Recession Dining? The Quest Begins.
So, the recession drags on. It has recently been brought home to me that I spend too much money on, well, pretty much everything. While I’m still not hurting for money for basics, which makes me pretty lucky, it would be idiotic of me not to give some serious thought to buckling down to saving some more money and increasing my emergency cushion a little in case something happens.
What I most need to do, really, is just spend more deliberately — give more thought to what I do and don’t spend money on. I’ll be working on that. But one item that I’d really like to work on that will actually require some thought and planning is my grocery bills. As I mentioned recently, I am a total grocery impulse shopper. This makes my cooking life pretty entertaining and frequently an adventure, but it also has the drawback of sometimes saddling me with completely bizarre foodstuffs that I have no idea what to do with, or 2/3rds of the ingredients for a recipe that I can’t quite make. I also haven’t really spent a lot of time thinking about what the most cost-effective use of my money is; my tendency is to buy anything healthy that I am at all tempted by to encourage myself, even if it turns out to be pricey.
So, my grocery bills tend to be probably more expensive than they need to be and lead to a certain amount of waste. I’m going to try to see if by actually thinking about what I purchase and finding some new recipes, I can shop more efficiently. The special challenge? I have a painfully large array of dietary restrictions that, among other things, prevent me from eating most of the cheap and healthy protein options (see e.g. the vegetarian ones). This leaves me with three options: a) the expensive, b) the unhealthy, and c) grossly inappropriate quantities of skim milk. So far I’ve been doing all three in more or less equal measure. There has got to be a better way to do this, though, and I’m going to see if I can find it.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not likely to turn into one of those dollar-a-day blogs or a parade of orthorexic eating. Frankly, I really like food, and there is no way I am going to be able to convince myself to live solely on ground chicken and turkey in perpetuity. My goal is just to do a little better, to figure out how to make more efficient use of my groceries and my grocery money, and keep myself reasonably healthy and reasonably interested at the same time. On the up side, I love to cook and bake, so even if I am also easily bored by food, hopefully I can keep myself interested. I’ll be coming back to this as I figure things out. Wish me luck!
you know, when I put a plan together and buy the ingredients for the things I think I want to make, I typically end up with those ingredients still sitting in my cupboard at the end of the week because I never followed through. I’m also an impulse grocery shopper and spend way too much on food but I’ve found planning makes me more wasteful (because I change my mind later on in the week and want to make something else). With my food restrictions I have resigned myself to the category of expensive. Not only is the “special” foods I have to eat horrendously over-priced, everything else is made from scratch and so I NEED to have a well stocked fridge / cupboard / freezer / pantry or else I run out of interesting options. Okay, well maybe I don’t NEED it but for my own sense of sanity I probably do.
OMG Sophie… I’m so channeling you…
Unfortunately i don’t think there is any way around it other than being a bit more disciplined (what the recession is doing to all of us anyway — some less voluntarily than others). Maybe that means forgoing the special food item until you know you’ll have enough people around to eat it all, or buying less of whatever it is, or putting up with more leftovers or frozen/reheated meals than you’d like, or making less glamorous substitutions. There was an interesting article in the NYT about this the other day. I don’t think it has to be unpleasant, though. I bet there are some creative and fun ways to deal with this (though I don’t know what they are, since i don’t cook a whole lot) – maybe you won’t even notice the difference.
If you do, though, in the end it may just come down to willpower. If if feels like the sacrifice in quality eating/cooking isn’t worth whatever $ is being saved, than maybe the place to save cash is in something else?