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Living on $150 a month (for groceries).
Blutraserei
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So after a year of agonizing nothing...I am poised to return to my hometown where I have friends and the strong possibility of a social life. Also included in this is me finishing my A.S. and getting my CCNA cert. This is possible because of a nice little trust fund.
For the first term I will have $150 for each month for groceries. Now. I have already gone through a thread on some forum of a site about living frugally, and have a fairly decent idea of things, but I would like the average geek's take on what to get, and how to spend as well. Diverse opinions please. No links to the Accumulated Forum Knowledge thread. What I'm looking for is a good idea of how to build a grocery list I can stick to so I don't spend like 4 hours in the store the first time I stock up, or go overboard.
For me this is also an opportunity to diet, as I am a fairly huge fucker with a BMI of like 44...*shame* (6'3", ~350). So relevant suggestions to that would be appreciated as well.
For the first term I will have $150 for each month for groceries. Now. I have already gone through a thread on some forum of a site about living frugally, and have a fairly decent idea of things, but I would like the average geek's take on what to get, and how to spend as well. Diverse opinions please. No links to the Accumulated Forum Knowledge thread. What I'm looking for is a good idea of how to build a grocery list I can stick to so I don't spend like 4 hours in the store the first time I stock up, or go overboard.
For me this is also an opportunity to diet, as I am a fairly huge fucker with a BMI of like 44...*shame* (6'3", ~350). So relevant suggestions to that would be appreciated as well.
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You'll do a lot of cooking for yourself, which is really one of the biggest and best things you can do when it comes to losing weight. Combining your two goals actually works extremely well too, because you can focus on healthy staples like rice and beans which are dirt cheap and good for you.
As far as tips, we'd need to know a bit more about you and what you like, but on strictly general terms:
1) Buy in bulk. 5-10 pound bags of rice, a big tray of chicken breasts, a pork loin you cut up yourself, etc. It's a bit more work for you but it saves money.
2) Brown bag it for lunch. Sandwich meat is expensive and dubious healthwise so either go PBJ (less good for you), make your own sandwiches with leftovers and/or eat straight leftovers, or go with salads.
3) Learn to make soups and chilis. They're cheap, easy, and can be made in big enough batches that they save you time and effort the rest of the week.
how comfortable are you with cooking(what's your kitchen like)? what kind of things do you like to eat? where are your shopping options?
learning how to store food is the most important thing i've learned in years. I went from buying things at the farmers market every week, to only needing to go once a month cause I learned how to keep stuff crisp and fresh. what-should-i-store-in-my-refrigerator is a good guideline. www.cookingindex.com is great all around.
I had already planned on rice. I did that the first time I tried moving out on my own. Buttered rice with various seasonings actually did pretty well for being all I had for the first few weeks. Lost hella weight with it too. I honestly should learn to do chilis and hearty soups. I could eat the fuck out of some chili so I might end up doing that.
Nice links. Bookmarked. My problem is that I like all of those things. One of mine will probably end up being brown rice and beans of no particular color cooked plain and spiced to taste. Rice and tuna sounds good too.
Another thing would be suggestions of how to prepare Ramen in an awesome fashion...from links from the internets right down to your own personal twists.
Keep the soda pop to a minimum if you can possibly stand it. That's $50 a month for me right there.
The hell with soda, I'll be using fruit juices or water. I like soda but ever since I started reading up on it's effects on the body I can't really stand it unless I'm eating like pizza or salt and vinegar chips.
I never knew ramen was bad for you until I actually took a look at it's nutrition label. I had no idea you could fit that much calories and fat into a little brick of noodles.
Any time you shop for food, know what you're buying and when you're using it. If you shop once a week, sit down, plan out all your meals, and a make a list of everything you need. It's important that you plan all your meals, because I've always found that the way to end up spending far more than you expected is to fail to account for lunch and end up having to get take-out or fast food or whatever.
definitely have a menu prepared for the entire week and stick to it.
make large servings and store remainder in the freezer. it also doubles as lunch. really isn't much more to it.if you were living on less for groceries its the same deal. except now you cna get nicer/more ingredients
My wife makes something that is essentially some chopped up vegetables roasted in the oven, and then mixed with pasta and cheese and a jar of marinara and baked. It's ridiculously good and then only expensive part is the cheese (which you could easily substitute less expensive alternatives for). Here's the recipe. Something like this would provide meals for a week, and the ingredients probably cost $10-15 max.
Another trick is to buy the pyrex casserole dishes with the rubber lids that snap on for storing in the refrigerator. Those things are awesome for cooking large quantities of stuff.
Don't eat ramen at all. You can also buy real pasta and make a meal with that which will have a fraction of the sodium. You really shouldn't eat ramen on weekly basis much less a near daily one. Even good brand pasta goes on sale for a dollar box sometimes and a cheap bottle of Rago can easily be made better with some spice. Or you can buy whole, peeled tomatoes an make your own sauce. I do this every other month, freeze it in individual portions and end up with about 20 dinners for less than $20. Not mention you can easily turn tomato sauce into a nice vodka cream for something a little different. Or you can use the same sauce to make a lasagna which will feed you for roughly a week or some bolognese with ziti that you can make individual portions of to bring to work/school.
I also buy meat when it's on sale and freeze individual portions of that. But don't be cheap about your freezer bags or you'll end up tossing a lot of meat. Don't be afraid to buy and cook a whole chicken either, leftovers are your friend and you can end up with a pot pie (it is so easy and cheap to make your own crust, it's just stuff you already have like flour, butter and eggs) just by making a gravy and getting some veggies and those end up turning a smaller portion of chicken into several meals, you can make a chicken soup and then freeze that individually for later, you can make chicken salad, put some chicken in a salad etc.
Farmers Markets are awesome places for veggies. I live in Boston but can still get 2 store sized containers of mushrooms, lettuce, 5 tomatoes, asparagus, radishes, 2 green peppers, a cucumber and a couple ears of corn for about $13 at SOWA. At a store that would cost me at least double.
I've already promised to send someone else on the forum a bunch of recipes and I can add you to the PM if you'd like. I've got sauces, pot pies, chilli, soups etc.
For meat, tuna should be your best friend. If you've got a Costco, you can get it hella cheap, there. I like to put it over brown rice, and add some hot sauce.
Nice post, and yes I would like to subscribe to your newsletter =P. When it comes to cooking I am habitually lazy because I despise dish washing (yes this is my reason), but otherwise cooking is a fun activity for me. I don't do it often though so now would be a wonderful time to start learning especially on a budget like this. I can't wait to try some of these.
(No. I don't do my own cooking often if ever. Links to pro-tips would be appreciated as well.)
What about 100% juices? I never go for concentrates because that's just pure flavored sugar. I mean things like 100% apple or orange....maybe even cranberry cause that stuff is awesome.
And I will make tuna my best friend. I discovered that tuna and rice is a wonderful combination once when using some of Starkist's foil packaged stuff that had it's own flavors mixed in with the oil/water. I think it was some kind of oriental-inspired flavor like sesame or teriyaki. I mixed that up with some brown rice and practically shoveled the stuff down.
The ideas for lasagna, casseroles, tuna, and chili will likely become some of my staples. My tastes are very easy to please and I don't mind repetitive meals at all. If any of you guys have a recipe for some mean chili or casseroles, etc...either post'em here or PM them to me (or both). Any and all pertinent information is accepted and beyond appreciated. Preferred would be a recipe proportion to make a ton at once that I could store for the rest of the week. I've eaten pasta and Ragu sauce for lunches at work for weeks before when necessary and don't mind doing it again.
I didn't live off of crap food either. It was mostly vegetables, fruit, brown rice, chicken breast, ground beef, pasta sauce, eggs, milk, and oatmeal. Just look for the cheapest deals and don't forget coupons. Costco's your friend.
Do you see this?
this + a bag of frozen chicken breasts + a bag of white rice
cost is $20~
I can eat only this for that $20 bucks for 2 weeks.
delicious.
Try to stick with actual fruit. I have no idea what it's like in the US, but whole fruit in Australia is incredibly cheap. It's also more filling to eat the whole fruit, contains more good stuff and is great to keep your metabolism ticking over in between meals.
I'd also recommend looking into a crockpot. They can often be had for cheap (or free, from family/friends who no longer use them) and they'll reduce your dishes problem as well as lending themselves to meals which are large and can be bulk frozen.
Get the chicken breasts with skin and bones still attached, than make a broth out of the bones and skin before freezing the breasts for later consumption.
Its cheaper, AND you get a soup out of the mix!
Buy bulk and fill up your freezer. Stay away from juices too, eat fruit and drink water. Waaay cheaper.
If you absolutley cannot drink plain water, get a giant cannister of Tang.
You can buy fresh vegetables but if you think they'll go bad, giant bags of frozen vegetable mixes are good too.
I buy those little snack bags that you see obsessive mothers put carrot sticks in, and put any meat I buy in those. One of those will hold roughly a single serving of most meats, so it's a really good way to keep track. Then you can just pull out a meat (chicken breast, ground turkey, cut up steak, etc.) some of those frozen vegetables, some rice and have yourself a meal.
But really to keep yourself from going crazy become familiar with spices and sauces. You can have the exact same ingredients but if you add a different type of sauce or spice to it, the meal can turn out a lot differently.
Find a lemon tree. Pick a bunch of lemons, add lemon to water. Depending on where you live it may be possible to fresh pick other fruit that just grows around. In my hometown I could probably sustain myself entirely for 5 months a year if I could stand eating plums or prunes, blackberries, apples and almonds for every meal.
For serious though, if you find a lemon, lime or other citrus tree, you can just pick a handful, juice it, then freeze the juice as icecubes and drop them in some water when you feel like having a drink.
Protips:
1) Cooking is (usually) a lot like that old saying about any number of games: easy to learn, difficult to master. If you're having a bad day, whatever you end up with may not be something you'd want to show off to friends, but it usually will be edible. Usually in my experience though, you tend to end up pleased and incredulous -- "Wait, that's all there is to it? ...And I've paid other people to make this for me??" (Quiche is a great example of this. It's ridiculously easy. Also great to use up leftovers.)
2) Don't be chained to a recipe, but keep in mind that there are certain substitutions that will not work for certain items -- knowing where not to stray off the path is mostly knowledge that's just sort of gained both through trial & error and learning from others, but you can look for other peoples' comments on certain recipes if there's a substitution you want to make, or compare several recipes for the same or similar items, to see if the sub you want to make is viable.
3) This is nowhere near as profound as the other two, but somehow I just found this out and it makes baking in a smaller household much more feasible: you can refrigerate or freeze bread dough at almost any point in the process. If you're freezing it, it's better to do it after its first rise when it's been shaped, but you can do it whenever you want. Why is this good to know? For example, I bake bread on Sundays, but it tends to go moldy by Thursday or Friday. If I make two loaves of dough on Sunday, I can freeze/refrigerate one of them and bake it on Wednesday, and then we can have edible bread all week. Or if you decide you want pizza one night, you can make a few extra crusts, throw them in the freezer, and then whenever you want pizza the next time, you're pretty much set to go. Etc.
Note: 100% cranberry juice is a) kind of hard to find because it's b) really damn tart. Most of the time if you see something in the grocery store labeled "100% Juice!" and "Cranberry!", it'll also have "cocktail" in small letters elsewhere on the label -- it's mixed with other juices (apple or grape, a lot of the time). Not necessarily awful, but worth keeping in mind.
My experience with (mostly) switching to water is that the first week or so, you're desperately wishing you had something to put in it, but then it just sort of becomes a non-issue after that. You might keep a lemon or orange around for if you want something in your water during the transition period.
Also, chili recipe. Not super exciting, but it was tasty and made plenty for cheap. (You might take a peek around that website, btw. May be useful for getting some ideas.)
Also also, as the chili recipe reminded me: canned tomatoes (diced, whole, etc) are really very handy. You may not think of them as a staple, but they're very flexible and filling and fairly cheap. Good to have in the pantry.
I can stand to lose about twenty or thirty pounds, so before I move I'm going to buy a pair of running shoes. I'll only be living about a mile from Green Lake, so I figure I can get myself a good four mile run in each day after work. I figure that plus making my own meals and having a limited budget will help shave off some pounds for me.
But anyways, I just want to thank everyone here in this thread for the suggestions, since it'll be helping me too. OP, if you find any good ways of saving food money, let me know! And I can let you know if I find any.
Right out of the can as a side
Put them in a green leaf salad or Make them into their own salad
Make some Hummus (I linked that one as I don't like tahini but tahini is easily obtained from grocery stores)
If you're feeling ambitious Chickpea cakes
You can even roast them for a chip substitute if you're craving a heathy(er) munchie.
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Look at the ad. If something you like is on sale (and you have a coupon for it...), no reason you can't splurge if it'll fit.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
When I grocery shopping I don't know what the fuck I want and I just grab anything that looks good, it causes me to spend twice as much.
Obviously, fruit and other fresh/expensive stuff is probably a no go.
Rice is king, so is Pasta. Anything you can store dry in a cabinet for weeks.
One of my favorite cheap meals is pasta, tomato sauce, shrimp, and a few spices.
The noodles and sauce are cheap as hell... you'll probably spend 10-15 bucks on a nice sized bag of frozen shrimp that can make 3-4 medium size pots that'll make about 1.75 meals each.
Another good one is ground beef and carrots over rice. Delicious if seasoned properly.
Perhaps I've missed something. At what point do I use this innocuous little packet of seasoning? Apply directly with a mix of chicken and rice?
Tell me more.
my apologies,
I suppose this is a recipe of my own invention.
I begin sauteing the chicken breast in butter, olive oil, margarine, really whatever I have on hand, lightly sprinkling the taco seasoning over as it cooks.
I remove the chicken from the pan, put in a half cup or so of rice, add some water, start the rice boiling, as the rice is almost done cooking I throw in some more of the seasoning (about half the package total per meal is used), add the chicken back into the rice to make sure it absorbs a little more flavor and stays hot, once the rice is tender I throw everything in the pan on a plate and dig in.
If you can master the easy art of cooking a vegetarian meal then you may be able to spend some of the surplus on getting better quality meats for the remainder of the week
Baby, you've got a stew going.
it was awesome
Was the last post "Got scurvy
Heh.
I've got quite the appetite, and I'm going back to school. Going that low would be like going cold turkey. The hunger or craving pains would be savage, and that's not something a mind that needs to work requires.
Thread's looking awesome guys, keep it up. Thanks for all your inputs.
Cooking without meat is definitely a good way to save some money. You can add flavour by using a healthy chicken broth (best if you've made it yourself as instructed earlier) as a base in which to cook your rice/soup. When I buy meat, I usually try to ration it out, so instead of using the meat as the centrepiece of my meal, I will add it to rice/pasta/stew/stirfry/whatever. That way a single package of meat lasts for days instead of just one or two meals.
For the most delicious veggies, try roasting or steaming them. You don't need to buy a fancy steamer, all you need is a way to cook veggies over a pot of boiling water with a lid on top. Carrots and broccoli are delicious steamed, and root vegetables are amazing when roasted.
If you have a few extra bucks before your budget kicks in, I highly recommend Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. It's like The Joy of Cooking, but more modern and healthier. When I was learning to cook, it taught me all sorts of useful things like how to carve a chicken (super easy once you get some practice, and you can take advantage of store sales on whole chickens), how to roast vegetables, how to bake bread, etc. It also contains recipes for all your favourite baked goods without all the artificial crap the stores put in, without shortening (thank goodness, I hate shortening and most cookbooks use it like crazy), and with low/no sugar options.
If you can beg or borrow a food processor from somebody, you'll find a lot of cooking jobs to be much simpler and easier. I find that I eat a lot more vegetables because I can chop them up in the processor instead of by hand. It's also easier to bake your own bread (bread that's worth eating can be expensive, but flour and yeast are cheap!) if you can "knead" the dough with the food processor instead of by hand.
My recommendation for you is to buy only 'food,' don't buy meals, drinks, snacks or desserts.
Since you'll be cooking for yourself, remember that you don't need to eat everything. Leftovers are usually find for a couple days.
To make it easier, we also try to make some things in giant batches, then freeze everything we won't eat in the next few days. Curry, stews and spaghetti sauce are great for this. Cooking for yourself can get old and time consuming (unless you enjoy cooking). This reduces the hassle quite a bit. They can also be defrosted in the microwave in a pinch.
As someone else said, coupons and sales are your friend. Either buy the local paper for the weekly ads or get them when you walk in the store (most should be online as well).
btw, make yourself sack lunches. This will save you a significant amount of money. If you can, bring your own water bottle from home (refill at home or using fountains).