My kids love juice boxes. We usually allow them to have one a day as part of an afternoon snack. We’re pretty picky about the ones we buy, making sure that at the very least they’re 100% juice and, often, we buy juice that has vegetable juice in it, too. We like the juice box portability, as it allows us to toss a couple into a purse or a diaper bag as we’re about to leave.

The only problem is that for the amount of juice you get, juice boxes are ridiculously expensive. From an environmental standpoint, the boxes are really wasteful, too, as they fill up the trash quite quickly.

After having a long conversation with a reader on Twitter about kids and juice, she encouraged me to look into getting the kids litterless juice boxes. They’re made of sturdy plastic, reusable, and basically have the same form factor as a juice box. Instead of just pulling an ordinary juice box out of the fridge, one would just pull out one of these boxes. We could then buy juice by the jug (much cheaper) and fill several reusable juice boxes at once, putting them all in the fridge.

She recommended Rubbermaid Litterless Juice Boxes, as that’s what she uses. These sell for $2.99 a pop on Amazon (though you may find lower prices if you shop around).

I then went to the store and did some price comparisons. Among the flavors of Juicy Juice that our children like, the boxes sell for $0.10 per ounce, where the large containers sell for about $0.075 per ounce, meaning you save about two and a half cents per ounce buying the larger containers instead of the juice boxes. This is without sales, of course.

Each juice box would have about seven ounces in it, and if each child drinks a single juice box a day, how long would it be before we would be cost ahead on the litterless juice boxes?

I decided to calculate the numbers as though we bought ten of the reusable juice boxes, as this would amount to an equal number of boxes that we would get if we bought juice boxes at the store. Total cost: $29.90.

Each day, we would use fourteen ounces of juice in the boxes, thus saving thirty five cents a day doing it this way.

Thus, we would have to use the reusable juice boxes for eighty five days (one a day for each of our two children) to break even. After that, we would save about seventeen cents per reusable juice box emptied.

Given that we have a four year old and a two year old at home (and another one on the way), the numbers seem to indicate that this would be a sensible move. It would give us more control over the juice in the juice boxes (mixing vegetable juice in, for example), save us about seventeen cents for each juice box drank, and they’ll be used for many years to come.

Reusable juice boxes, here we come.

Will they save money for you, though? I think these factors are important.

First of all, do your kids drink juice with any regularity? Ours usually have about one serving a day or so. If it’s a lot less than that, then they’re not worth it. If it’s that much or more, then it probably will be worth it.

Second, do you have multiple children? If you have multiple children, the value factor goes up.

Third, are your children young? The value factor also goes up if you have young children, as they’re likely to use them for a long time down the road. Older children might not.

A long time ago, after posting several articles about using a crock pot to save money and still produce great, quick meals, readers asked me to post ten of my favorite crock pot recipes. Since digging through my recipes and typing them out again in an comprehensible format takes a while, I started by posting five of them.

And I never got around to posting the other five. Today, I’m completing that post.

So, after you’ve perused the art of the slow cooker and five of my favorite recipes, here are five more for you to try. I have no idea where these originally came from, but each was experimented on and modified more than a few times and seem to only exist on my own handwritten cards.

One big tip! If you’re going to leave these on for more than eight hours, add an extra half a cup of water before you go. The biggest danger for cooking things in a crock pot longer than that is having the food dry out.

Let’s go!

Chicken Chili (our current favorite crock pot recipe)

1 1/4 lbs boneless skinless chicken breasts
2 15 oz. cans great northern beans or navy beans (I prefer to soak dry beans myself)
12 oz. frozen sweet corn kernels
1 4 1/2 oz. can chopped green chiles (or you can chop your own)
3 tbsp. chili powder
16 oz. chicken stock or chicken broth
8 oz. half and half (you can use skim milk if you want it healthier)
1/2 tsp. corn starch (if you want it thicker)
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 cup chopped onion (optional)

Dice the chicken into 1″ cubes and put them in a slow cooker. Add the beans and corn and optional onions. In a bowl, mix the chili powder, the peppers, the half and half, and the chicken broth or stock (and the starch, if you want it thicker). Stir until well-mixed, then add to the chicken. Cover and cook for 8-10 hours on low. Just before serving, stir in sour cream until consistent.

Wild Rice Turkey

1 1/2 cups wild rice
2 cups finely chopped onion
1/4 cup golden raisins
2 apples, chopped
3 cups chicken broth or chicken stock
1 1/4 tsp. thyme
1 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. marjoram
3/4 tsp. sage
1/2 tsp. pepper
whole turkey brest (4 lbs. or so)

Mix rice, onion, raisins, apples, thyme, salt, pepper, sage, and marjoram until consistent. Put thsi mixture on the bottom of the pot. Cover with chicken broth/stock and make sure all of the rice is covered with at least a quarter of an inch of liquid – if not, supplement with some water or additional stock. Place whole turkey breast (thawed, of course) on top. Cook on low for eight hours and be sure to check the temperature of the turkey before you remove it (it should be 160 degrees F or roughly 75 C).

Stuffed Zucchini

1 medium zucchini or squash, halved lengthwise, with seeds removed
1 cup tomato sauce
1 tbsp. red wine vinegar
1 onion, chopped
1 tsp. minced or powdered garlic
1/4 cup brown rice (uncooked)
1 tbsp. parsley
1 tbsp. basil
1/8 tsp. black pepper
Mozzarella cheese (optional)

Put the zucchini halves in the bottom of the crockpot. Mix the tomato sauce and vinegar together in a small bowl – a cereal bowl works. In another bowl, combine the onions, garlic, rice, parsley, basil, and pepper and mix thoroughly. Add two tablespoons of the tomato-red wine mix to the onion mix and stir thoroughly. Put the onion mix on the zucchini halves, then pour the rest of the tomato-red wine mix on top. Cook on low for 6 hours.

Three Bean Stew

1 cup dried lima beans
1 cup dried great Northern beans
1 cup dried chickpeas / Garbanzo beans
4 cups water
16 oz. carrots (baby or sliced full carrots)
1 1/2 cups chopped onion
2 1/2 cups or 1 14 oz. can diced tomatoes
2 tbsp. tomato paste
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 tbsp. parsley
1 tsp. basil
1/2 tsp. thyme
1/2 tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. pepper
1 bay leaf

Soak the beans together overnight in water by putting the beans in a pan, then adding water until there’s an inch of water on top of the beans. Drain the beans and place in crock pot. Add the water, carrots, oinion, garlic, parsley, basil, thyme, pepper, and the bay leaf to the crock pot. Cook on low for eight to ten hours. Add the tomatoes, the paste, and salt and cook for another hour on low. Remove bay leaf and serve.

Barbecued Ribs (it doesn’t beat slow-cooked on a grill, but it’s very good!)

4 lbs. baby back ribs, lightly peppered and salted
2 cups catsup
1 cup finely diced tomatoes
1/2 cup finely chopped onion
1/8 tsp. cloves
1/4 cup vinegar
2 tbsp. pepper
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
2 tsp. oregano
2 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
hot sauce to taste

Rub the ribs down with salt and pepper. Put them in a shallow baking pan and bake them in the oven for 15 minutes at 400 F / 200 C. Turn the ribs over and brown for another 15 minutes in the oven. While it’s browning, mix the other ingredients in a bowl. Take the ribs from the oven, place in a slow cooker, pour the sauce over the ribs, and flip the ribs around to coat them. Cover and cook on low for eight hours. Delicious!

Good luck!

Every time I visit the grocery store, I’m amazed to see how much of the fresh produce aisle is taken up with prepackaged fresh foods. You know what I’m talking about – bags of prewashed lettuce, pre-cut apples, pre-cut celery, pre-cut pineapple, and so on.

I understand why such items are for sale – they’re convenient. It’s easier to just grab a bag of prewashed romaine lettuce than it is to grab a head of romaine and deal with it when you get home.

Yet, when you look at the prices, you’re actually paying a significant markup. Two bags of Dole romaine lettuce at my local grocer costs about the same as a single head of romaine. The bags cost about $4.50 together, while the head costs about $1.60 (with some variance, of course, due to weight, sales, and so on). By buying the head, you save $2.90 – or, from a different perspective, you’re paying $2.90 for the convenience of someone else washing your lettuce.

Is that really worth it? I bought a head of romaine lettuce myself, put it in one of those handy bags that they provide, and took it home with me. Upon arriving home, I set a stopwatch for myself, then chopped the leaves off of the head of lettuce, rinsed them thoroughly, rinsed the bag a bit (leaving some moisture inside), then put the leaves back in the bag, tying it. I then tossed the knife in the dishwasher and stopped the stopwatch.

Total time? Three minutes. Actually, it was just a bit shy of that.

Let’s say over the course of the next year, I repeat the same action twenty times. I buy a head of romaine, put it in one of those bags from the store, take it home, chop it myself, and store it in that bag. Each time, I’m saving myself $2.90. Over the course of a year, I spend an hour chopping up the lettuce and save myself a total of $58.

The same holds true for all of those convenience foods.

Apple slices? I found apples I like at the store for $1.29 a pound, whereas pre-sliced apples added up to $4.76 a pound (I found four four-ounce bags of them for $1.19 each). I have a nice little apple slicer, so I’m able to slice up a few apples at dinnertime and completely clean up from it in about thirty seconds. My estimate on this is that buying un-cut apples saves me about $80 for every hour of apple-slicing I’m willing to do.

Celery sticks? I can buy a bag of celery for $1.49 or I can buy about three containers of pre-sliced sticks for $1.99 each. I spend about four minutes cutting the sticks and it saves me $3.47 – or about $52 over the course of a full hour.

I can go on and on with these items, but in each case the central idea is true: the convenience has a really, really high cost, much more than it might seem at first glance.

To me, this type of convenience food is a perfect example of how the little things really add up when it comes to personal finance. There are so many little conveniences that we pay for in life, whether it’s pre-sliced apples or take-out food or a lawn care service. When you actually step back and calculate the hourly rate that these things are costing you, it’s truly astounding. Yet people fill their lives with these conveniences and question those who skip out on them, then they wonder why it’s challenging to make ends meet.

Take a stand today. Slice your own vegetables. Then put that saved money aside for something for yourself.

This is part of an ongoing series about how to trim the budget of the average American. As this series focuses on such broad-based tips, some will work for you and some will not. You’re invited to mention in the comments the tips that you found to be the most useful for inclusion in a comprehensive budget trimming guide at the conclusion of this series.

Alcoholic Beverages – $457

The solution to cutting this element of your budget is easy.

Don’t drink.

For many of us, though, that’s not really a solution. I often enjoy a glass of red wine with my dinner and I like a mixed drink once in a while, particularly on social occasions. I know I’m far from alone in this type of attitude towards alcoholic beverages, too.

What’s the solution for keeping such spending under control? Let’s look at a few options.

Don’t spend more than $10 on a bottle of wine. There are thousands of different options for wines under $10. You don’t need the $50 bottle of wine in order to enjoy a nice glass of red with dinner. Pick up a low cost bottle and give it a swing.

Keep track of the low cost ones you do enjoy. This way, you can share these good low-cost wines when guests come over instead of feeling compelled to drop cash on a more expensive bottle that has some “promise” of being good (but really doesn’t have any such promise at all).

Have social events at home. Instead of going out for drinks and paying a hefty surcharge to sit in some loud, miserable place, have events at your own home. Have people bring a bottle of something they like and do something together, like play a board game or watch a film.

Look for specials. Alcohol is actually one of the most common loss leaders that stores use to get people in the door. Keep an eye on the prices local stores have in their flyer for your particular beverage of choice and stock up when it’s cheap.

Drop the brand snobbishness. Most of the times, brands are nothing more than the product of a lot of clever marketing – and you pay for that marketing with a higher sticker price. Nowhere is that more true than with alcoholic beverages, when you often pay substantially more for just a name on a label. If you doubt it, combine the idea with a social event at your home and have a blind taste test, for fun. You’ll likely be surprised.

Don’t drink at the restaurant. If you’ve decided to go out and eat, great! Have fun! However, you’re almost always far better off if you don’t consume alcoholic beverages at the restaurant, because they’re often exorbitantly overpriced. Instead, limit yourself to just a glass of wine with dinner, if that, and then enjoy a drink elsewhere with your dining companions.

Make your own. I make my own beer and find it to be cheaper to brew craft beers than to buy them. The savings is even stronger with wine, provided you find a reasonably-priced supplier. Make your own – it doesn’t take much equipment and it’s surprisingly fun to have others try your home brew.

I want your help! In the comments, please let me know which of the tips you find most useful for trimming these costs. I’ll include the top choices in a comprehensive budget trimming guide at the conclusion of the series.

This is part of an ongoing series about how to trim the budget of the average American. As this series focuses on such broad-based tips, some will work for you and some will not. You’re invited to mention in the comments the tips that you found to be the most useful for inclusion in a comprehensive budget trimming guide at the conclusion of this series.

Food – food away from home – $2,668

The average American family spends $225 a month eating away from home – dinners eaten out, quick snacks grabbed, and coffees ordered and consumed on the run.

Much of this spending comes about simply because it’s convenient. Rather than investing the time to get my coffee machine set up, I’ll just stop at Starbucks and get me a cup of some sweet mixture resembling coffee. I don’t have time to make lunch, so I’ll just stop at Mickey D’s and pick up a sandwich to go. It’s been a long day, honey – let’s go out to eat.

In each of those cases, though, you’re often paying for surprisingly inefficient, low quality food. Setting up the coffee pot before you go to bed takes just a moment or two – and you can basically have a cup waiting for you when you’re ready to go in the morning. It’s easy to make convenient lunches for yourself in advance that are much cheaper, tastier, healthier, and just as quick as anything you can get at the drive-thru. The same holds true for going out for dinner – if you know what you’re doing in the kitchen, you can have a great meal on the table in fifteen minutes, giving you a full evening to relax at home.

That’s not to say that one should completely eschew eating outside the home if they enjoy it, but these tips can help trim the costs a bit.

Keep eating out squarely in the “treat” department instead of letting it turn into a tired old habit. Given the huge cost difference between eating out and dining in – and given the special experience that dining out can be – you’re much better off if you save dining out for special occasions and eat at home the rest of the time. If you do this, not only will your food budget thank you, but the occasions when you do eat out will become that much more enjoyable.

Have materials on hand for very impromptu meals. Many people choose to eat out (or order food) because they can’t think of anything simple to make after a hard day of work. Don’t ever allow that to be an excuse. Always keep materials on hand for several simple meals. For example, we always have the materials we need on hand for chicken-broccoli-rice stir fry, spaghetti, homemade pizza, and chili, each of which can be cooked in about half an hour or so. We make sure to always have the things on hand for these meals, even if we don’t make them right away.

Learn how to cook at home. Hand-in-hand with that is the fear many people today have of their kitchen (besides the microwave). It’s really not hard to cook for yourself – it just takes practice. Teach yourself how to cook so that the thought of preparing a meal for yourself in the evening doesn’t feel like an overwhelming potential disaster.

Prepare full meals in advance and freeze them. On a weekend, make three batches of a casserole and freeze two of them as close to finished as you can possibly get away with – or do the same with any other complete meal, like a roasted chicken. This way, you can just stick the meal in the fridge the night before you want to eat it, come home the next day, preheat the oven, toss in the meal, and an hour later, you’re eating.

Prepare convenient breakfasts and lunches in advance and freeze them. Similarly, spend some time on a lazy weekend afternoon making an enormous batch of frozen convenient breakfasts and lunches, such as breakfast sandwiches or delicious lunch burritos. When you’ve made and frozen a big batch of these, making a quick, tasty, healthy breakfast is as easy as yanking the items out of the freezer, wrapping them in a paper towel, and microwaving them for three or four minutes. That’s it – you’re ready to go, and it’s a lot cheaper, faster, and tastier than the old drive-thru.

Brown bag it whenever you can. If you have any sort of a chance to prepare food in advance before you leave for the day, do so. A quick sandwich, vegetable, fruit, and beverage tossed into a bag can serve as lunch for anyone – and that’s just the start of it. There are many, many possibilities for the humble brown bag – and virtually all of them are less expensive than eating out or ordering food into the office.

If you eat for social reasons, host a potluck dinner. Perhaps you eat out regularly with friends. Instead of doing that, why not take turns hosting dinner? You can either handle the entire dinner yourself or you can ask the others to bring side dishes. Do it on a rotating basis so the work is shared and you’ll find that everyone is saving some money and still having all of the social fun.

If you eat out for social reasons at work, suggest a regular brown-bag day. Many people eat out with coworkers and use the opportunity to touch base about work issues – which is certainly a strong career element. However, why do you always have to eat out to do this? To start changing that culture, suggest a regular brown-bag day once a week for the group. Alternately, you could have one person in your group handle all of the brown bag lunches for everyone once every few weeks. Over the long run, this saves all of you some serious change without disrupting the social flow.

I want your help! In the comments, please let me know which of the tips you find most useful for trimming these costs. I’ll include the top choices in a comprehensive budget trimming guide at the conclusion of the series.

This is part of an ongoing series about how to trim the budget of the average American. As this series focuses on such broad-based tips, some will work for you and some will not. You’re invited to mention in the comments the tips that you found to be the most useful for inclusion in a comprehensive budget trimming guide at the conclusion of this series.

Food – food at home – $3,465

Another $300 a month component of the average family budget comes from merely eating at home. This does not include food eaten outside the home, nor does it include household cleaning supplies, toiletries, and other items that typically are bunched together in a family’s budget (since they’re often purchased together).

I like cooking at home – in fact, I’d go so far as to say I’m passionate about it. As a result, I often talk about cooking and food on The Simple Dollar, so for you regular readers, many of the tips below will seem old hat.

Five years ago, though, I rarely cooked at home at all. I could barely fry an egg and most meals just seemed ridiculously hard. Instead of putting out all that effort, I’d just go out to eat – and that became an enormous money leak in my life.

Here are twelve big things you can do to reduce your food spending at home, regardless of whether you eat out a lot or if you eat primarily at home.

Learn how to cook at home. The actual ability to cook real food makes it much easier to simply make the choice to eat at home instead of eating out. If you have difficulty boiling an egg, eating out seems like a vastly easier and less time-consuming choice. It’s not. I recommend checking a copy of How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman and just start at the beginning, trying everything suggested in there. It’s the closest thing I’ve found to a “teach yourself to cook at home” book that doesn’t overwhelm you in details right off the bat.

Make grocery lists. Keep a list on your refrigerator with a pen dangling from it. The simple way to do it is to take two cheap fridge magnets, a notepad, a pen, and a piece of string, and homebrew it. Just glue a magnet to the back of the pad and hang it up. Then, glue one end of the string to the other magnet, tape the other end of the string to the pen, and hang up that magnet. Whenever you notice something you need, write it down immediately. Then, when you go to the grocery store, trust your list. Buy only what’s listed. Don’t wander aimlessly and buy a bunch of impulsive things.

Make a simple price book to determine which store near you has the best prices. The easiest way to do this is to identify the fifteen to twenty-five most common things you buy at the grocery store, then shop at a bunch of different stores and compare the prices on these items. The store with the lowest average price on the things you buy should be the store you shop at regularly. I was surprised when I did this test myself, because I discovered that the store I thought was low priced was far from the least expensive option on the stuff I actually bought routinely.

Make a meal plan. Plan out what you’ll eat a week in advance before you leave for the grocery store. Know the next seven breakfasts, lunches, and dinners you’ll have, then make sure you have all of the ingredients for them. If you don’t, add that ingredient to the shopping list (it’s right on your fridge, right?).

Use your grocery store flyer. The grocery store flyer can be a great extension of the meal plan. You can use the flyer to see what items are on sale that week – particularly the fresh produce. Plan your meals for the upcoming week around these items. This will reduce the average cost of each meal because the meals are centered around an ingredient or two you got at a deep discount.

Buy fewer convenience foods. I don’t just mean frozen meals (I’ll get to those in a minute). I’m talking about things like pre-bagged lettuce and pre-cut apples. If you actually sit down and compare the prices on such prepared foods, you’re essentially paying $5 or so for about three minutes’ worth of work. Get some reusable containers, go home with the raw lettuce or apples, and do such things yourself.

Make more convenience foods. Instead of stopping each morning for breakfast, make your own breakfast burritos in advance and freeze them. Instead of just buying a premade mediocre overpriced casserole, make your own casserole in advance and freeze it. You can make your own convenience foods – and you’ll find that they’re both tastier and less expensive than the convenience foods you’ll buy elsewhere.

Drink filtered tap water as your primary beverage. Water from the tap is the least expensive beverage available to you – take advantage of it. Make it into your primary beverage throughout the day. You don’t have to give up whatever your favorite beverage might be – mine is vegetable juice, actually – but if you replace the majority of your intake with water, you’ll reduce your spending, reduce your calorie intake, and view that drink you like so much as a treat rather than a mundane requirement.

Eat (and enjoy) leftovers. When you have food left over, don’t just push it to the back of the fridge and forget about it. Have leftovers for dinner once in a while – and make it more flavorful by amping up the spices in it. Use leftovers as the basis for future meals, like transforming pot roast leftovers into a pie. Even better….

Brown bag your lunch. Take leftovers when you can. Even if you can’t, a simple meal made at home and taken to work is far, far cheaper than going out with the gang. Try doing it one or two days more a week than you do now and you’ll be surprised to see how much money you can save.

Have potluck dinners with friends. Many people socialize by going out to dinner. Why not do the same thing at home with home-cooked food and a much, much smaller bill? Start a series of potluck dinners with your friends by hosting the first one – make the main course and ask your friends to bring side dishes. It can be a fun social engagement, plus it’s a big money saver when it comes to food.

Appreciate (and utilize) the low-cost staples. I love beans. They’re incredibly inexpensive, very filling, and provide essential protein in your diet. I use beans as often as I can in recipes. Rice is another low-cost staple (though not as low-cost as it once was) that can provide an essential element to your meals. Look in the produce section of your local store over time and note the ingredients that are very low-cost. Seek to grow intimately familiar with how to make these items – and you’ll find yourself saving a lot of money.

I want your help! In the comments, please let me know which of the tips you find most useful for trimming these costs. I’ll include the top choices in a comprehensive budget trimming guide at the conclusion of the series.

When I was a kid, each year my Christmas stocking had a large orange in the toe. I always thought of this as a bit strange, so when I was a bit older, I asked my parents about the orange. It turns out that oranges were pretty hard to get ahold of when my father was young, so an orange in the stocking was considered a magnificent treat.

Two years ago, I thought this would be a fun tradition to continue with my own son, so I went out to the store a few days before Christmas. What did I find? Amazingly low prices on oranges. I don’t remember the exact price, but I bought multiple pounds of oranges, took them home, and made fresh orange juice out of them.

It turns out that December really is the cheapest time of the year to buy oranges. That’s because orange crops tend to be heavily harvested just as the winter months begin because oranges are very sensitive to freezing and, although oranges grow in very warm climates, freezing during the winter months is still a concern.

This same phenomenon holds for almost every kind of produce. To put it simply, produce is cheapest during the typical harvest season for that crop. Often, there are secondary products that see a price decline as well: for example, gardening supplies tend to go on sale at the same time that gardens are being harvested in your area.

Knowing this schedule and planning ahead a bit can be a big boon to your food budget. Obviously, seasonal food calendars are never exact because of both the vagaries of your local area as well as the year-to-year variations in food crops and in temperatures, but here are ten rules of thumb I use for my own fresh produce purchases (well, at least as fresh as I can acquire in northern Iowa).

Asparagus – late April and early May
Broccoli – late February and March
Cauliflower – late March and April
Cranberries – October
Oranges (all but Valencia) – December
Raspberries – mid-August
Strawberries – late June through early August
Sweet Corn – early August to early September
Turnips – February
Watermelon – July

These aren’t so much learned from my own garden but learned from when local stores tend to put produce on sale.

How do I take advantage of this?

One, I save recipes and meal ideas. If I have some ideas for asparagus, I save those asparagus ideas until the asparagus appears discounted and very fresh in late April. Out of season, the asparagus isn’t nearly as fresh and it’s also much more expensive. The same holds true for a lot of produce.

Two, I freeze some of the items. Many fruits and vegetables can be frozen and later thawed for meal use – sometimes the texture is a bit altered, but the flavor is always tremendous. If we do this, I just soak the items in water for a bit, then freeze them individually on a tray in the freezer. Once they’re frozen, I’ll put them in a bag or other container together and clearly label them. If you freeze them individually like this, they tend to not stick together (much) in other containers, making them easy to use later on.

This type of planning lets us get our fill of the produce in season, plus often try a few recipes again at the opposite point of the year. So, for example, we’ll often thaw asparagus in October or November for a recipe or two.

Three, it all comes back to using the grocery flyer. If I hang onto asparagus ideas, for example, I don’t even have to think about them until I see that asparagus is on sale. If that sale matches up with my rule of thumb about when those items should be fresh and on sale, I’ll spring at the opportunity to not only get a delicious fresh ingredient on sale, but also to use those ideas I’ve been storing up.

Plan ahead a little with your food and you’ll wind up saving a lot.

Lately, my wife and I have been studying ways to reduce our weekly grocery bill. We’ve been using several tactics to do this, which I will discuss one at a time over a series of articles.

Salads before dinner are a common staple at our house. For a long time, we would buy lots of different dressings and other items to complement the salad. While planning for a grocery trip a few weeks ago, we realized that we were about to spend fifteen dollars or so on salad accompaniments (because several of our items were depleted). We decided to try some different tactics to drastically reduce our spending on salad.

Avoid Prepackaged Greens
Many people buy prepackaged bags of salad greens – they’re convenient and provide a variety of greens. We did the same until we started running the numbers and realized we could buy enough greens for a week’s worth of salads from the fresh area, mix them ourselves, and not only eat fresher, but save some money, too. All you have to do is select two or three fresh greens that seem interesting – lettuce, arugula, spinach, etc. – and take them home. Wash them up, put all of them in a lidded bowl, and mix it thoroughly. Then pop that bowl in the fridge. It’ll last for several days and, if you eat salad every day, you’ll blow right through it.

Make Your Own Croutons
This is stupendously easy and quite tasty. Just take about half a loaf of bread and cut each slice into cubes. In another bowl, put some olive oil (about three tablespoons or so – you can put in more if you want) and add whatever spices you want – grated Parmesan cheese, garlic powder, dried oregano. Mix the spices and oil, then dredge the cubes through the oil. Toss them on a baking sheet, turn the oven to about 300 F (140 C), and bake them for about twenty minutes. These croutons will keep practically forever in the cupboard in a sealed container.

Make Your Own Dressing
Most dressing recipes are really simple, too, and you can make quite a lot of it for pennies. AllRecipes has a huge list of dressing recipes, but my favorite is cucumber dressing. Just take a cup of buttermil and add a tablespoon of brown mustard and a teaspoon of lemon juice. Then take a cucumber and grate it, adding about half a cup of the grated cucumber to the mix. Sprinkle on some black pepper, mix it, and keep it in a jar in the refrigerator – it’ll last a long while. That’s how I like it, but other people add things like minced green onions, minced parsley, dried dill, and minced celery.

Make Salad a Routine
Salad can be a very healthy addition to any meal, since it’s primarily just greens. I like to just eat a big pile of lettuce with about two tablespoons of dressing and a few croutons to start off a meal.

Of course, the real kicker is that, with these changes, salad is actually really inexpensive compared to the cost of the entree. So make a simple change to your diet – start each meal with a salad. This way, you can prepare less of the entree. Not only does this save you money in the short term at the grocery store, it can be the foundation of a much healthier diet.

I Hate Salad!
I used to hate salads, but I found that when I started trying lots of salad variations, I found greens that I like. Today, I love nothing more than a mix of spinach and arugula – I don’t really like lettuce at all, which was a big reason I didn’t like salads as a kid. Similarly, I kept trying different dressings until I found some that I really like (like the cucumber one above). You might like something different – there’s an almost infinite variety of dressings.

Keep trying and you’ll likely find some combination that you like. When you find that combination (or find several, hopefully), remember them and use them as ways to open your meals. It’s one of those things that’s a win from almost any perspective.