eating out Archives — Beating Broke

Nearly every month, the cost of groceries seems to rise. What can you do? You need to feed your family, but the current high price of groceries is straining most families’ budgets, especially when combined with the high cost of other necessities such as gas and housing. For most families, the cost of food is the second-highest expense behind housing. (In our family, if I’m not careful, the cost of food is higher than our monthly housing costs.) While you may try to coupon or buy food when it’s at its lowest sale price, another way to save is to utilize these tips to stop food waste.

How Much Food Do Americans Waste?

According to Earth.com, the average American family “waste[s] nearly one third of the food they buy.” However, if they utilized strategies to eliminate food waste, “a family of four could save $2,000.”

If you haven’t made a conscious effort to stop food waste, now is the time.

8 Tips to Stop Food Waste

Years ago, my husband and I wasted quite a bit of food. Every week, we would have anywhere from three to six containers of leftover food that we would have to throw out. We would also sometimes waste fruits and vegetables. Now, we no longer do that; we rarely waste any food.

We used these eight tips to stop wasting food:

Don’t Eat Out Frequently

One reason we wasted so much food years ago was that we ate out three to five times a week. When you eat out that frequently, you don’t have the opportunity to eat the leftovers you already have or the ingredients you bought to make meals.

Not eating out dramatically reduced our food waste.

Make Meals You Enjoy

This seems silly to say, but make meals that you enjoy eating. I used to make casseroles because I liked making only one item for a meal that had the protein, carbs, and veggies my family needed. However, none of us liked casseroles, especially not leftover. The leftovers frequently went in the garbage.

Now, I make meals we enjoy, and they’re not wasted.

Freeze the Leftovers

We have two deep freezers, and I utilize them extensively to avoid food waste.

Freeze Leftover Meals

Sometimes I make a recipe that is supposed to serve eight, but there are enough servings for 12. We eat the meal once, and then we eat the meal leftover once later in the week.

By then, my family is tired of eating this meal, so if it freezes well, I freeze the last four servings. Then, about six to 12 weeks later, I pull it from the freezer and serve it to my family. They don’t complain because it’s been weeks since we last had that meal. I don’t complain because I get a night off from cooking, and I didn’t have to buy food at the grocery store for that meal that week.

Freeze Leftover Ingredients

You can also eliminate food waste by freezing leftover ingredients. For instance, I only use tomato paste for a beef stew recipe I have. Once I use one tablespoon, I have about two-thirds of the can left. Rather than just tossing it, I put the tomato paste in ice cube containers and freeze it. Each ice cube size of tomato paste is about one tablespoon. Now, the next four times I make beef stew, I don’t have to use a new jar of tomato paste; instead, I use one of my leftover ice cubes of tomato paste. Sure, I am only saving a little, but when I do this for many food items, the savings add up.

Create a New Meal Out of Leftovers

Luckily, my family doesn’t mind eating leftovers. If your family does, you can avoid food waste by making new meals out of the excess.

For instance, let’s save you have a pork roast for a meal and have leftover shredded pork. You could serve it just like you did the first time. Or, you could mix it with barbeque sauce and make pulled pork sandwiches. If you still had leftovers, you could use them later in the week for pork carnitas. Your family probably won’t complain about eating leftovers this way because you’ve made three different meals with the meat.

Don’t Buy More Than You Need

Don’t buy more than you need sounds simple but can be difficult. Rather than planning six meals you’ll make from scratch this week, only buy ingredients for four meals. You can serve leftovers for the other meals or make meals from what you already have on hand.

Buy Frozen Fruits and Vegetables

If you routinely have to throw away produce because it goes bad before you can cook it, consider switching from fresh to frozen. Fresh strawberries may go bad within a few days, but frozen strawberries last for months in the freezer.

We usually buy fresh fruits and veggies, but we also have several bags of frozen that we use to supplement our fresh vegetables. Frozen veggies give you more flexibility because you don’t have to use them within a few days.

Have a Pantry Challenge

We’ve all bought ingredients for a recipe, but then something comes up and we can’t make that recipe. Meanwhile, the ingredients sit on our pantry shelves. One way to avoid having miscellaneous items fill your pantry shelves is to have a pantry challenge. For one to four weeks, buy the bare minimum groceries and focus on using up the ingredients that you have on hand.

Not only is this a great way to reduce food waste because you’re using what you already have, but it’s also a good way to save money.

Final Thoughts

If you’re struggling with the high cost of food, use these 8 tips to stop food waste. Learning to not waste food could save your family thousands of dollars a year.

How to Feed Your Family on a Low Budget

5 Tips Save on Groceries This Year

MelissaB

Melissa is a writer and virtual assistant. She earned her Master’s from Southern Illinois University, and her Bachelor’s in English from the University of Michigan. When she’s not working, you can find her homeschooling her kids, reading a good book, or cooking. She resides in New York, where she loves the natural beauty of the area.

www.momsplans.com/

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

MelissaB