Yes, it is an effort to cook dinner. It takes planning. It takes commitment to say “We are not eating out this week”.

It also takes a stack of simple recipes that you enjoy that take very little time to prepare.

Start small. You and your wife will be surprised at how much better you feel when you plan ahead, know what is for dinner, and know how much money you will save.

1) Buy your fruits and vegetables at a produce market and processed food at the grocery store. Always buy off brand. Also, produce markets that sell meat generally beat grocery stores on prices. Look for sales. I never pay more than 1.69 a pound for skinless chicken breasts.

2) When filling up your tank, do so in the morning, fill it up slowly (not full blast) and always refill your tank at the half way point. Don’t wait for it to nearly empty out. Drive the speed limit. When you are driving, note what your rpms are at 40 miles per hour. As soon as your speed increases above what they are reving at 40 mph, stop increasing your speed.

3) Always combine errands.

4) When stuck in traffic or at a drive through window, shut off your car. This is a common practice in Europe.

5) Learn to cook from scratch. It’s can be a bit challenging at first, but after a short while, you’ll be ask yourself why you didn’t do it all along.

6) Always grocery shop from a list. Never go into a grocery store without one.

7) Grow your own herbs and vegetables in the summer time. It takes little effort and the dividends are huge. Tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, corn — you name it. Plus its better for the environment.

These are in no particular order. I practice these principles and save a lot of money by doing so.

Do most of you have one person staying at home while the other works? Or are you both working?

A large (15 cubic foot) chest freezer I saw the other day was rated at about *one* kWh/day – that’s $0.10/day on average in the U.S.

Remember, food in your kitchen freezer will *not* last as long (automatic defrost on the fridge, manual defrost on the chest/upright freezer)

We store an amazing amount of free food (berries, etc.) in the freezer.

But….then I got a bunch of those reusable Ziploc containers. I set aside one weekend afternoon, crammed up my shopping cart, cooked like a fiend. Made six or seven different things, divvied them up into the containers into single serving portions.

I ate well for four or five weeks at a time. (Yes, I did own a small freezer, but it paid for itself in a matter of months when you totaled up how much those nasty TV dinners added up.) Better than I did before, in fact.

Best of all, it was even *more* convenient than driving to the store, parking, getting out of the car, etc. I just had to stroll to my freezer, pop it in the microwave, nuke it, and voila. Don’t discount the time savings, they can be immense.

Give it a shot, it’s got to be better for you than that processed garbage.

(Unfortunately my bro got the freezer after I married. But am looking into doing pretty much the same thing ~ cooking like a nut and freezing them up for later).

Just don’t be afraid. Try new things. Read the directions. have all the ingrediants before you start.

lol…this will also come in handy if your kid ever needs serious orthodontic work. I’m currently sporting hardware that has left me unable to chew for about five more months. Suffice it to say I’ve become well acquainted with my blender. :-)

What we did is buy frozen veggies and prepare them as directed. Then take them from the pot and put them in a small 2 cup size food processor, purchased for about $12, hit the button and you have instant healthy baby food. It worked for us.

I don’t shop by store flyers and rarely use coupons because I prefer to purchase organic products, and the promotional items almost never include organics. Instead I buy in bulk and directly from local farmers, or grow my own.

We’ve been taking a hard look at the meats and vegetables stashed away in the freezer, and all the canned and dried goods in our extensive pantry. It was time for freezer cleanout anyway. There’s a lot of pork and lamb in there from our fall purchases of a side of each. We get more eggs each day from our four hens than we can eat, and I make all our bread at home. I’m getting close to the bottom of a 50 lb. bag of bread flour. We’ve already gotten a few hardy cooking greens from plants that overwintered in our garden.

Some meals we’ve made in our attempts to use up stuff from garden/freezer/hens/pantry:

pasta with olive oil, garlic, hot pepper flakes, and garden dinosaur kale
strata with broccoli rabe, cheese, tomatoes and onions
curried chard & frozen spinach with tomato, served in sourdough crepes
smoked turkey monte cristo sandwiches
pulled pork
pea and pesto soup
A Goan curry made with frozen tilapia, served with buttery basmati rice
thin crust pizzas with garden herbs
huevos rancheros with garlic toast

We have a huge garden planned for the summer, and we’ll have apples, cider, and apple butter from our tree in the fall. We do all this on 2/3 acre in a suburban (formerly rural) neighborhood. I’m absolutely confident we can do the same again next month. We’ve made some headway in using up the food we have stored, but there’s a lot more to get through.

I like to think my grocery “strike” is keeping the prices down, just a tiny bit, for others.

Great blog, Trent. Keep it up!

My husband’s family has a genetic cholesterol problem and they have a feast or famine response to certain foods. My mother-in-law has only margarine and low-fat cheese at home (gag), but put her in a restaurant where they serve butter with the bread and you can’t pry the dish from her hand until she’s inhaled it.

They’d probably be better off having butter at home and getting over the perception of scarcity that makes them overdo it in restaurants and when eating with friends, but they’re afraid. Their heads nearly exploded when we lost a lot of weight in France guzzling wine, eating croissants for breakfast and downing baguettes with lots of butter at dinner. (We lived in a 5th floor apartment with no elevator, walked everywhere, adjusted to smaller European portion sizes, and we never, ever snacked.)

All of the stuff talked about in the article, we here and on other sites have been talking about doing for *years*. This isn’t a ‘recession diet’, its my freaking life!

I’m sorry, but I am pretty disgusted right now.

Who needs dried out store-bought cookies, really?