Saturday Savings #2

Eat out of your home.  This includes home cooking all meals. Also, eat up any food you may have stored.

I'm a store-er.  Not a hoarder.  I keep emergency easy make meals such as hamburger helper, pasta and sauce and frozen meatloaf/meatballs.  They're easy to store and don't perish quickly (precooked food in a deep freeze can last a year!).  They're go to meals when I run out of time, or have doctor's appointments and we don't want to eat out.  Being gluten-free makes it harder to eat out at restaurants, especially if I try to keep it inexpensive.

Start with consuming any food you have in your freezer and pantry.  I always keep a well stocked pantry for emergency and a lot of my cooking comes from there.  I usually just supplement with produce.

By doing this you'll use food you already owned, you can become more creative in the kitchen and you'll save money and time.  Restaurant meals are at about 3 times more expensive than the same meal home cooked.  Although I find pasta dishes are maked up much more than that.  Olive Garden sells their marinara sauce and pasta for $7.95 (well the last time I was there they did).  A pound of pasta is $1 and a jar of Ragu can be found for $1.66 (neither of these is sale prices) and that can feed 4 people!

When we get a medical bill we didn't foresee or we just want to put some money in savings we do a pantry challenge and eat as much out of our freezers and pantry  before going shopping.

The best part of pantry challenges is the thrill of replacing it at the cheapest price possible.