Food prices seem to be increasing everyday. Besides shopping for sales, which I highly recommend, another great way to save money is by making your own meals and baked goods.
Store bread is going up in price quite a bit, but to bake your own bread, it only costs a fraction. To make your own bread check out our how to here. I figured out to buy bread in our home it would cost us over $100 a month! Just in bread! It may cost us $17 a month to make it. And, if I do say so myself, it tastes much better, is more filling and healthier.
A great item to go with bread is always jam. Do you have a lot of strawberries, or other fruit, left in your freezer from last summer? Here is a very easy recipe for making jam from frozen fruit with half the amount of sugar. We use this all the time. Last night my daughter helped me make two batches of it and we were done in about 40 mins from start to finish (not including thawing time for the berries). Jam in the store costs about $4-5 a jar. I made 7 large jars last night for about $1.46 a jar. In our family that saves big $$ as we go through 7 jars in 2 months or so. Instead of $32, it costs us around $10 and I reuse my jars so that's even more environmentally friendly and cost saving.
Our latest love is eating English Muffins. I started buying these more frequently when I have found them on sale, but found it hard to justify the cost. Tonight, I made English Muffins for the first time -without cornmeal! (Not a fan here.) It was surprisingly easy and fast. To buy 6 english muffins at the store it's around $2, it might have cost me $0.25 to make 12. That's $3.50 savings for every 12! Try out this recipe here for a first attempt. There are a lot of recipes out there, just search around until you find one that you like.
These are just a few simple things to start with to reduce your bill. They really don't take too much time - just don't try to do them all in one day!
What items do you make to reduce your bill?
Enjoy!
3 comments:
I so agree with everything you wrote. Sadly, I now work outside the home and my baking as been limited. I must say that since I've been married, we have never bought store-bought jam, we've always eaten homemade. In fact, I bought jam in Jamaica last month only because of the ingredients which cannot be found here. It is coming to the point where I will be forced to make all my bread and freeze it, which is not a bad option considering the price and flavour.
I try to bake oat scones once a week and have played with the recipe to make it low fat and low sugar. I also make homemade soup every week that I take for lunch (very cheap) and we make big pots of stews using dried beans which are super cheap!
I prefer to buy butter rather than margarine, which is, of course more expensive but I feel more healthy as indicated by the list of ingredients: cream, salt! So what I do is when it comes on sale I buy several pounds - and I look for good sales and then I freeze it. I haven't bought butter at full price in 3 years!!!
Post a Comment