Cookbook

Think of your family as a team. Every member of the team should participate in the process of providing food for the family, whether it’s hauling in groceries from the car, helping with meal preparation, or stacking the dishwasher.

Consider co-op cooking with another family of similar size. Once or twice a week, one family will cook a larger meal and share half of it with the co-op family. This will give one or two kitchen-free days to each participant. Sharing can work well when people live in close proximity and are very good friends.  I would not try this with strangers or with people whose taste in food is quite different from yours. Planning the shared meals together would be a big help.

Assign breakfast prep to various members of the family on a rotating basis so that Mom is not always the one rushing around in the morning.

Choose breakfast meals that allow for advanced preparation the night before. Recipes that can be prepared after dinner, placed in the refrigerator, and then popped into the oven the next morning are perfect for this.  Also, crock pot breakfasts can be prepared before bedtime, and they will be hot and delicious in the morning for a tiny fraction of the cost of cold cereal or breakfast bars.

Make double or triple amounts of breakfast baking and supper casseroles that do not contain pasta or potatoes and freeze the extras for quick warm up after a busy day.

Cook several pounds of hamburger and freeze the browned hamburger in portion-sized containers to dramatically reduce the time for supper preparation.

Plan meals for several days, a week, or even a month.  This saves decision-making time each day and will also make your shopping trips more efficient.

Most of these tips not only save time, but they also save resources. Cooking larger amounts and planning for the leftovers reduces cooking energy, and more efficient shopping trips save gas and time.

This post provide courtesy of: My Weekly Menu Planner where you can find meal planning tips, recipes and more.

Family Finances: 7 Ways to Save Time and Money on the Food Budget