Feeding Your Family on a Budget, Part 6

Even more ways to save money:

• Cook from scratch! Buying convenience food costs money. I can just as quickly whip up pancakes from scratch as from a box and they taste better and are healthier, too. If you think you don’t have time, then you could prepare extras on weekends or when you do have time.

• Don’t buy convenience foods! You can buy a lot more rice in a bag than if you buy minute rice. It really isn’t hard to cook rice and it doesn’t add a whole much more time (especially if you have a rice cooker because then you can just set it and forget it!)

• Eat whole grains! Whole grains fill you up faster so you will eat less. For example, before we made the switch to whole grain pasta, we would go through two pounds of pasta at each meal (back when there were just 7 of us). Just the other night I made a meal with only one pound of pasta for all of us.

• Serve lots of side dishes! I learned this one by accident. If you have out more options for sides, people won’t eat as much meat which will save you money! I was raised that every meal needed a meat, starch and vegetable, but if I offer two vegetables and/or a fruit, then the amount of meat consumed is less.

• Raise your own food if possible! We started with a garden to help us save money. Even if you don’t preserve your abundance, you will still save money during the summer/fall when you are picking from your garden. We now have chickens for eggs (and meat) and goats for milk. It costs a lot less for feed for those animals than it would for us to buy the food. Even if you live in the city, you can still do container gardening, square foot gardening, etc.

• Let your friends and family know you will take their abundance! We have friends who know they can call us if their gardens produce more than what they want. We just head over and pick what is left. I have friends who receive food from others and they might not particularly care for what was given to them, so they call us. We have even had friends of friends call and offer food from their gardens, old hens for butchering, etc.