Grocery Outlet Score

On the way to the store where I most commonly grocery shop is a grocery outlet store. I stop there regularly, because it's on my way to my main shopping destination. But I rarely buy anything. There's never any telling what I'll find there, but by and large it's full of low-quality foodstuffs, most of which are at or past their sell-by date, or have damaged packaging. I stop there regulary though because every once in a great while I've come across organic dairy products. I once bought 12 pounds of organic butter there at $2 each. Having a chest freezer means I can take advantage of such rare deals.

Recently I lucked onto what is probably my best find yet. Fourteen bags of Organic Valley non-fat powdered milk. For $1.39 per bag. I cleaned out the store. Now, I had looked at buying these bags in the past. Once upon a time it was possible to use powdered milk for a substantial savings. But at least when it comes to organic powdered milk at regular prices, there's no savings to be had. A regularly priced bag is $6.99, and it makes 13 cups of reconstituted non-fat milk. That works out to 54 cents per cup, or $4.30 per half gallon, much more than I pay for fresh organic whole milk.

I have scored a few bags of this powdered milk before as a free handout from someone who had paid good money for them but hadn't used them. I used the powdered up bit by bit, adding about one cup to each half gallon of whole milk I bought. One cup of reconstituted non-fat milk becomes indistinguishable when diluted in a quart of more of whole milk, at least to us.

By stocking up on this powdered milk at such a great price, I've laid in a fantastic resource in terms of emergency preparedness. And I'll be cutting the cost of our organic milk for at least a year to come. By adding just one cup of the reconstituted milk, I've effectively lowered the price per half gallon from $3.69 to $3.37. If I add two cups per half gallon, the price per half gallon falls to $3.11. I also just like having powdered milk around for occasions when I want to bake something that calls for milk, without using up all the fresh milk I have on hand. It has certainly saved me a few grocery trips in the past.

I'm going to harangue you just a bit now about a frugal practice that many people dread. It's the price comparison book. This is just a little notebook in which you record the current prices for the foods you happen to shop for, at all of the places you shop at regularly, even if "regularly" means only once per year. While it is a chore to assemble this information, once you've done it, you hold in the palm of your hand an amazing wealth of hard facts and power. No one else can tell you where to find the best prices for the things you buy on a regular basis among the stores that are local to you. Plenty of people can speak in generalities about the consumer price index and regional prices, but you need information specific to you and your area to make the best shopping decisions.

Because I knew that these bags of powdered milk normally sell for $7 in my area, and because I knew how much I normally pay for fresh whole milk, it was completely obvious to me that $1.39 per bag was a steal. It's what gave me the confidence to buy up all fourteen bags on the shelf. If I'd had no idea how much this product normally costs, I might have bought only a bag or two, or none at all. The information in my price comparison book, collected for almost no cost at all, just allowed me a significant ongoing savings.

Non-fat powdered milk will keep for a very long time if it is stored in an airtight container, and in a dark and cool area. Fortunately, the powdered milk I purchased comes in a tightly sealed bag. Even better, I have room for them in my chest freezer, which will prolong their shelf life. I could keep them in the basement though if I didn't have room. Once the packages are opened, the powdered milk will begin to deteriorate, so I will try to use it up fairly quickly. Given the amount of baking I do and diluting our fresh milk with the powdered, I don't think we'll see any spoilage.

Have a look around in your area for grocery outlets. And if you don't see anything of interest there the first time you shop, give it another try about a month later. You may surprise yourself with what you can find there!

The $50 Monthly Grocery Challenge - How It Might Be Done

I've had a challenging budget goal for groceries every month since May of this year. Could we spend no more than $50 per month for our food? I've made regular reports on my attempts to meet this challenge. But I thought I'd sum up my findings and thoughts in this post.

Everyone's constraints and advantages will differ when approaching such a tight budget. Our constraints were that with few exceptions I buy organic, especially where meat and dairy products are concerned. I also try very hard to support local agriculture by shopping at the farmers' market. Could I get cheaper milk and fruit? Of course. But I personally wouldn't feel good about eating it. If our financial situation were truly dire, that preference would become a luxury we couldn't afford. But we're not there yet. Also, neither of us was prepared to subsist on ramen noodles. We weren't going to eat an unhealthy diet just for the sake of meeting this goal.

Our advantages were several. We have laying hens and a huge vegetable garden, a chest freezer with plenty of meat, fish, and homemade bread, and a well-stocked pantry with lots of shelf-stable cooking ingredients. Also, we only had to feed two adults. And I didn't have to include the meals my husband ate when he traveled for work, which was a significant part of the time.

I failed every month at meeting my own self-imposed grocery budget. But am I going to let that stop me from giving advice? Heck, no! Having made the attempt, here are my thoughts on how to go about feeding yourself if you need to cut back radically.

1. Stop eating out. This should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway right off the bat. No lattes, no fast food, no deli sandwiches. Unless you have a coupon or gift certificate that makes food from a restaurant completely free, eating out is out of the question on this budget.

2. Shop your pantry/freezer/garden. The first and most obvious thing to do is to use up what you've already paid for. If you have food sitting around the house, now is the time to get creative and prepare meals using what is already available to you. This is how we were able to get even within striking distance of our budgetary goal.

3. Glean or forage. Never turn down free wholesome food. If someone offers you something edible - be it an overgrown zucchini from their garden or groundfall apples - accept it graciously and then use it. Learn what wild foods are available in your area and learn to appreciate them. Nuts, fruits, roots, wild greens - there's a whole world of edible food out there. Check Euell Gibbons' classic Stalking The Wild Asparagus out of the library. If you haven't already read it, it'll surprise you. If you see a fruit tree in your neighborhood with fallen fruits all over the ground, politely approach the owners and ask if you might collect the fruits. (Be aware of the risks with groundfall fruits however.)

4. Buy only cooking ingredients, never prepared foods. With very few exceptions, there's no way to meet such a strict budget while buying any sort of convenience food. So skip all prepared foods. Buy rolled oats instead of breakfast cereal and dried pasta instead of Chef Boyardee. Forego snack foods, alcohol, single-serving anything, and any purchased beverage other than milk. Stick to the produce aisle, the aisle with the canned and shelf-stable goods, and the frozen vegetable section.

5. Shop the loss leaders. Most chain grocery stores have a weekly advertisement about their sale items. Oftentimes these prices are so good that the store will not make any money on them, and will even take a loss. That's their decision. Your decision is to be one of the smart customers. Let another customer fulfill the store's expectation that the impulse buys and unnecessary purchases will cover their costs. Buy what they're promoting, and nothing else but what you really need to cook cheap but healthy meals.

6. Stop wasting food. On such a tight budget, there is no room whatsoever for letting food go to waste. Keep track of what is in your refrigerator and your fruit bowl. Pull any perishable items out to the front of the shelf where you will see them everyday. Make it a high priority to use stuff up before it goes bad. Also reconsider every scrap of food that you would otherwise throw away. Maybe you don't like to eat chicken skin. But did you know that the fat in it can be rendered down? It's called schmaltz, and it's used a lot in Jewish cooking. That's a few tablespoons of fat that can replace butter or cooking oil in another dish. Waste not, want not. So start thinking outside of the box when it comes to your food.

7. Produce your own food: garden, raise animals, fish, or hunt. This one is going to be a tough sell for those who don't already raise some of their own food. But there's really no way that I can see to come close to living on $50 worth of purchased food per month without directly producing some of my own food myself. Eggs and vegetables that are "free" to me have been the cornerstone of many, many meals for us during these months of the challenge. All of these options require lead time, effort, an investment in tools and/or licenses, and they're all easier to do once you've gotten some experience. (Who was it that said, "Experience is something you get after you need it.") You can't snap your fingers and have a productive garden or a starter flock of laying hens. If you don't have the tools or the permits needed to hunt or fish, you probably can't afford them if you need to live on $50 worth of food per month. But you can make long term plans to do these things. Or make friends with someone who already does. Gardeners often have extra food, and they nearly always have weeds to pull and work that should really get done if only they could find the time. (Trust me on this one.) Some hunters have extra meat that they'd be willing to barter for. Offer to trade a little labor for some food. You may also pick up some skills or tips to help you do it better yourself when you can. And by the way, chickens love kitchen scraps, which helps enormously with #6.

8. Eat less meat. Unless you're practicing one of the options mentioned in #7, other sources of protein are usually cheaper than meat. Eggs, dried beans, and tofu, and sometimes even dairy are all fine, protein-rich alternatives. I'm not saying you need to become a vegetarian. But unless you hunt, raise animals for meat, or have already stocked up on a lot of meat before you begin trying to live within this budget, meat is going to have to play a small role in your diet. Get past the idea that a proper lunch or dinner must include a large serving of meat. Instead, think of meat as a garnish or a flavoring ingredient. We often put a few slivers of parboiled bacon on our homemade pizza. The whole rice-and-beans idea sounds pretty dismal, I admit. But have you tried Cuban black beans lately? Or the combination of lentils and basmati rice with some sauteed onions and herbs? Give it a try. You may surprise yourself with how good these cheap alternatives can be.

9. Learn to cook. If you already know how, you're well situated for this budgetary challenge. If not, then learn the basics. This is not the time to try to master chicken Kiev or beef Wellington. Learn to cook pasta with fresh or frozen vegetables and a few pantry staples such as canned tomatoes and olive oil. Learn to make potato-garlic soup. Learn to bake bread - it's a lot easier than you may think. Turn to the library for solid cookbooks on the basics. I recommend Joy of Cooking, The New Best Recipe, and How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. All of these books will give you clear instructions on how to prepare simple, healthy foods.

10. Have a meal plan and a shopping list. Inventory your pantry and freezer, then sit down with a pen and paper to create a meal plan for the week. Build on what you already have. Then look at those store fliers and see what you can add without spending much money. List the meals you will prepare from those items and plan for leftovers wherever you can. Create a shopping list of what you need to buy and then stick to it like glue when you shop. Unless you see a spectacular unadvertised deal that you know you can incorporate into your meal plan, shop for only what is on your list. Don't go to the store hungry, or with hungry kids.

11. Skip the coupons. This is going to surprise many people. But when you're on a very tight grocery budget, coupons are rarely a good strategy. Few coupons are available for the most basic cooking ingredients. You may save a dollar on that frozen dinner, or that over-processed, over-packaged snack item. But you're probably better off spending the same after-coupon amount on potatoes, beans, or pasta. A large banana and a mug of tea brewed at home will be about as much as one serving of frozen orange juice. By sticking with basic ingredients you'll avoid the chemical additives and preservatives as well. Coupons will save you a little money if you insist on paying the premium for processed foods. But it's nearly always the better route - financially and health-wise - to buy basic ingredients and prepare the food at home. Now coupons for TP, those are worth using.


I'm not saying that doing all - or even any - of this is easy. Nor am I saying that this will guarantee that you can feed two adults on $50 of purchased food each month. After all, I failed every time I tried with this Challenge, even with all the advantages I had. Living on so small a grocery budget will require discipline and effort. If you plan carefully enough, know how to cook, and have some sources of "free" food (either from storage, gleaning, or your own production), this should be doable.

Finally, a serious note. I've written all of the above from the perspective of someone choosing this strict budget as a voluntary challenge. If you're reading this because your immediate financial situation is so dire that this is not an option but a necessity, then seek help from a foodbank, a church, or any charity that will help you put food on the table. This is not a time to stand on pride. My understanding is that it takes months to be approved for the foodstamp program, so you may not be able to rely on it in the short term, but get the process started as soon as possible. By the time you're approved, you may not need it and you can graciously decline the aid. But better to give your future self that option than ignore a valuable resource that may make all the difference. If you are looking ahead to serious longterm financial constraints, then you should seriously consider every possibility of growing or raising your own food.


Related Posts:
May Challenge report
June Challenge report
July-August Challenge report
Four Cornerstone Meals for Frugal Living

The $50 Grocery Challenge: July & August Report

August must be the month of bottomless to-do lists and good intentions. The garden has gotten away from me entirely, and there are just never enough hours in the day. I had meant at some point this month to give an update on how we've been doing for the monthly $50 Grocery Challenge. In a nutshell: we overshot big time in July.

The problem was, we ran out of some essentials. I don't mean avocados, or chocolate. I mean olive oil and pasta. And rather than just buy a single bottle of oil and a pound of pasta, I bought a case of bottles and about 15 pounds of pasta. It was the right choice financially, because it coincided with a carpool run to Trader Joes, which has the best prices on organic extra-virgin olive oil and organic pasta in my area. But it definitely blew the Challenge right outta the water. See, there was batch after batch of pesto to be made with all the basil and sage coming out of the garden. On top of that, I also needed walnuts for the pesto. The walnuts were far cheaper than the more gourmet pine nuts, but they still weren't cheap. Faced with the choice of putting up the garden produce in a usable form, or sticking with the challenge, I opted for the food preservation. And truth be told, running out of olive oil would pretty much qualify as an emergency in my kitchen, tantamount only to running out of tea or garlic. We're talking meltdown territory. If I sound like I'm blaming the overspending on the pesto production, that's just an excuse.

So, we came in at well over $180 spent on food in July. Other than replenishing our supplies of basics, we didn't do too badly. No eating out, and pretty much every meal built around what was coming out of the garden. Lots of homemade pizza, pasta dishes, and some meat and fish pulled from the freezer.

This month we're doing a bit better with the Challenge, though we've spent a lot on dairy this month. I'm working on a post that will summarize my thoughts and observations on this crazy Grocery Challenge of mine. I'm getting pretty sick of tracking everything so closely, so I probably won't make any further monthly reports. But it has been a useful practice for me in that it has definitely changed my outlook on cooking and feeding ourselves. The change has been for the better and for the frugaller.

Related Posts:

$50 Monthly Grocery Challenge: How it Might Be Done

$50 a Month for Groceries

Food prices have been going up, and everyone who's paying attention has felt the pinch. We're foodies in my house, and we cook from scratch most of the time. We also have a very well stocked pantry, a large garden just getting started outside, four laying hens, and a chest freezer that's so full it's difficult to navigate. So at the beginning of May I decided that we would have an experiment this month: $50 for groceries, for two people, for the whole month.

I figured we would still need to buy milk, other dairy products, and a few cooking staples such as onions and garlic. (We've got garlic in the ground, but it's not mature yet.) Aside from these few things that we can't provide for ourselves and we can't do without, we'd be eating from our reserves and the current usufruct of our mini-homestead. Despite a few missteps, I'd say it's worked pretty well. But I should explain all the exceptions and wheretofores.

First of all, I bake all the bread we eat and I also sell breads. It so happened that I ran out of flour this month. I bought 100 pounds of flour wholesale and did not charge this against our grocery bill. Why not? you may fairly ask. Because the money came out of my egg and bread money, the funds I get for these items that I sell occasionally. I keep the money in an envelope, and pay for chicken feed and baking supplies out of it. In other words, our eggs and bread supplies pay for themselves, with a little of my labor thrown into the bargain. I had the cash on hand and will replace it with a few more bread sales.

Secondly, my husband travels almost half time for work. He was home more than gone in May, but even so he had some grocery expenditures that are simply too difficult to incorporate into our grocery experiment. I pack a great deal of homemade food for him so that he's not tempted to eat out much. He has my baked goods and fruit for breakfast every morning, and I send frozen homemade dinners along with him too. So those meals do count as coming out of our stored food assets.

Thirdly, when I do buy groceries, I buy organic or at farmers markets. This means that my food dollars are buying smaller quantities of more nutrient-rich foods. But I didn't count any non-food grocery store purchases against my $50 limit. Toilet paper and soaps don't come out of the freezer.

Here are some meals I've put together this month out of foods we have on hand:

Mirin-glazed salmon with sushi rice and garden lettuce salad
















Tomato and spinach strata with garlic toasts















Thin crust pizza with bacon and fresh sage from the garden











Homemade bagels


























Chard, frozen spinach and roasted potatoes with cream and Indian spices, served with basmati rice or sourdough crepes



















Pasta arrabbiata with peas and parmesan
Sushi rolls with leftover mirin-glazed salmon
Smoked whitefish chowder with bacon and peas
Pad see ew (Thai rice noodles with pork cutlet, cabbage, egg and hoisin sauce)
Sushi rolls with garden lettuce and tamago (sweet egg omelet)
Peach sourdough pancakes
Kheer (milky Indian dessert with leftover basmati rice)
Chocolate-hazelnut sourdough crepes
"Cheater's" huevos rancheros (eggs fried/cooked in salsa)
Roesti potato cakes
Scrambled eggs with caramelized onion and shredded zucchini

As you can see, we're eating pretty well and I haven't busted out many of the frozen roasts yet. We're working on the salmon first.

It's May 26th and so far I've overspent my monthly food budget by about $2.50. I still have plenty of food to eat, but I will probably need to buy milk before the month is out. Yet this month-long experiment has been good for me. My meal planning has shifted quite a bit. Rather than simply following my whimsical foodie moods, I start by taking stock of what's on hand. What's out there growing in the garden that needs to get used? What can I make with what I've got? How long can I go between runs to the grocery store? What's at the bottom of that freezer? And what am I going to do with all these eggs? It's not unusual for me to eat an egg as part of two meals in a day now. Good thing our pastured eggs are lower in fat and cholesterol than the ones from the store. The pantry is looking a little less chaotic, and the refrigerator a lot less so, but the freezer is still almost full. (Partly that's due to me stockpiling bread so that I needn't bake so much over the summer.) I've made fewer trips this month to the grocery store and a lot more to the garden. And the bottom line is I've eaten extremely well.

True, we're not really surviving on just $50 of groceries. We're eating out of previous purchases and what we're producing right now. But using up what we have is the point. Even in a non-cycling chest freezer food will eventually go off. I don't want one bite of that food to go to waste, which means we need to get serious about using it up. I recognize that what we're doing, or trying to do, isn't feasible for everyone. Not everyone has a big pantry, space for a big garden and laying hens, or a freezer full of food. But maybe you have a few things tucked away that you've forgotten about. Why not see what meals you can make of them. Think of it as an opportunity to get creative. Necessity is, as they say, the mother of invention.

I've been so impressed with my own changed mindset and very near achievement of my goal that I'm going to set the same challenge for myself for next month. This time I won't be lured into buying even the cheap store-brand soda that seemed like a frugal deal. I do regret that this experiment leaves me feeling tightfisted even when it comes to local farmers markets. I like to support local and sustainable producers. But nothing is more local than my own substantial garden. It should produce a good deal more for us in June than it has so far in May.

Related Posts

June Report
July-August Report
Four Cornerstone Meals for Frugal Living

The USDA's Cost of Food - How we measure up

The cost of feeding ourselves is one area where I've been focusing a lot of my efforts in saving money lately. Eating out is a thing of the past for us. Our grocery bill therefore represents our total expenditures on food. I wanted some objective indication of how well we were doing at saving ourselves money in this area. A link found on a frugal discussion forum sent me to the USDA's Cost of Food page. Here the US government breaks down the average price of food at home across the country on a month by month basis. There are four different budgetary plans, ranging from "thrifty" at the low end to "liberal" at the high end. The chart makes it easy to look at average food costs for families of different sizes, and as of this writing the data is complete through December of 2006.

Although I have shopped carefully with my price comparison book, baked our own bread, prepared home-made breakfast items, and relied on cheap staples for dinners, I had never actually tracked our grocery expenses to the dollar. I decided that this month - February, 2007 - would be the month to start. With my husband's cooperation, the receipts started piling up. And yesterday, with a well stocked refrigerator and no need to shop before the end of the month, I toted up the grocery bills and checked in against the government website.

Since no data is available yet for this month or even last month, I looked at both the December, 2006 and the February, 2006 figures for a family of two adults. Extrapolating from these figures, I estimated that under the thrifty plan, the figure for this month would be only about $315-$320 dollars. I'll check this against the actual posted figure when the government catches up on its data.

At first I thought we were doing just fine, with almost $29 to spare until the end of the month. But then of course I remembered a receipt I'd set aside for an item that needed to be returned. That receipt put us over the USDA's thrifty plan figure by $6-11, even when we eliminated the vitamin pills we purchased, moving them out of the grocery budget and into the health care budget. The good news turned to not-so-good news.

My husband and I spent a little while going over our collected receipts. We'd done some stocking up this month, buying a couple cases of "three-buck Chuck" wine for less than $75. I noted that there were quite a few snack items and beer listed on my husband's receipts. He keeps a small apartment in another city that he travels to regularly for work, and the urge to splurge just a little is irresistible for him, I think. He suggested that we not count the beer he bought because he hadn't yet drunk all of it. I demurred, pointing out that we've been eating foods throughout the month that were purchased earlier and stored in the pantry and freezer. Besides, stocking up during sales and once-a-month runs to specialty stores is our usual practice. So it's not our consumption costs, per se, but our food expenditures that we're tracking. In the long run, it should all even out.

The exercise of tracking all our grocery expenses has been a good one - one that we will undoubtedly repeat in the coming months. I'm a little bit disappointed that we didn't meet our goal of living within the thrifty plan as defined by the USDA. But I'm glad that we definitely come in at the low end of their "low-cost" plan, even when purchasing organic products whenever we can. The snack foods and beer that my husband buys have been noted, but that's as far as I'm willing to go in addressing the issue. He's the bread winner, and I'd much rather have a contented spouse than see him feeling deprived and unhappy for the sake of another $20 per month.

We learned that even under the thrifty plan, we could buy organic products and a fair amount of meat, or buy a small amount of snack foods and alcohol - but not both. This is very useful information for me as the primary grocery shopper for the household. I'm not sure yet how it will change our spending habits, if it does at all. But having the knowledge is always a good thing.

How to save by costing your meals

Yesterday I posted about baking at home to save money on breakfast items. I wrote about comparing the price of my favorite store-bought cereal to morning glory muffins and other goodies I baked at home. Today I'm going to explain the costing process in detail, in case others want to know exactly what a given meal is costing them per serving. To do these calculations, you'll need a kitchen scale and a calculator.

Let's start with costing a serving of breakfast cereal, because with only two ingredients to measure and price, this is a fairly simple cost analysis. I used to eat Special K red berries cereal with organic milk. To figure out how much each serving cost me, I first calculated the cost per ounce of the cereal, which is sold by weight. (I no longer have a copy of my own calculations, so I'll work with hypothetical figures from here on.) Checking my price comparison book, I saw that the best price I could find for this cereal was at a wholesale shopper's club, at $3.41 per pound. That works out to about $0.2131 per ounce. Then I calculated that my organic milk was costing me about $0.39 per cup. This is just a little complicated here, because we're mixing weight pricing with volumetric pricing. But bear with me.

Next, I used my kitchen scale to find out how much cereal I consumed on an average morning. The portion sizes indicated on the side of the box were irrelevant to me. I needed to know what I actually ate - not what the marketing wonks "recommended." My kitchen scale has a tare function on it. That means that I could set my bowl on the scale, and set the weight to zero, so that the scale ignored the weight of the bowl and only paid attention to the cereal I was about to pour in. Let's say that my serving size was 4.6 ounces. Then I poured a cup of milk into a clear graduated measuring cup. I poured milk into the bowl as I normally would and measured what was left: a little less than 1/4 cup. I called that 0.8 cups and sat down to eat my cereal.

When breakfast was over, I ran a couple of quick calculations. Multiplying my 4.6 ounces of cereal by 0.2131, I found my cereal cost of about 98 cents. Taking 0.8 cups of my 39 cents per cup milk, I found that the milk for my cereal cost me about another 31 cents. Thus, my cost for breakfast that morning was $1.29. This of course excludes miscellaneous costs like washing the breakfast dishes or the gas needed to go buy the groceries. It seemed to me that $1.29 per day was a good starting point, and that I could surely find ways to save money on this meal.

I moved on to costing some of my own baked goods. With a lot more ingredients, these items were much more complicated to price out. Some of the items I wasn't able to get an exact price on at all, so I had to estimate for those costs. Below, I've tried to show how I did it.

Morning Glory Muffins

3 cups organic white flour 0.938 lbs x $0.745/lb. = $0.655

1 cup organic whole wheat flour 0.344 lbs x $0.81/lb. = $0.279

2 cups organic white sugar 0.925 lbs x $0.84/lb. = $0.777

1/2 cup organic steel cut oats 0.188 lbs x $0.74/lb. = $0.139

4 tsp. baking soda (unknown price)

4 tsp. cinnamon (unknown price)

1 tsp. salt (unknown price)

4 cups grated organic carrots 1 lb* x $0.798/lb = $0.798

1 large organic apple, grated 0.77 lbs* x 1.99/lb = $1.53

1 cup organic raisins 0.3125 lbs x $2.59/lb = $0.81

1 cup organic walnut pieces 0.288 lbs x $8.51/lb = $2.447

1 cup organic unsweetened coconut flake 0.1 lb. x $2.71/lb = $0.271

5 large organic eggs 5 x $0.241/each = $1.20

1 1/2 cups organic vegetable oil 12 oz. x $0.244/oz. = $2.933

4 tsp. organic vanilla extract 0.660 oz. x $1.998/oz. = $1.33

Spray oil for muffin tins (unknown price)

*Note that I needed to weigh the carrots and apples before I peeled, trimmed and grated them. I didn't use the scraps to cook, but I still had to pay for them. So I needed the entire weight to calculate my costs.

You can see that I had some gaps in my price chart. I didn't have a good way to calculate the exact cost of the small amounts of baking soda, cinnamon, salt and spray oil. I knew that cinnamon is a fairly expensive product, while all the others are relatively cheap. To come up with a figure, I made a wild guess and put down 50 cents for all these ingredients combined. If I come up with a good way to exactly figure these prices in the future, I'll revise my cost analysis.

So adding up all the known costs plus my estimate, I came up with a total cost for the entire batch of muffins of $13.669. When I baked off this double batch of muffins, I got 35 muffins out of the batter. So I divided $13.669 by 35 to come up with my cost per muffin of about 39 cents each. This seemed fantastic to me. By eating one muffin instead of a bowl of cereal, I could save 90 cents each day.

But doing all this analysis also allowed me to see just how much some of these ingredients were costing me. The vanilla and walnuts were among the most expensive ingredients in the recipe. I didn't want to take out the vanilla, because I suspect it adds a lot to the recipe. But I had to admit that the walnuts really weren't all that noticeable in the muffins. So the next time I made the recipe, I left them out. Neither my husband nor I seemed to miss them. I recalculated and found that my price dropped to about 35 cents per muffin.

Since then I've also costed out the recipes for my apricot-oatmeal buttermilk scones and English muffins. The scones come in even cheaper than the morning glory muffins, at about 30 cents each. English muffins on their own cost me only about 11 cents to make, but I haven't yet figured out what the butter and jam costs. And besides, they aren't the healthiest breakfast, so we don't eat them all that often.

I hope this explanation is helpful to someone out there. You can apply the same procedure to any meal you prepare at home, so long as you have gathered the pricing information on the majority of the ingredients. Please leave me a comment if you have any questions or remarks.

Oh, the things you can bake!

Nutrition experts tell us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. For the frugal set, breakfast is often the last meal considered when trying to trim grocery expenditures. There are good reasons for this: breakfast is usually eaten at home by most members of the family; we're often in a big hurry in the morning, with little time for anything but a convenient meal. Still, there are good ways to economize on this meal without resorting to junk food. In fact, it's pretty easy to improve on the nutrition offered at breakfast with a homemade baked good.

As I became a more frugal person, changes happened gradually. First I looked for the best unit price on the cereal I liked to eat. Then I looked for cheaper cereals. But at some point, I got my calculator and my kitchen scale out and worked out that even at the best prices I could find for cereal and milk, my modest breakfast portions were costing us about $1.30 per day. That's when I decided to find out what a few home baked alternatives would cost.

I started with morning glory muffins, because I knew that my husband and I liked them. I also knew that they contained good things: shredded carrots and apple, dried fruit, nuts and eggs. If your not familiar with morning glory muffins, think of them as something like a gourmet carrot cake in miniature form. After making a double-sized batch of these delicious treats, I divided my ingredient costs by the number of muffins I got, and found that each muffin had cost me about 36 cents. And I had paid for organic products for almost every ingredient. In other words, each muffin represented a savings of almost $1 per breakfast, per person. Now, I'll grant you that these muffins were not huge. And their sheer deliciousness sometimes makes my husband and I want more than one for breakfast, especially if we're gearing up for a day of physical activity. Yet even if we each had two muffins per day, we still saved about $1.16 between the two of us. Assuming that we each ate two of these muffins every single day instead of a bowl of cereal, that's almost $425 saved in our household per year - with organic ingredients.

I soon cut the nuts out of my recipe, because I didn't feel they added all that much to the muffins, and they're a very costly ingredient. This resulted in further savings. If you choose not to bake with organic ingredients, your own savings using this recipe would be even higher. I also started costing out some other baked goods that would be suitable for breakfasts. It was clear that even 36 cents per serving could be improved upon without causing any apparent hardship. In fact, my husband vastly prefers one of my baked goods to breakfast cereal. He can grab a muffin or a scone on his way out the door and he's good to go.

I have started to keep a steady inventory of morning glory muffins, buttermilk scones and also sourdough English muffins in my chest freezer. I've costed out each of these, and the morning glory muffin is by far the most expensive of them. It's true that it takes some time and effort to make all these items. But because they all freeze so well, they can still be convenient breakfasts if you can devote part of a weekend afternoon to making big batches to store away for later in the week or month. So now, instead of looking at home-baked muffins and scones as special treats, we see them as healthy, thrifty and convenient staples of our diet.

Tomorrow I'll post some of my recipes, along with an explanation of how I cost out a recipe.

Trimming the grocery budget

Here are some practical tips for saving your pennies in the grocery department.

• When buying produce that is bunched and sold by unit, weigh the bag. Onions, potatoes and other produce are often sold in net bags or paper containers. Invariably, there is some variation in the actual weight of the items. Don't be ashamed to use the produce scales to select the one that is heaviest! Someone is going to get that free extra half pound of potatoes, so it might as well be you. Get yourself a little extra value for the money you're paying.
• When buying produce that is sold by weight and is iced or kept moist with sprayers or mist, shake off that ice or water. Water is heavy, whether melted or frozen. There's no sense in you paying the grocer for that water. Give the food a vigorous shake before you put it in the bag. You've saved yourself a few pennies at least.
• Use it all up. Lots of different kinds of vegetables are trimmed at home. All too often, too much is thrown away. Just about anything that is sold in a grocery department is really edible. Yet we turn up our noses at eating broccoli stalk or discard a corn cob once we've gnawed off the sweet kernels. Learn to eat and enjoy beet greens; they're good for you! Peel that broccoli stalk and add the tender white center to the dish you're cooking. Save parsley stems, corn cobs and celery tops for flavoring broth. Small leaves on broccoli and cauliflower are tender and delicious. Whenever you cook meat with bones, save the bones in the freezer until you have enough for some broth. Think before you throw any food item away. Can you get some value out of it? Even if you don't want to eat it, consider freezing the item to add flavor and nutrition to a broth. Get more mileage out of what you've already paid for.
• Eat seasonally. Buying asparagus in September or peaches in January is a bad idea on so many different levels. Not only has this food been flown in from half way around the country or the world, using up more calories in transit than you will get from consuming it, but such produce was probably picked early to withstand the rigors of shipment. You'll pay more for an out-of-season item that is less fresh and less nutritive. And the bottom line is: it's just not going to taste very good. So why bother? Timeliness is an essential ingredient in many dishes. Learn to think of tomatoes, peaches, asparagus, sweet corn and strawberries as seasonal treats. When they're in season in your area and thus cheap, buy them, celebrate them and glut yourself on them. Store some away in the freezer or canning jars for later. When the season for that food is over, you'll probably be sick of them anyway. Then it'll be time to move on to the next seasonal food that's at its peak nutritionally and at its cheapest in the grocery aisle.
• Buy in bulk, when it makes sense to do so. If you have the room to store extra goods and you know the consumption patterns of your family, stock up! Buying in bulk can give you access to much better prices than small-portion retail usually offers. Check your price comparison book and use your calculator to be sure that the bulk price represents a real savings. Only buy in quantities you know you'll be able to use up before it spoils. Canned goods such as tomato sauce and beans have very long shelf lives. So if you know for sure that you will use the item and that the price is good, buy as much can be stored easily at your home. Toilet paper, diapers and soap have no expiration date, so these are also excellent candidates for bulk purchase. Don't buy any product in bulk if you are unfamiliar with it or have any doubts as to whether or not you will use it. Better to pay a few more cents on a single unfamiliar item and discover you don't like it than to save a few dollars on a case of the same item. Once you know a particular product well, you might look into buying it by the case. Some regular retail stores will pass along savings if you special order a case or more through them. It can't hurt to ask.
  

The Price Comparison Book

When it's time to conserve money in a household, the person responsible for family meals naturally thinks of the grocery bill as an area where pennies can be pinched. The food budget, along with the entertainment budget, is one area where we have enormous latitude in how much we spend. Other large monthly expenses, such as rent or mortgage payments, are much less flexible and farther from our immediate control.

I can't recommend the practice of a price comparison book highly enough to anyone who is trying to trim expenses. It makes sense to price all of the grocery and toiletry products you buy at all of the stores you buy from on a regular basis. The value of this practice is that no one can give you better information on the products you buy in your own area than you can gather for yourself. It's free to gather this information, and it will pay off in spades. A detailed price comparison book allows you to tell the difference between a marketing ploy advertisement and a really good time to stock up on something you'd be buying anyway.

It's okay to start small. Rome wasn't built in a day; it will take a while to gather all the information to transform an ordinary notebook into a powerful storehouse of information. But start today. Get a little notebook and start recording the prices of things that you buy at the store from now on. Record the information in a way that makes sense to you. I keep track of things alphabetically, but you may choose to group things by categories, such as "produce," "baking," "frozen," etc. If you have extra time, walk through the store and write down the prices of things that you buy regularly, even if you don't plan to buy those items on this store visit. This will allow you to buy wisely the next time you need to buy that item. If time is a precious commodity for you, just record the prices of the things you bought based on the store receipt. Keep close tabs on the prices of various items for at least four months. Don't make a special trip to check prices at a faraway store you wouldn't normally shop at. Chances are that any potential savings will be eaten up by the extra gas it takes to get there.

If you are actively gathering information by walking the aisles each time you shop, you should have a very useful collection of information after just a month or so. It will get much better after four months. If you have time just to record the prices from receipts, you should still have good information after a couple of months.

Let me give an example of some price comparisons in my book. Hebrew National reduced fat hot dogs are an easy, reasonably healthy, and cheap meal when I'm ravenous and have no leftovers to heat up. Also, they conveniently store very well in the freezer for months at a time. I started pricing these and was astonished at the range of prices for this standby emergency meal of my home. Here's what my price comparison book showed me:

• Wegmans regular price: $3.79/12 oz. = $5.05/lb, or 54 cents/serving
• Giant regular price: $4.79/12 oz. = $6.39/lb, or 68 cents/serving
• Trader Joe's regular price: $3.49/12 oz. = $4.65/lb, or 50 cents/serving
• Weis/King's regular price: $3.99/12 oz. = $5.32/lb, or 57 cents/serving
• Military commissary price: $2.89/12 oz. =$3.85/lb, or 41 cents/serving
  

As you can see, I like crunching numbers. Gathering this informaiton showed me that the commissary had by far the best price for this item. I can only stock up there via a relative who makes semi-annual trips to the base. The next best price is at a Trader Joe's an hour's drive from my house. This means that I only go when I can carpool with a relative and we end up going there no more than once per month. That's fine for me because I have a large chest freezer and it's easy for me to store a lot of hot dog packages. However, recently Wegmans had a sale on these hot dogs, offering the same pack at just $2.99, for a serving cost of just 43 cents. With four months of data at my fingertips, I knew for sure that this was an excellent price, almost the best available to me from any vendor. So I bought eight packs of hot dogs: the amount I thought we could eat in six months. I also told my mom about this sale. She stocked up on the hot dogs too so she has a cheap meal for my young nephew when he stays at her home.

Your own price comparison book can only be compiled by you. Only you know what foods and toiletries you buy regularly and only you know which stores are convenient for you to shop at.