Shop Smart to Cook More
Save Money on Groceries and Make More Meals
There are millions of "30 minute meal" dinner recipes... hundreds of weekly mealplans, 4-ingredient dinners, and crockpot creations. Does this world of quick and easy solutions make you feel like you can get dinner done in a snap? Sure, one night at a time. What's missing from these one-hit wonders is the follow through to help people feel like they can make quick, healthy, homemade meals every night after night after night. That's right, a lifetime of success. Following are some strategies to employ in your kitchen and weekly routines to help you get to the point where a delicious meal is an afterthought -- something that produces itself out of your kitchen with what can seem like the smallest of efforts.
To Start, Get to Know Your Themes.
Is your a family where a good pasta dish can be a satisfying dinner any night of the year? Is fish your fillet of choice? Get to know your family's staples, and give them a place of prominence on both your grocery list and in your pantry. Yes, that's right, go ahead and buy the bulk-pack of eight boxes of pasta, or the five-pound bag of rice. If you discover it's a staple in your family, dinner will become less stressful when you know you have your standby ingredients on hand.
Next, Focus on Ingredients, and Shop Smart.
Cookbooks like 70 Meals, One Trip to the Store, by Organizing Dinner and Starting With Ingredients, by Aliza Green, can help you learn that what you buy each trip to the store forms the potential opportunities for the meals that trip can produce. For example, in 70 meals, you are instructed to stock your pantry with a list of simple and inexpensive ingredients that will enable you to make any one of the 70 meals in the book any night of the year -- without a trip to the store.
Core Ingredients
The book instructs you to maintain a stock of "core" ingredients, such as:
- chicken broth
- canned diced tomatoes
- black beans
- flour
- butter
- eggs
- a box of rice or pasta
- a few chicken breasts
There are a multitude of combinations for you to create from basics like this. To name a few, the possibilities include black bean soup, tomato soup, chicken pot pie, Mexican style chicken, Italian style pasta. This book helps teach you how to shop for an unlimited supply of dinner possibilities, rather than one recipe at a time.
Starting With Ingredients teaches you how to make several various dishes based on one ingredient. If you have something at home but aren't sure what to do with it, this is a great reference tool. Even the smartest of shoppers can occasionally have a leftover something that they just aren't sure how to transform into a meal. This book presents options to make that ingredient work for a variety of tastes and families.
Dinner happens every night, like it or not. If you put that little effort into shopping smart and planning ahead, you can save mountains of time between 4 and 6 p.m. wondering what to make, where's the stuff to make it with, travelling to the store, and/or ultimately waiting for your takeout/delivery. Empower yourself in your kitchen and tackle dinner head on.
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