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Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

How Bulk Cooking Can Save You Money

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Have you ever had a day where everything went wrong?  The kind of day where you have a meeting at 4 p.m. and think it will end at 5 p.m., but it runs an hour late?  Then you get home, the kids are cranky and hungry.  You still have to help them do their homework, but you have nothing ready for a quick meal?  Most people accept defeat and order take out.  That’s what I used to do years ago, but then I discovered bulk cooking, and I started saving both time and money!

Bulk Cooking

How Bulk Cooking Works

There are several ways to incorporate bulk cooking into your life.  Just choose the style that you like the best.

Make Meals in Advance

One way to try bulk cooking is to make several meals on one day.  Ideally, you’ll pick four to five recipes and at least double each recipe.  Then, you’ll take the eight to ten meals that you made, put them in a freezer bag, lay them flat, and freeze them.  In the future, when you have a busy night, simply grab a meal from the freezer instead of calling for take-out.

Some people who are extremely motivated make enough meals in one day for their family to eat for a month!  However, I wouldn’t recommend this for a beginner because it can be exhausting.  You spend an entire day cutting up produce, batch cooking, and cleaning up.  The reward is that for the next 30 days, you don’t have to worry about what’s for dinner.

Prep Food for the Week

If you’re intimidated by the idea of making entire meals in advance, you can start more slowly with meal prep for the week.  Doing this on a Sunday will still save you a lot of time during the week and make your actual cooking time faster.

Bulk Cooking
Photo by Ella Olsson on Unsplash

When you do this type of bulk cooking, you simply prep all the ingredients that you will need for the week.  For instance, if you know you’re making chili during the week, brown the ground beef and soak and cook the beans now.  Then, on Wednesday night, chili night, just pull the precooked beef and beans from the refrigerator and combine on the stove and let simmer.  You’ll easily skim 20 to 30 minutes off your cooking time by doing this.

There is one caveat to this way of preparing food.  If you prep food on Sunday, you may need to freeze some portions that you’ll use later in the week because the food won’t stay fresh until the end of the week.  I love to take out two pounds of ground beef on the weekend, brown it down, and then store it in the freezer in smaller size portions.  Whenever I need it, I just pull it out for the recipe I’m making.

Where to Find Recipes

Not all foods freeze well, so it’s best to find recipes specifically for bulk cooking.  Simply Google “freezer cooking recipes” and you’ll find a slew of recipes, all designed with ingredients that freeze well.  Often times when I serve a meal, my husband can’t even tell that it’s been frozen before.

Advantages of Bulk Cooking

There are so many advantages to bulk cooking!

Choose the Ingredients

You get to choose the ingredients.  If you’re interested in eating clean or you have food allergies or intolerances, this way of cooking may be for you.  You choose how much fat or sugar you add.  You choose organic or non-organic ingredients.  Since you’re making the meal, you know exactly what you are putting in your body, which can’t be said if you order take out or buy frozen meals from the store.

Cook the Foods You Like

You have the ultimate say in the meals that fill your freezer.  You can make meals that the entire family enjoys, even the fussy little ones, which makes meal time much more pleasant for everyone. And you needn’t stop at meals – you can also cook your favorite sauces to use as an accompaniment for those blander mid-week meals where you don’t have the energy to make anything fancy. For example, take a look at this chinese hot mustard sauce recipe which is perfect both for freezing and for giving a kick to your dinner!

Save Time

Yes, bulk cooking requires an investment in time in the beginning, but you’ll soon find that it saves you so much time during the week.  Can you imagine the ease of just pulling a meal from the freezer, heating it, and making a salad to go with it?  Or, pulling out all of the meal components from your refrigerator and simply simmering them together?

How Bulk Cooking Can Save You Money
Photo by Ella Olsson on Unsplash

Plus, you make most of the mess on your bulk cooking day, so on the day when you actually eat the meal, there is very little clean up.

Save Money

This is one of the best advantages to bulk cooking.  You can save some serious money.  Let’s say you’re a busy family of four, and you grab take out costing you $40 once a week.  That’s $160 a month you could save if instead of relying on take out, you could simply have a meal defrosting in the refrigerator waiting for you to heat up on a busy night.

Plus, have you ever had weeks where you buy groceries, but then you get too busy and can’t cook as often as you had planned?  Those ingredients spoil before you can use them.  You lose $10 or $20 in ingredients you didn’t use.  With bulk cooking, that issue mostly goes away, saving you money twice.

Drawbacks of Bulk Cooking

I have been bulk cooking in some form or other for the last 15 years.  I really enjoy preparing food this way, but there are some drawbacks.

Initially Expensive

Let’s say you spend $200 a week for groceries.  If you decide at the beginning of the month that you want to make all of your dinners for the month and put them in the freezer, you may have to spend $300 or $400 to buy all of the ingredients at once.  This can be hard on your budget initially because you have to spend more upfront than you have budgeted weekly.  After that initial bulk cooking session, you’ll find that you spend less per week.

Time Consuming

When my kids were little, my husband would watch them all day so I could bulk cook for the month.  The cooking day was always exhausting, and as much as I loved having meals in the freezer for the whole month, I hated bulk cooking day.

Now that my kids are older and more self-sufficient, I bulk cook on Sunday for the upcoming week.  Rather than taking me all day, bulk cooking for the week only takes me two to three hours.

Final Thoughts

Bulk cooking is an excellent way to save money and time.  Yes, you have to initially invest money and time, but you’ll reap the rewards for days to come.

Read More

5 Strategies to Make Food at Home If You Hate Cooking,

Frugal Tools and Strategies to Help Busy Families Get Organized,

Even More Ways to Save on Groceries

3 Easy Ways to Get a Home Cooked Meal on the Table: Save Time and Money

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Do you cook at home?  If so, how many times a week?

Chances are, your answer will vary depending on whether or not you work outside the home, your age, and your income.

Sure, cooking at home can save you plenty of money, but not a lot of us do it.  According to Harris Interactive, “Two in five (41%) say they prepare meals at home five or more times a week and three in ten (29%) do so three to four times a week.  One in five (19%) of U.S. adults prepare meals at home one to two times a week, and 11% say they rarely or never prepare meals at home.” There aren’t always easy ways to get a home cooked meal on the table.

In the last several years, my husband and I have made the switch to exclusively eating at home.  We go out to eat less than 10 times a year, usually only when we’re traveling.  What I’ve discovered is that cooking at home can actually be A LOT of work.  Making healthy, low-cost food requires time and energy, and then there is all of the clean up to do afterwards.  If I were still working full-time outside the home, I doubt that I would have time to cook as much as I do now.

Home Cooked Meal
Original IMG credit: DSC_0719 on Flickr

However, there are a number of strategies that can help make preparing foods at home easier.

Have a go to meal.  Everyone should have a few easy meals that they can make from staples in the pantry when they’re short on time.  Choices might include spaghetti, cheese quesadillas, grilled cheese sandwiches, etc.  These meals may not be ideal nutritionally, but they’re still better than grabbing fast food, and they’ll save your wallet.

Use your slow cooker.  Start the slow cooker in the morning, and when you come home, you’ll have a hot meal waiting for you.  To save even more time, prep all of the ingredients the night before so in the busy morning, you can just dump in the ingredients and go.

Utilize freezer cooking.  Take one day a month and cook up several meals for your family for the month.  This might take you three to four hours, but then you will eliminate much of the cooking you’ll need to do for the rest of the month.  Simply take a meal out of your freezer the night before you need it and then reheat it when you get home from work.

There are short cuts to freezer meals, too.  Search Pinterest, and you’ll find crockpot freezer meals.  Simply dump the ingredients in a freezer bag and freeze.  This type of freezer cooking doesn’t require any cooking before putting it in the slow cooker, so you can make a month’s worth of meals in about an hour.

Another idea is to double any recipe you are already cooking and put the second one in the freezer for a busy night.

Don’t be discouraged if you haven’t yet mastered how to eat at home without spending all of your time cooking.  As Marion Nestle, professor of food studies at New York University and author of What to Eat says, “Anything that you do that’s not fast food is terrific; cooking once a week is far better than not cooking at all.  It’s the same argument as exercise: more is better than less and some is better than none” (The New York Times).

What is your favorite strategy to get a healthy meal on the table quickly?

 

Evaluate the True Price of Dining Out to Save Money

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Our culture seems to be one that is centered around dining out.  When you are younger, you meet friends at a restaurant for a night out and to chat.  As you get older and have a family, you may go out to eat because time is short between working, raising a family, helping with homework, and doing housework, among other things.  Some people are extreme and eat out for every meal because they do not like to cook or have not learned to cook.  This is so commonplace in the American culture, that we don’t often question these expenses.  Instead of just assuming that going out to eat or grabbing take out is a necessity, evaluate the cost of your restaurant purchase.

It has been a stressful day, and you would like nothing more than a night off from the kitchen.  You decide to buy take out for your family of 4 and spend $25.  True, you did buy yourself a night out of the kitchen by avoiding cooking and washing the dishes that you would use.  Yet, ask yourself, would you have paid $25 to hire someone to come to your kitchen for an hour that night, make a meal and do the few dishes that you used?  No?  Well, that is essentially what you did by picking up take out.

Riced out.

I use this way of thinking frequently now to save myself from spending money eating out.  My family ate out by habit until I started evaluating the true cost.  I recently quit my job and have been doing freelance work from home.  Several of my smaller jobs each pay $20 a month.  Recently, I wanted to go out for sushi, which is a weakness not only of mine, but of my husband and kids.  When our family of 5 goes out for sushi, it typically runs us $55 to $60.  I asked myself if one meal of sushi was worth doing 3 additional small jobs to recoup the $60?  Although the jobs do not take much time weekly, I would have to do the three jobs for a month to recoup the money spent on sushi.  Was it worth it?  No.  We did not go out that night.

The idea of evaluating life energy for consumption is not new.  It was the subject of the book, Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robins.  The overall principal is to look at the amount of time and money it would take to recoup an expense.  I try to use this in my life normally, but I find it especially effective when considering the often inflated price of dining out.  Take the sushi dinner for $60—my family’s weekly grocery budget is $100.  Is that one meal worth half a week’s groceries?  Definitely not.

I am not saying we shouldn’t go out.  My family still enjoys going out, but I am suggesting we should stop thinking of dining out as something routine and to be done daily or several times a week.  Instead, think of dining out as a treat and something to be planned and enjoyed.

photo credit: dslrninja