Ten Ways to Stretch Your Food Budget

I’ve been living on my self-imposed food budget for just over a month now, and I have so far managed to avoid scurvy, night blindness, and violent fits of chocolate envy. Between pouring over the comparative prices of bulk grains and turning my leftovers into soup, I have dutifully been scribbling notes to myself. What works? What takes a lot of time? What cuts out the most waste? Through my haphazard ruminations, some patterns emerged. The result was a handful of concrete, practical strategies: a few things to add to your culinary repertoire, a few places to look for waste, and some organizational strategies. The list seemed to round out nicely at ten, so here they are: the ten techniques I think will serve you best in stretching your kitchen budget.


Cook your own grains. Nearly every cuisine has a cereal grain for a backbone (though on occasion tubers will take on this starchy role). Western Europe has wheat; Eastern Europe, rye. Most of Asia depends on rice (though millet has even older roots in Asia). South America has corn. It matters little, in terms of saving money, what grain you’re cooking; what does make a difference is that you are cooking your own grains. The basic product that you buy (flour, milled grains) is almost always pretty cheap. What costs more money is processing. When you invest the time to cook your own rice or bake your own bread, your food budget is directly converted to the staple of your diet.

I find it much easier to manage a diet when I stick to one central grain. Right now I’m working with a wheat-centered diet, but that doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally cook a rice- or corn- centered dish. Sticking to one grain, there are just fewer things to manage -- I can easily judge if I have enough bread for the rest of the week or if I’ll need to do some more baking. That calculation is a bit more tricky when measuring a half dozen different grains and leftovers. No matter if it’s bread, millet, quinoa, rice, cous cous or dried pasta, when you cook your own grains your money is efficiently spent.

Eat Dried Beans. I know. There really isn’t anything sexy about dried beans. I don’t know what has done the most harm to the reputation of beans, their propensity to induce flatulence or the very long-standing, rather snobbish verdict that beans are lower-class food. But I adore them. I really think that our little friends in the pulse family are about as close to a superfood as anyone could ask for. Impossibly cheap. Nutritious. Capable of being stored just about indefinitely. Oh, and they are also delicious. Ok, so now the bad news. They do require specific (though not difficult) preparation (properly preparing dried beans can also minimize their wind-generating properties). It’s true that canned cooked beans are a pretty cheap source of protein too, but I think beans are so much better when you cook them yourself. It’s more than just my queasiness about the disturbingly viscous liquid canned beans are suspended in. When you cook your own beans you can add other ingredients to punch up the flavor (garlic, broth, bay leaves, spices). I promise to follow with a post detailing my tips for turning various beans into tasty dishes.

It might be a cliché that rice and beans are the staple foods of the cost-conscious. But there is real wisdom behind this trope; grains and beans are cheap and nutritious. Making them the center of your everyday meals is an easy, effective way to trim down your food budget.


Produce is really important. The concern is not just achieving the right balance of foods for a healthy diet (which does need a lot of plant foods), produce is also essential in making your daily meals satisfying, varied, and interesting. But produce can also be tricky. It is often expensive. It’s unpredictable. It goes bad. I’ve found this to be such a critical area of concern that the next four tips largely address how to buy produce in a cost-effective manner and use it before it goes bad-- though many of the same principles apply for meat and dairy.


Juggle fewer balls. Sometimes maintaining produce feels impossibly complicated. Bananas, pears, kale, potatoes, tomatoes, avocados somehow make their way into your fruit bowl or vegetable drawer, looking so innocent and promising. But then they unexpectedly turn on you. The avocados and bananas are not ripe when you need them, and overnight they turn into something brown and sticky, like clay. Kale turns yellow and bitter while spinach dissolves into a slimy green sludge. It is really, really hard (even for experienced professionals) to gauge exactly when fruits and vegetables will be ripe, and for exactly how long they will last. I think that the easiest thing you can do is to simplify the equation for yourself. Do not buy a lot of produce that has a narrow window of time when it is palatable (fresh greens, avocados, bananas, pears, berries, stone fruits). All of these foods make their own schedule; you have to be ready to act when they are in their prime. If you’re buying too many types of demanding produce at once, you are setting yourself an unpredictable culinary obstacle course. The solution? Buy less, (particularly less types at once). You can also simplify your tasks by buying fruits and vegetables with longer hold times (apples, citrus fruits, root vegetables, onions, winter squash). Buying in this manner does mean that you might have to go to the store a bit more frequently to supplement your fruit or salad greens, but I think it is a worthwhile trade-off for not throwing out your priceless plant foods.

Buy Seasonally. This tip gets bandied about quite a bit in discussions about eating ecologically. Again, it is one of those tips that makes some rational sense -- when less of your dollar is spent on shipping costs (and all of the involved processes to grow and transport produce out of season) your dollar is converted more directly into food. Depending on your source, seasonality can also apply to meat and seafood.

Make your own preserves. A dear friend of mine recently confided to me her childhood memories of canning. It was an all-day affair. In the heat of summer, endless sweaty hours were spent boiling jars, and pitting, skinning and cooking the pounds of slick, wet fruit. It was an activity that left the whole family distinctly cranky.

Let me first say that this is not the type of preserves that I am talking about. In fact, I use the term preserves rather loosely. I would include freezing extra vegetables and simply cooking fruits or vegetables to store in the refrigerator -- anything that extends the life of your produce is some type of preservation. And some of these techniques are phenomenally easy. Tossing cooked or raw vegetables in a simple brine at least triples how long they will last in your fridge (you don’t have to sterilize jars if you’re just making pickles in your fridge!) And if you cook fruit with sugar you can similarly extend its life span. Of course, I’m not arguing against canning your own peaches, but making preserves doesn’t have to be a complicated, intimidating project. And some of the simple things means of making preserves can save you a lot of money by avoiding spoiled produce.

Save useful scraps. A lot of the trimmings of vegetables and fruits are useful ingredients in their own right. This is such a rich topic that I’m making it an ongoing discussion/exploration. I will follow with posts about what scraps are useful to save as well as how to use them. It is surprising how much goodness you can wring out of leftover trimmings. The calculation on this one is obvious: turning scraps that you would normally throw away into delicious food is as close as you can get to making something from nothing.


Consume luxury foods sparingly. I’ll admit that this is the one that scared me. I am fully guilty of making food purchases in the thrall of an exotic or unknown ingredient -- I have bought sapodillas and cold-pressed pumpkin seed oil without the slightest idea as to what I was going to do with them. So it was with some amount of trepidation that I weighed and calculated the cost of ground espresso that it takes to make my morning latte (a habit which I have cut back on, but not eliminated). I would term “luxury” anything that has to either travel from a long distance, or is a highly concentrated product. Wine, beer, liquor, cheese, cream, chocolate, coffee: these are all goods with truly unique qualities but they are made precious by either the great mass of care (and sometimes a lot of raw food matter) that goes into their production, or their unique origin. So far, though, cutting back on the expensive foods hasn’t really bothered me. After my first two-week budget, I had enough money left over to buy myself a cheap, but enjoyable bottle of red wine (thank you, Trader Joe’s for your well-selected, affordable wines) and a bar of good chocolate. Consuming these items sparingly has, for me, actually made them a bit more enjoyable. Call me crazy, but spreading a thick pat of pasture-raised butter on my morning toast or nibbling on a small square of dark chocolate with my afternoon tea leaves me feeling that I eat very richly indeed.


Minimize Processed Food. This is a tough one. So much has been done by all parts of the food industry to make prepared foods convenient and appealing. Often we’re just trying desperately to keep up with overburdened schedules; adding extra culinary tasks seems like an impossibility. I don’t have any easy fix. The calculation is simple though: if you turn basic ingredients into food yourself, you pay for the ingredients. If you buy a food that is processed, you pay for the ingredients plus the processing plus the packaging and marketing. Making food in your own kitchen is just more economical. There are a few products that particularly kill me with the markup. For instance cereal and crackers are fairly basic, grain-based products; the cost of the raw materials in them is very low. The pre-made packaged varieties, however, are not so cheap. Some of these items are pretty easy to make at home (I promise to follow up with my recipes for crackers and granola soon). The absolute worst culprit in this regard, though, has to be soft drinks. Really, any bottled drink. The cost is particularly egregious when you consider that you are getting almost no nutritional value for your money.


Make allowances for your eating and cooking habits. I’m betting that most people have some eating or cooking foible. I need to have a snack in the afternoon. If I don’t then I get hungry and surly, and when I get home from work I eat a big snack and spoil my dinner. For a while I tried to work around it -- maybe I should eat lunch later? drink more water? Sometimes this would work, but all too often I found myself popping out of the office to grab a snack or reverting to my cranky, dinner-spoiling habits. So for me the solution is simply that I need a little snack. By planning for this, I can make sure to bring my own snack rather than buy some expensive, not-very-nutritious tidbit. Your allowances need to meet you wherever your foible lies. Perhaps you need to always have a soup or pasta in the freezer for when you are just too tired to cook what you had planned. If you’re having a tough time keeping up with your cooking, then it is worth taking a good hard look at where and when you turn to prepared foods or take-out. Anticipating this ahead of time can keep you from needing to turn to these more expensive options.


Improvise. I think the truest measure of a good cook is how they react when something goes awry. And there will always be unpredictability in a kitchen. Ingredients will be missing. Unexpected bushels of zucchini and eggplant will materialize. Guests will show up unannounced. To make the most of these opportunities, you need to be nimble. I find that flexibility comes from equal parts expertise and gusto. So, yes, it is absolutely important to bone up on your culinary knowledge. Read and talk endlessly about food -- many of my best ideas have sprung from meandering discussions. But I can’t overstate how important it is to experiment. Be a little reckless. It is easy to feel pitted into one of the cook stereotypes: either you are some sort of domestic prodigy-- effortlessly turning out four course dinners served on time around a tasteful hand-made centerpiece, or you are the buffoon-- instantly all thumbs whenever there is a knife in hand. Neither of these images is very helpful. Anyone can learn to cook; but it does take practice. And a little fortitude. The biggest barrier to improvising in the kitchen seems often to be a lack of confidence, not a lack of culinary ability. And the only reply I have is to just dive in. Take on bigger, more involved projects. Try new techniques that you’re unsure about. Having a broader set of skills will serve you well when you inevitably have to deal with something unexpected. It seems my final suggestion has turned into something of an argument for home cooking. I can stand behind that. Cooking at home is likely the best single move you can make to get good food for less money. Cook at home to save money. Cook for sustenance. Cook for pleasure. Cook unapologetically. But do, do cook.