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.

Recently, several couples in our community started a frozen meal exchange. It’s a really simple idea. On a certain day, everyone in the exchange meets for coffee and brings along a laundry basket full of frozen meals, one for each family, along with any needed instructions taped to the lid. The members of the club just swap the meals so that everyone takes home one of each meal that they didn’t prepare.

It’s a very clever idea for several reasons. First, it makes it very easy for people to prepare a variety of home-cooked meals. Second, it drastically reduces the meal preparation time, since there’s only one big session of making several copies of one meal and after that one only needs to pull a meal out of the freezer and toss it in the oven. Third, it’s much cheaper since you can buy the ingredients for your meal in bulk.

Although I’m not a charter member in this group (I did suggest giving me a ring if a spot opens up), I’ve put some serious thought into starting my own group. I asked a few questions, did some research, and here’s a simple guide to starting your own meal exchange with some friends.

Consider who to invite. You need people that are frugal and reliable. Are they people who consistently come through when things are asked of them? Nothing will make an exchange fall apart faster than someone who doesn’t come through.

Avoid food allergies. When you invite someone, get clear information on their food allergies and simply make those ingredients verboten in all meal exchanges. If there is also any intense food dislikes, those should be known, too, though you should consider not inviting any notoriously picky eaters as they will make the exchange difficult for everyone.

Make a very clear set of written guidelines for everyone to follow. You’ll need to specify several policies for the group. I took a look at the guidelines for the local group and it featured the following things.

+ Meals were exchanged on the first Sunday of each month, with a rotation of hosts for the get-together. The host usually served coffee and a simple snack.

+ The meals were expected to be frozen, which means they couldn’t be prepared earlier that day and it’s actually more useful to do them late in the previous month.

+ You’re only allowed to miss one month per year – if you miss more than one, you’re automatically out unless everyone agrees by secret ballot to allow you to stay in (which allows exceptions for something truly exceptional). An exception to this is if you can give a two week notice to the entire group (so that vacations can be handled, for example).

+ To join, everyone had to buy a set of identical pans with covers, one for each other person in the exchange, that they didn’t mind “losing.” That means that the first month, everyone uses their own pans to prepare the meals. After the first exchange, everyone simply used the pans they have.

+ The contents of each meal, along with a clear statement on how to finish preparing it, had to be taped to the top of the lid.

+ A food allergy list (mentioned above) was also included in the form of a “foods that must be avoided” list.

Once you have these guidelines, make sure everyone has a clear copy. You might also want to send out an electronic copy of them.

Have an email list and set up email reminders. An email list makes it easy for you to issue reminders to everyone in the group of upcoming events – the next meal exchange (who is hosting, when, and where), reminders to get your meals cooked, notices of how many meals need to be prepared, and so on. A calendar can also be set up to help with such reminders.

A meal exchange is a really great idea to cut down your food costs and your food preparation time without giving up meal variety. If you have a wide social circle, consider starting one up.

By this time next week, most Americans will have gathered with friends and family and eaten the traditional Thanksgiving meal. I’ll be gathering for three separate Thanksgiving dinners during this holiday weekend.

Quite often, I’ll see people spend exorbitant amounts of money on lavish Thanksgiving spreads. While I completely understand the reason for doing this – often, it’s the one time in the year that we can gather around one table with a lot of people we love – there’s still a lot of simple things we can do to reduce the financial outlay and the stress of the meal without reducing the quality of the day in any way (and often improving it). Here are ten ways to do just that.

Cook and slice the turkey on Tuesday. What? No beautiful turkey on the table? Whatever will we do? In truth, though, the turkey on the table during Thanksgiving dinner often results in lots of problems: it keeps someone away from the meal because they’re carving the bird, the bird is often dry because it hasn’t had a lot of time to rest, and the finished bird often arrives later than expected, delaying the whole meal and often reducing the quality of the other food. Solve all of these problems by cooking the bird on Tuesday or Wednesday, slicing it at your own pace, then putting all of the meat on a platter along with all of the juice and a few pats of butter. Cover the serving platter and put it in the fridge, then just turn on the oven (or the electric roaster) on Thanksgiving to thoroughly warm the meat.

Use nature for your decorations. During the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, there are thousands of colorful leaves all over the place, free for the taking. Be picky – go outside and look for some nice, clean, colorful leaves. All you need is a plain tablecloth and a row of colorful leaves sprinkled down the middle to create a very festive setting.

Get the slow cooker into the act. Many Thanksgiving side dishes can easily be prepared in a slow cooker. Slow cookers consume less energy and quite often can be used in a “fix-it-and-forget-it” mindset. It’s the perfect tool to make cranberry sauce, for example.

Be creative with your Thanksgiving dinner leftovers. By the third day, turkey sandwiches start to get tired. Instead of allowing that to happen, share some of your extra food with people in need (for example, make a couple plates of food for shut-ins you know and deliver the plates) or make something interesting, like kugel or tetrazzini, out of the leftovers.

Round up when you estimate. I’ve been to two different Thanksgiving dinners in the past three years where there was just barely enough food to make ends meet for the number of guests (to put it politely). People showed up bringing unexpected dining companions and estimates for how much each person would eat were strangely low. Don’t fall into that trap. Estimate high, but estimate realistic. After all, you can always eat leftovers, but you can’t undo unhappy guests.

Don’t be afraid of potlucking it. Ask your guests to bring a dish or two with them so that you can focus your time, energy, and money on a few key dishes. Most people are quite willing to help (provided, of course, that they’re not coming from out of town).

Save the bones. Seriously. Put the entire carcass in a large Ziploc bag and save the bones and small pieces of meat for a day or two. Then, take all of the leftover vegetables (potatoes, corn, non-glazed carrots, etc.) and the carcass, stick them all in a crock pot, then add enough water to just cover the bones. Turn it on low overnight (this is perfect to do on Saturday evening after Thanksgiving). Then, in the morning, save the liquid. What will you do with this delicious turkey broth? Freeze it (along with a pound or two of leftover diced turkey meat). Then, in a few weeks, use it as the base for an amazing soup – just add vegetables and/or dumplings to the stock and the turkey (along with perhaps a bit of water to thin it).

Have appetizers. Inexpensive appetizers – like a selection of vegetables – helps people keep the edge off of their appetites and keeps them from over-eating during the main meal. Not only does this make the overall meal more healthy, it often makes it cheaper, since a vegetable tray can be really inexpensive. Much like the turkey, this can also be assembled the day before.

Don’t try to “impress” with your wine. There are countless great wines under $10 (here are five of my favorites from a few years back). Don’t feel the need to buy an expensive bottle of wine to impress anyone. Just stop by your local wine and liquor store and ask for a low-cost full bodied wine for the Thanksgiving table. They’ll be happy to point out something great for you.

Save your recyclable containers for leftovers. Instead of just tossing large containers of items like margarine or whipped topping, save the containers. Then, on Thanksgiving, fill the containers with leftovers and give them to your guests. There’s no responsibility at all for them to return the container and it gets an extra use out of the items that would normally be tossed.

This morning, I was doing a bit of advance planning for our dinner this evening. It’s Friday, which is traditionally homemade pizza night at our house, but tonight we were intending to use some left-over beef stew and transform it into a beef pot pie using a pie crust and some corn starch for thickening.

As I dug around in the cupboards and refrigerator to make sure we had everything on hand, I came across a few scary outdated items in the back of the refrigerator. They looked scary. They smelled scary. And, sadly, they headed right to the trash can.

One of the most disappointing things at our house is food that’s gone bad. It finds its way to the back of the refrigerator or cupboard and, eventually, gets too old to use. I look at such things with disappointment, as it’s good food simply going to waste.

Throwing away food – just like throwing away anything else – is a waste of resources. Our money and/our our time was invested in acquiring and preparing that food and simply throwing it away means that your time, money, and energy went to nothing. That’s a conclusion that doesn’t make anyone happy.

Of course, much like anything else, food can sometimes be recycled to a spectacular second use. Before you decide to toss out the food, give it a serious second look and ask yourself if the trash can is the best ultimate destination for it.

Quite often, the food really is bad and needs to be discarded. If something is moldy, I don’t mess with it (well, excepting certain kinds of cheeses, of course – blue cheese is all about the mold). If something has a smell that indicates that it’s gone wrong, I’ll just toss it. If it’s opened and past the date, I’ll almost always toss it immediately.

Sometimes, though, food that I’ll pass on in its current form has value if it’s used in another context. Here are some examples.

Stale bread If you have stale bread that’s gone dry and hard, get out the grater and grate it into bread crumbs, then save those crumbs in a jar. After all, this is exactly what bread crumbs are. Bread crumbs make a fantastic breading for fish, chicken, and vegetables, helping to seal in the moisture and flavor while making a crunchy outer shell.

Old fruits As long as they’re not genuinely rotting, most over-ripe fruits can easily be turned into an excellent bread. One great example of this is banana bread, which just requires a loaf pan, a spoon, some over-ripe bananas, a bit of butter, sugar, an egg, vanilla, baking soda, and flour. Just mix them in a bowl with a spoon until it’s consistent and put it in a loaf pan. You can make something very similar with many overripe fruits – I’ve made strawberry bread, pineapple bread, and zucchini bread and all were good (we just tend to eat a lot of bananas, so banana bread is a regular thing).

Old vegetables I save these in a small box in the freezer. When I have a full box, I’ll use the vegetables to make a vegetable soup. I’ll just put all the vegetables into the crock pot, add water until it’s got about half an inch of liquid over the top of the vegetables, and then season the whole thing like crazy. It makes for a pretty good – and pretty healthy – meal.

Another old vegetable and fruit tactic Add them to a compost bin. If you don’t have one, ask around, particularly among your gardening-oriented friends. It’s far better to return the leftover materials to the earth than to put them in the trash and watch them head to a landfill. You can use coffee grounds and eggshells in a similar fashion.

Here’s the real message: don’t look at old food as something to immediately be thrown out. Sometimes, it’s a resource that can be used in future meals. It’s far less wasteful to approach things in this fashion, which means that you’re not only conserving your own resources, time, and money, but you’re also sparing the earth.