food — 2/3 — Beating Broke

Is Convenience Food Sucking Up Your Food Budget? The Rice-a-Roni Example

January 7, 2013 By aeneriz 10 Comments

Take a look at your past grocery receipt. Do you like the total of it? Chances are you may have been a little mortified once the cashier told you the final total of your groceries. You are not alone! Many individuals and families struggle with keeping their grocery bills down. It can be disheartening to spend $200-300 one week on groceries and then feel like you don’t have enough food the next week. You just shake your head and ask yourself, “Where did all the food go?”

Convenience foods suck up a lot of your grocery budget.

While they may save you a few minutes in the kitchen, they don’t save you a lot of money. Take example Rice-a-Roni and similar rice dishes. Yes, you may be able to get them for about .60-$1.20 per box, which is not horrible, but still not the best. However, consider this: a 25-pound bag of brown rice cost $8.99 at Costco (I am sure you can find similar pricing elsewhere). An average box of Rice-a-Roni has 5.9 ounces in it. You could make 67 Rice-a-Roni servings from your 25-pound bag of rice! Now consider these scenarios:

I eat a box of Rice-a-Roni once a week with my family’s dinner. I pay $1 per box (1 cup of rice). At the end of the year, I paid $52 to feed my family this side dish once a week. Not too bad…

I bought a 25-pound bag of rice from Costco or similar store for $9. I use a little less than ½ pound of rice (2.5 cups of rice – which actually makes more than the Rice-a-Roni box) per meal, at one meal per week. At the end of the year, I have spent $9 on rice and probably even have a little leftover rice.

Cost difference is =$43 per year

I know you skeptics out there have two things on your mind. First, Rice-a-Roni has a lot more seasoning than regular brown rice. Very true. You can either calculate the costs of seasonings or the savings of your future health bills (Most packaged rice meals have about 600-700 mg of sodium per serving!). Here is a Rice-a-Roni copycat recipe that cost .12 per batch.

Secondly, I know many are scoffing at the idea of saving $43 a year. For some, that is an hour or so of work, for others scraping by, it is a little more than five hours of work. I also want to point out that this is just one convenience food example. I am certain you can find 5-10 more foods like it on your grocery list, here are a few I came up with:

pizza dough
canned biscuits
bottled sports drinks
sodas
potato chips
beef jerky
cereal
instant oatmeal
canned soups
salad dressing
pancake mix
frozen waffles
yogurt
trail mix
frozen dinners
ready made chicken strips (for salads, wraps)
cream of ____(chicken,mushroom…)

Think about some of the convenience foods you buy. Break down their ingredients to simple terms. Can you make that at home for pennies rather than buying it at the store for dollars? Let’s not forget the health factor that comes into play here too. Many convenience foods and prepackaged foods are full of artificial flavorings, fillers, and chemicals to make them have a longer shelf life. Not only are these foods hard for your body to digest as real food, but the packaged version usually has more fat, calories, sugar, and sodium in it too, which can lead to a thicker waistline.

If you can find at least 5 convenience foods/junk foods you buy on a regular basis and either remove them for your diet or replace them with an inexpensive homemade version, you will be surprised at how much money you will save. I challenge you to make a list of every packaged thing you buy and eat on a regular basis. Then decide which ones you want to learn how to make yourself and which ones are a waste of time (i.e. I am looking at several easy crockpot yogurt recipes that I hope will save me a good chunk of money, but I would never make my own corn tortillas – they are so cheap in CA, that it is not worth my time to make them from scratch).

img credit: Sörn on Flickr.

3 Big Steps to Fight Off Rising Produce Costs this Summer

February 20, 2012 By MelissaB 10 Comments

My family has been increasingly consuming organic produce because we are trying to eliminate all food additives, preservatives and pesticides from our diet. If you are trying to feed your family the recommended five servings of fruit and vegetables a day, you may be spending more than you would like on produce, regardless if you buy organic or not. Just for my family of 5, meeting the USDA dietary recommendations means feeding us 25 servings of fruits and vegetables a day, or 175 servings a week! Here are steps you can take now to save money this summer on fresh produce:

Grow a garden. If you have the space, consider growing your own garden. You will have an abundance of fresh, organic produce growing in your back yard, and food doesn’t get any fresher than that. Eliminate the chemicals and the long transportation time that your produce often endures to get to the grocery store shelves.

If you live in the city or don’t have room to grow a garden, consider getting a plot at a community garden. Community gardens are designated locations that usually have 15 to 40 plots available for members of the community to garden. You use a plot and plant what you would like. You just have to agree to maintain your plot and water it at least once a week. There is often a small fee. The community garden I plan to use this summer charges $20, but that money is refunded at the end of the season if you have tended your garden throughout the season.

Subscribe to a CSA. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. Many CSAs offer organic produce and deliver it to a location near you every week. Programs often let you choose between a 1/2 bushel and a bushel of produce weekly or every other week and typically run for 18 to 22 weeks.

In return, you must pay for your share upfront, usually before May. In larger cities CSAs fill up quickly, so you may want to begin looking for a CSA in your area this month or next month. You also usually are not given much say in the produce you receive, so being open to trying new vegetables is necessary.

Freeze Your Excess. If you have grown your own garden or have a share of a CSA, you may find yourself with an abundance of fresh produce during the summer months. Rather than letting it go to waste, consider preserving some of it. True, you could can some of it, but I have done that before, and it was a miserable time. (This is just my experience; you may enjoy canning.) Instead, take advantage of your freezer. Shred the excess zucchini and put it in the freezer in small bags. Puree excess squash to sneak into baked goods during the winter. Make Jamie Oliver’s pasta sauce and freeze it for future spaghetti or pasta meals.

With careful planning during the rest of the winter months, you will be able to not only enjoy fresh produce during the summer and slash your grocery bill, but you will be able to save some of that produce for the fall and winter months, effectively lowering your grocery bill for produce all year long.

photo credit: Martin Cathrae

Evaluate the True Price of Dining Out to Save Money

August 31, 2011 By MelissaB 14 Comments

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.

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