How To Stop Burning Money On Food Without Burning Down Your Kitchen
By Katie Eiler
Photo by Becca Tapert on Unsplash
We’ve all dragged ourselves home from our commute with pure intentions of cooking a cheap, healthy dinner only to open the fridge to see nothing but a bag of wilted celery and some almost-expired milk. But dropping cash every week on take-out and buying lunch at work seriously racks up.
‘I can’t cook!’ I hear you cry. None of us were born knowing how, my treasure. It’s a learning curve, but you can make it happen.
Structure Your Meals
If your vision of meal planning is batch-cooking a bunch of chili on Sunday night and then miserably choking down the same damn thing all week, never fear (they’ve got this revolutionary technology called ‘freezers’ now, and it’s gonna change your life).
What works for me is picking five recipes a week and sticking to them. I cook dinner and have leftovers for lunch at work the next day. It doesn’t have to be set in stone--you can cook twice one night if you’re busy the rest of the week, or freeze a bunch to eat next week if you know work will be nuts.
Plus, shopping for recipes, rather than wandering around in a daze and convincing yourself you won’t let those bell peppers rot this time, takes less time and wastes less money.
Where the hell do you find recipes? Start here for delicious, easy meals that won’t break the bank:
Good and Cheap (this one also has great tips for budget-smart shopping!)
And have fun with it! Text your mom and ask how to make your childhood comfort food. Go to the library and check out some cookbooks! You’re Ina Garten, baby.
Play To Your Strengths
Figure out what’s keeping you out of the kitchen and work around it. Do you absolutely hate chopping vegetables? You don’t have to! Make a baked potato or a nice spiced daal and start saving up for a food processor.
Do you just not have the damn time? Find swaps--for example, ditch rice for couscous--cooks super fast, just as filling. Become a devotee of big hearty salads instead of slow-cooking braises.
Bored? FaceTime your best friend while you’re dicing squash, listen to a podcast, learn the words to a new song you love. Scheme your next side hustle--two birds with one stone!
And don’t get so hungry you just give up on dinner--always have some trail mix, some savory homemade muffins, or a piece of fruit around to tide you over and keep you from speed-dialing the gyros place.
Shop Smart
Like many of us, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool TJ’s freak, but even I have to supplement sometimes. For in-season fruits and vegetables, or bulk items like rice, lentils, and dry beans, do a little research.
Often community-specific markets are great places to shop--I swing by our local Middle Eastern market once every few months to stock up and get great deals. (Plus, you’ll be introduced to new ingredients and support small business owners--win-win!)
Make a weekly food budget and stick to it--my household (three adults) has settled at $70. Also: if you’re buying less than five pounds of rice at a time, you’re officially getting ripped off.
Don’t talk to me about storage space. Put it in a bin under your bed if you have to. It’s like Jenga!
Get decadent!
You know those fancy Italian ten-bucks-a-box rosemary crackers that go with special-occasion cheeses? Yeah, those cost like fifty cents to make and you can make them in fifteen minutes with this recipe.
Budgeting smart doesn’t mean living like a monk. Yes, you can get the brie sometimes! Getting so sick of rice and beans that you snap and drop fifty bucks on sushi doesn’t help you in the long run. Find a mix of sensible and delicious that feels sustainable for you and stick to it.
Plus, cooking and eating with friends is a real joy--and a dinner party can be a lot more fun, and a lot less cash, than a night out with friends. (Yes, I know you don’t have enough chairs. Nobody has enough chairs. Lounge on pillows, it’s fun.)
Extra perk: being able to whip up a huge, ten-buck tiramisu from scratch means you’ll be knee-deep in eligible suitors of your desired gender(s). Now, go get ‘em, tiger!
Katie Eiler is a playwright/paralegal/community organizer living in Seattle (she only gets paid for the middle one). She graduated from NYU in 2016, and her play Crunch was produced at the 2018 Son of Semele Company Creation Festival and the 2018 Los Angeles Fringe Festival. She's a natural tightwad whose love language is gift-giving, which can get complicated.
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