Dinner with My Family is on a one week hiatus (which is party explained below). It will return next week.

Over the last month, Sarah and I have been experimenting with a longer period between grocery store trips.

Prior to this month, we had almost always done a weekly grocery store visit, usually on Saturday but occasionally on Sunday or Monday. This enabled us to do a single week meal plan, a process I described in detail a while back.

Simply put, we would just make a list of all of the meals we would make during the upcoming week, then we would buy groceries to fulfill those meals, along with staples like milk and so on.

Over the past few weeks, however, we’ve made a commitment to extend that period between grocery store visits for several reasons.

First, our pantry has a lot of stuff in it that needs to be used up. It’s almost full to the brim and it would be very good for us to use the stored food before some of it goes bad, such as the half-full container of quinoa or the egg noodles or the spices we purchased several months ago. This is purely a money-saving tactic, of course.

Second, our time constraints are different now. Sarah has returned to work and our two oldest children have a bevy of evening activities. This makes preparing a fresh meal from scratch every evening substantially more difficult than it was during the summer or when Sarah was off on maternity leave.

Third, we wanted to really explore options for make-ahead meals. Lately, we’ve been looking carefully at meals that we can make mostly in advance and store for the future. We want to try making a diversity of meals this way, from soups and stews to casseroles and pizzas.

Finally, we want to prolong the magic of our garden as we enter fall. If we can take some of those vegetables and use them in meals that we can use down the road, we’re extending the life of the fresh vegetables in our garden without putting them to waste. If we can use three more onions and three more tomatoes from our garden, that’s a good thing.

The end result of all of this is that over the last month, we’ve only been to the grocery store twice. How did we do it? Here are some of the specific tactics we used.

We switched to drinking water with our meals. This is something I’ve always done, but my wife and my two oldest children consistently drink skim milk with their evening meal. A month ago, we switched. The exception to this is our youngest child, whose pediatrician recommended that we keep him on whole milk for a while longer. Thus, we buy whole milk just for him, which lasted perfectly for two weeks twice now.

We’ve tried making double batches of almost every meal. If I make a homemade pizza, I make another one for the freezer. If we make soup, we store an extra batch of it in a gallon-sized freezer container. If we make a casserole, we make another one for the freezer. If we make burritos, we make a bunch of extra ones for the freezer.

We’ve tried to base meals on the items we have in our pantry. What can we do with a lot of quinoa and barley? How can we use a half a pound of ground tarragon? What can we do with this buckwheat flour? These are all questions we’ve considered over the last month or so – and most of them have come to good answers.

The end result of these methods is that for the month of August 15 to September 15, our grocery bill was about 50% lower than our average month of groceries. At the same time, we’ve also banked several meals into the freezer that we’ll be able to use in future months. (Yes, part of that reduction was due to an influx of vegetables from the garden, but not nearly all of it.)

The biggest reason why this has happened, in my opinion, is that we’re drastically reducing our impulse buys. Even with a grocery list, we usually tend to make a few impulse buys on each grocery store visit. This not only saves us money, but it also helps with our health as well.

Time, money, health – this move is a triple win, in my eyes.

One of the big tricks of shopping successfully at a warehouse store (I use Sam’s Club because it’s the only one reasonably close to me) is knowing when to buy something in the bulk sizes available there. It’s not always the best move.

For example, our local Sam’s Club often carries these giant 24 packs of sandwich buns. I’ve learned the hard way that if I buy one of these packs for just my family, we’re either eating nothing but sandwiches for several meals in the near future or they’re going to either get very hard or moldy. On the other hand, if I’m having guests over, is it worth it to buy one of these?

The same thought process repeats itself over and over again as I shop there. Am I going to be able to use all of this before it goes bad?

Flour. Lemon juice. Carrots. Watermelon. Pretzels. Brown sugar. Broccoli. Cherries. The list goes on and on. (Of course, there are the things you can pretty much store forever, like laundry detergent or dishwashing detergent or toilet paper or paper towels.)

To put it simply, if you’re not careful, your cart can quickly fill up at a warehouse club. Warehouse clubs are full of products that you use at a very good price point per unit. A cup of detergent at the warehouse club is almost always cheaper than a cup of detergent at the local grocery store.

Similarly, if you’re not careful, the stuff you buy at a warehouse club can go bad before you use it, wasting your time, your space, and especially your money. Take a pound of grapes. The price per pound at a warehouse club is less than it is at your local grocery store. The problem is that at the warehouse club, you have to buy five pounds of grapes to get that per-unit price. If you don’t use those grapes, then the leftover grapes go to waste and you end up wasting money.

It’s a balancing act, and it’s one that requires you to be in touch with what you actually need, not what you think you need or that you merely want.

Here are some tactics I use for shopping at a warehouse club.

First, I tend to buy the vast majority of my non-perishable items there. Trash bags, paper towels, toilet paper, shampoo, soap, razor blades, light bulbs – these things are almost always far cheaper at a warehouse club than at a grocery store. The only drawback is that you do have to have a place to store this stuff. We store much of our excess in the garage.

For my perishable food items, I rely entirely on my grocery list. Of course, this grocery list is based on a meal plan that accounts for the number of guests we intend to have at each meal throughout the week.

To make it simple, If we’re using the same item multiple times during the week or we’re having a number of guests, then I will buy perishable food items at a warehouse club. Otherwise, I just won’t buy it there. An item is not a bargain if you end up having to throw half of it away because it’s stale, rotten, or otherwise unusable.

My usual shopping plan for the week involves making a “warehouse club” list and making a “regular” list. Items that I’m sure I’ll be able to thoroughly use if I buy in bulk go on the “warehouse club” list. Everything else goes on the “regular” list.

I don’t even take the “regular” list into the warehouse club. Inevitably, if I do, I wind up buying something in bulk that I shouldn’t be buying in bulk. When I buy something in bulk that I shouldn’t be buying in bulk, I often end up wasting the excess and losing money.

To put it simply, I make the bulk-buying decision on each item before I ever go to the store. This way, I’m never caught in the trap of convincing myself to buy something in bulk that will go to waste. This keeps money in my pocket and space in my cupboard.

As I’ve mentioned many times on The Simple Dollar, one of our most frequently-used methods for saving money on food is to simply create a meal plan each week based on the sales found in grocery flyers. I then take that meal plan and prepare a grocery list based on it, which naturally includes many of the sale items found in the flyers.

For me, this approach to meal planning was vastly different than the way I once did it and, to be frank, it took some getting used to. I tend to learn such things through repetition and example, seeing what others have done and simply trying it myself until it becomes natural and normal.

With that in mind, this week, as I was working on my family’s meal plan, I decided to simply make a post outlining the entire process, from meal plan to grocery list, so you can see clearly how the entire process works and perhaps imitate it yourself for food preparation in your own home.

Getting the Flyers
Many grocery store chains carry digital copies of their flyers on their websites. If your preferred grocery store does not, you can often find a copy of that week’s grocery store flyer inside a copy of the Sunday newspaper in your area.

I tend to use digital flyers for the grocery stores I most often visit. I tend to split my grocery shopping between Fareway and Hy-Vee – the former has the best prices on many goods, but the latter often has a better selection for specific items I might need. Since I often do the bulk of my grocery shopping at Fareway with just a quick stop at Hy-Vee at the end of the trip to pick up what I couldn’t find at Fareway, I check the websites of both stores for flyers (hyvee.com and fareway.com).

Identifying Interesting Items
As I browse through the flyers for each store, I try to look for items that are either on sale low enough that they stand out to me or ones that stand out for flavor reasons, inspiring me to get into the kitchen and cook. I tend to particularly focus on produce deals.

In the current flyer at fareway.com, I found these sales worth noting:
Navel oranges, ten cents each
Fresh broccoli, $1.49 lb.
Baby portabellas, $1.29 lb.
Red potatoes, $1.99 for 5 lb. bag

In the current flyer at hyvee.com, I found these sales worth noting:
Asparagus, $2.97 lb. (expensive out of season, but sounds delicious)
Mild yellow onions, $1.39 for 3 lb. bag
Baby red potatoes, $0.69 lb.

Finding and Choosing Recipes
I know that I need to plan for five dinners in the coming week, as well as making sure that we have things on hand for breakfasts (like plenty of oatmeal, for example) and a few items for backup lunches in case we don’t have enough leftovers to cover our lunches.

I usually use a recipe search engine like allrecipes, putting in the interesting ingredients I found above to search for simple recipes I can make that the family would like (with an eye toward my own dietary needs, too). I often also go through our cookbooks and recipe box to see if we have anything interesting that matches well.

I wound up with several recipes worth using, including a portabella penne, an asparagus ratatouille that lets me use the leftover tomatoes from some cooking last week, and a recipe that I’ll be using in my Friday meal post.

Building a Meal Plan and a Master Ingredient List
I usually come up with an actual meal plan at this point, slotting in the various meals for various nights. The biggest reason for doing this is so that I can be sure to use the fresher ingredients as quickly as possible, to plan ahead in terms of tasks that need to be done (like soaking beans overnight), and to make sure I can roll over elements easily from one meal to the next, like having both meals with onions close enough together that any extra chopped onion doesn’t go bad in the fridge.

I also prepare what I call a “master ingredient list.” This is basically a list of all of the ingredients in this week’s recipes sorted by the place where I’d find it in our kitchen – refrigerator, freezer, top pantry shelf, etc.

I do all of this on the computer, usually using Google Docs. It’s much easier to just type all of this stuff out than it is to actually write it down.

Turning the Ingredient List into a Grocery List
When I have a “master ingredient list,” I take it around the house to each of the places I’ve grouped things by on the list, then I cross off the things we already have. This also makes me check up on the quantity of stuff we use frequently, like milk, and encourages me to add such things to the list.

Once I’m done hitting the spots in our kitchen, the grocery list is ready to go. Conveniently, it’s already pretty well organized, as I marked the sale items on the list so I know what store to buy it in, and all of the refrigerator and freezer stuff is already grouped together for me.

I simply hit the grocery store, unpack everything, and then just follow that meal plan throughout the busy week.

Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance book or other book of interest.

Cut Your Grocery Bill in Half is the follow-up to America’s Cheapest Family, a very solid book on frugality by Steve and Annette Economides from 2007 that I quite liked.

Cut Your Grocery Bill in Half seems to be a detailed expansion of the second chapter of their first book. The focus here is on groceries – mostly food shopping, but a little bit of overlap on buying other household products.

Is there really enough juice in that topic to fill up an entire book?

1. Cut Your Grocery Bill in Half (or More)
The book opens by making clear the fact that changing your grocery shopping habits isn’t a magic wand that will instantly reduce the costs. Instead, it’s a combination of techniques, most of which become both easier and more effective with practice and repeated use. In other words, saving money on groceries will seem like a ton of work for less savings than you expect at first, but as the tactics become more familiar and natural, they’ll take less time and effort and earn more savings. I’ve certainly found this to be true in my own life.

2. The Power of the Plan
A grocery list. A meal plan. A pantry inventory. These are all tools that make it a lot easier to maximize your grocery dollar, but they all required advance work and planning before you go anywhere near a grocery store. Successful grocery shopping – at least in terms of bang for the buck – relies a lot on doing advance work. Of course, this advance work also saves you a lot of time when you’re actually in the store.

3. Shopping to Win
Here, the authors list a big collection of specific grocery saving strategies, devoting a page or two of text to each one. They’re quite varied, which means that some will be useless to you and some will be home runs but the two groups will be different for each person. The one I like is the one about aged beef – beef is often better with some aging, provided that you prepare it well when it’s actually ready in your kitchen.

4. Couponing – One of Many Ways to Save
Some people swear by it. Others find it useless. My take? Couponing works to a small extent as a component of a lot of other strategies. My opinion is that people often refer to couponing when they’re referring to a big pile of interacting strategies, of which actual coupon use is just one part. The authors address the big complaint that many people use against coupons, which is that they encourage unhealthy eating habits. They make a very good point countering that – coupons don’t cause bad eating habits, people do. Just because a coupon exists for an unhealthy food doesn’t mean you have to use it.

5. Cooking That Will Save You Time, Mone, and Sanity
This chapter is another big list of specific saving ideas (devoting about a page to each one), this time focused on cooking. Buy in bulk. Cook once a month and freeze. Spice, spice, spice. Cook with your spouse. Start a “meal swap” club (something we’re trying to get started… and something I’ll discuss in a future post).

6. Stocking Up and Organizing – Store It, Find It, Use It
If you buy lots of stuff in bulk, how do you find it when you need it? A big key to all of this is keeping the stuff you have on hand organized so you know what you have and can find it when you need it. The best way to do this is to simply keep an ongoing pantry list, where you list all of the food items you have stored along with notes on where to find them. You can also use this list when making a meal plan or a grocery list so you know what you have on hand without digging in the cupboard. Microsoft Excel is a great tool for this.

7. Economizing Equipment – Powerful Money-Saving Tools
It’s good to have some basic tools on hand to make cooking easier. The Economides list a lot of different items here, most of which I agree with. Surprisingly, one of the best things we’ve ever purchased is our KitchenAid stand mixer, which we use for all kinds of things from making homemade bread to preparing mashed potatoes and cookie batter. I’m also a big believer in eventually getting very good, very durable kitchen equipment. A Teflon-coated pan hits the trash in a few years, but a cast iron pot is forever.

8. Family Dinnertime – Building a Stronger Family at the Dinner Table
It’s statistically proven: families that eat dinner together have lower incidence rates of teenage pregancy and juvenile delinquency. If you have children – or even if you’re married without children – strive to eat dinner together and, ideally, prepare it together. Meals can be a very social event that goes far beyond the direct nutrition you put into your body.

9. Feeding Your Kids for Less
What do you do when you have a family full of mouths to feed? Have lots of low-cost snacks (what fruits are on sale this week?) and involve your children in the whole process of meals, from planning to shopping to preparation to setting the table, so they gain an appreciation for the whole process. Our oldest kids are four and three and we’re already integrating them into this process.

10. Where and How to Eat Out for Less
The easiest solution for saving while eating out is to not eat out. However, that’s not the ultimate answer for many, so how do you do it? This chapter offers a lot of advice – don’t be afraid to use coupons, take home a doggy bag, go simple with the beverages (I recommend water), don’t get “upsold” to more expensive versions of what you ordered, and so on. The best solution really is to just not eat out, even at a very “cheap” place (where you’re getting really dodgy food quality).

11. Gardening – Grow It Yourself and Be Healthy
Gardening can also save a lot of money, not just in the produced vegetables, but in the extremely low cost entertainment it can provide for many hours during the summer. The trick is to grow a variety of vegetables and, when you have excess, to store them properly by freezing them and/or canning them. There’s nothing better in January than having many pounds of garden-fresh tomatoes canned or frozen, just ready for use.

Is Cut Your Grocery Bill in Half Worth Reading?
If you’ve never even thought about your grocery bill and your dining out bill as ways to really save money, this book will be a home run for you. Many of the techniques you can use to trim your grocery bill are quite easy and this is a spectacular collection of such tips.

On the other hand, if you’re an experienced frugal grocery shopper and food preparer, you’ll find a lot of tips that make you say “No kidding?!” with a few tips here or there that will be of use to you mixed throughout the book. If you’re willing to search for some treasure, this one will still be a worthwile read.

I found several interesting ideas in the book that we’re going to try, even if many of the tips felt like repetition of the things we already do. Does that make for a good book? I say yes, because it has ideas for beginners and old hands alike.

Why do you shop at your preferred grocery store?

Think about it for a minute. What reasons do you have for shopping at one store over another? Is it purely the prices? What about the location – is it because it’s close to your home? Cleanliness (like my Aldi story a while back)? Store organization? Convenience? Shopper rewards programs? How they treat their employees? How their company behaves? Availability of certain specific goods? Cost to get in the door (a la Costco and Sam’s Club and B.J.’s)?

All of these (and more) are factors when you choose where to shop. Some stores are going to excel in one area or another and do poorly in other areas. A store that excels on prices will often tank in other areas, like employee treatment (like Wal-Mart). A store that excels on prices and employee treatment fails on cost of admission and organization (like Costco). Experiences in some of these areas will also vary from place to place.

My choice of store centers around a handful of factors. At minimum, a store has to have a certain level of cleanliness or I’ll turn around and walk out.

I won’t bother to go more than about three miles farther than the nearest grocery store to shop, but that rule includes Hy-Vee, Wal-Mart Supercenter, Aldi, Fareway, Dahl’s, Sam’s Club, Super Target, and Cub Foods, so there’s plenty of choice in that range.

I tend to prefer stores where it’s easy to find what I want – the more bad experiences I have wandering around trying to find something, the less likely I am to come back, even if the prices are great. After that, prices rule, in my book.

I’m not too worried about the shopper’s reward policies or their corporate behavior, and the cost of entry issue mostly comes down to “do I save money over the long run.”

What am I left with? I have a handful of stores I prefer to shop at (topped by Fareway) and another handful I’ll stop at for specific sales or specific items.

That’s great and all, but why am I writing about this?

First of all, the sticker price is rarely the bottom line. Almost always, if I strictly chase the absolute lowest price on an item, I end up costing myself more because of the additional costs.

For example, I won’t drive an extra ten miles (and spend that extra time) to save an extra dollar. The automobile wear-and-tear and maintenance costs will eat the savings and you’ll have spent a chunk of an hour chasing that imaginary dollar. I’ll happily spend an extra dollar at a different store to save me that twenty minutes and the wear on the car.

Second, a bit of planning trumps most of the other factors. Be patient on your staples, for example, and don’t be afraid to buy a lot of them when the right price comes along. This requires some planning, of course, but it allows you to buy the items you need from locations that are acceptable for you, ethically or otherwise.

An example: I would have to drive significant extra mileage to hit a CVS (around here, DrugTown is the most common drugstore chain) in order to take advantage of their bargains. What I’ve learned, though, is that patience, planning, and coupon use often trumps their bargains elsewhere, which enables me to not have to spend time and money traveling to CVS to get a “bargain.”

So what’s the best solution?

For me, it’s simply a matter of knowing and using a small handful of local stores, being patient, and hitting the good sales there hard.

Knowing two or three local stores makes them convenient and increases my ability to find things in those stores, making shopping trips faster (and time is money).

It also allows me to narrow my searches for sales. I only really pay attention to a few different grocery store flyers when planning my grocery shopping. I pay attention to coupons, but only in the sense of “this is a coupon for a staple, let’s clip it and see if it eventually matches a store sale.” This attitude saves a ton of time.

In a nutshell, patience trumps “super” bargains for me in that it saves me time and allows me to be choosy about where I shop so I can take advantage of the other aspects of grocery shopping (like convenience and being able to easily find items).

Whenever I go shopping, I find myself with an interesting mix of items in my cart. There’s quite a few generics, quite a few “low cost” name brands, and still some more rather upscale items (like organic fresh foods). Organic baking soda gets tossed in right next to the free range eggs, for example.

Why exactly do I skimp so hard on some items but spend so much more on the others? How is that frugal in any way?

Here’s the thing: it’s all about the value I get from the item, which may or may not be the same as the value you get from the item. And that may be different than the value someone else gets from that item.

Take the generic baking soda. Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate, whether you buy it with an Arm and Hammer logo or with a generic source. There is no extra value, from my perspective, from buying name-brand baking soda. I’m happy to save $0.25 on a box here.

Then we go to the milk aisle, where I’m likely to pick organic milk that is completely free of artificial hormones. To me, the extra dollar or two per gallon that I pay for this is well worth it, as it greatly reduces my children’s exposure to rBS and rBGH, which can alter their development and trigger puberty earlier (among other effects), and the cows do not consume feed treated with pesticides, which shows up in small amounts in non-organic milk. This has a value to me that’s worth paying extra for. This may or may not be your value.

As we walk down the aisle with the garbage bags, I don’t choose the generic, nor do I choose the expensive one. I choose whatever bag is recommended as a “best buy” from the most recent Consumer Reports rundown of trash bags that I’ve read. Why? Because a ripped garbage bag is a big mess that I don’t want to deal with – and generics often rip – but the expensive bags don’t really add anything extra.

Naturally, with all of these choices, I tend to stock up when they’re on sale or I have a coupon.

What process led me to these choices? It’s a pretty simple one.

First, I make my buying decisions outside of the store. If you’re trying to decide which one to get when you’re standing in the store, the psychology of store marketing is going to be at work. Carefully designed packaging and familiar name brands will play a big role in determining what you buy.

If something’s on my list, I usually know the exact brand I’m going to buy before I walk into the store. That way, I’m not spending time standing there idly trying to decide between several options, because that’s when marketing takes effect.

Second, if I don’t know exactly what I’m going to buy, I research it. Consumer Reports is one of my first stops, but I tend to use a lot of different sources. I want to know the ins and outs of everything that I buy, even down to the $0.99 stuff.

Third, if I can’t explain why I would specifically need a higher-cost version, I buy the generic. With the baking soda, I can’t see a reason to spend extra money to get an Arm and Hammer logo. With the garbage bags, I’m buying the “best buy” bags because I do not want the bags to rip – it’s not a mess I want to deal with. With the milk, I’m buying the organic milk for the family health reasons stated above.

This holds true for every item on my list. If I know what value I want from the item and I’ve done a bit of research, I know what version I’ll be buying. I don’t have to look at nine different kinds of diapers or twenty six boxes of cereal to decide which one I want. I’ve already done much of the shopping outside of the store.

This has another big benefit: this, along with a shopping list, drastically reduces the time spent inside a store. I basically move most of my grocery store time out of the store to my home, where I can make my own list and do my own research without all of the marketing distractions in the store.

The end result? I don’t go into a store until I know exactly what I’m going to buy there. That makes it easy to go through the store very quickly. I fill my cart with the stuff I want that delivers what I want and maximizes the value I get for the money I spend. Even better, my time for impulse buys is almost eliminated.

That’s how we’re rolling through the grocery store this morning. How about you?

A few weeks ago, I went to the grocery store in the afternoon to take care of grocery shopping for the week. Sarah had written a list for me (in all fairness to her, it was actually closer to a set of notes for a meal plan rather than for grocery shopping; it wasn’t really a complete and finished list), but I hadn’t looked at it very carefully. However, I did know from what she told me that I would have to do at least some of the grocery shopping at a different grocery store than our usual one because there were a few unusual items on the list for special meals. As a result, I decided to pick up most of the stuff at a different grocery store than our usual one, in order to save some time.

After the shopping was over, though, I left the store in a painful daze. It had actually taken far longer than it ever should have – and the shopping list was the big problem.

First of all, the items weren’t categorized well. There were several fresh fruits and vegetables on the list, but they were often separated by things like flour and spices and eggs and milk – items in completely different parts of the store.

Second, some of the items were simply names of complete recipes that we knew well. In a rush to complete the list (which, as I mentioned above, was closer to notes for a meal plan), Sarah simply jotted down two complete recipes by name that we both know cold. Of course, in the store, that means spending the time to think about the items required for the recipe – and also possibly buying extras of a particular item.

Third, the list annotations were unclear. Sarah had included a few notes that would have made perfect sense to her – but didn’t make any sense at all to me. I made some valiant guesses and, in a few cases, made the right guess, but I spent a lot of time puzzling them out and quite often I made the wrong guess.

Why is this an issue worth writing a post about?

First of all, it cost time. I spent a bunch of extra time in the store because of the items on this list, whether it was simply trying to figure out what they are or rushing from one end of the store to the other to find them.

Second, it cost us money. I bought a couple of unnecessary items along the way due to redundancy and also due to not understanding the list fully.

Third, it convinced me to make a few impulse buys. As I spent so much time wandering back and forth in the store, I was continually exposed to shelf after shelf of items that weren’t on my list and I didn’t need. Thanks to that exposure, I bought at least two unnecesary items.

So, how can I solve this problem? My goal, quite simply, is to save as much time and money as possible compared to this shopping trip. Here’s the plan I put in place.

First, I made a bunch of custom blank meal plan sheets. These are basically sheets that enable us to fill in full meal plans for the week ahead. These can easily be stuck on the fridge with a magnet, enabling us to fill in the blanks as we so wish.

Second, I made a bunch of custom blank grocery lists. Instead of just using a blank sheet of paper, I made a sheet that had a few distinct groups on it – “fresh fruits and vegetables,” “dairy products,” “meat counter,” “bread aisle,” and “other,” to be specific. If an item falls under one of the first four categories, we put it there. Otherwise, it goes in the “other” area.

Third, nothing gets added to the grocery list unless it’s out until we’re ready to go to the store. The only thing we put on the list during the week are items that we’re out of (or very close to depleting). This way, there is no confusion about what’s on the list.

Finally, the meal plan is finished (and the grocery list completed from the meal plan) just before we leave to go shopping. By keeping all complete meal ideas on the meal plan and not on any grocery lists, no one will have to stand in the store and piece through what the ingredients are for “jambalaya.”

What I learned from all of this is simple: doing that prep work ahead of time actually saves time in the store, and it certainly saves money, too. I learned this the hard way from that day with the confusing list.

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.