spending on food
Being the only one in the household for 17 days, I have spent $94.00 on groceries.
Is that too much? It depends on how I think of it. 17 days is 17X2=34 lunch or dinner meals. I think I ate out about 4 times, so lets say 30 meals cooked at home. 94 dollars divided by 30 is about 3 dollars a meal. So, cooking for myself definitely saved me a lot of money, compared to eating out all the time. Eating out real cheap would have cost about 6 dollars a meal, which is double the cost of cooking at home, and also would have involved lower quality ingredients than the ones I use. So in this way I am happy about my spendings!
I am also happy that I really splurged on groceries and still saved a lot of money. Whenever there was an organic selection, I bought it, even though organic produce is expensive. I bought mostly vegetables, and not much meat, and saved money this way.
Eating everything I buy takes effort and strategy, but it is important for saving money and saving energy and labor as well. Today, I checked the refrigerator and threw away a bunch of vegetables to my compost pile. Wasting food this way makes me sad and it is really a waste.
I realized that, in order to use everything I buy, I should have several recipes that use the same ingredient, know what ingredients I need before I’m going grocery shopping, and also know how to cook something well. For instance, I always knew that there was a bag of asparagus in the fridge, which my mother had bought, but I never took it out. All of my previous asparagus dishes have tasted horrible, and I didn’t want to force-feed myself the stuff.
Also, doing a thorough stock check in the refrigerator and freezer is pretty helpful. There is always an item that could be sitting in there going unnoticed. If I forget about a vegetable or fruit already cut open in the fridge for five days, it’s usually too late to enjoy it.
Today I cooked for two friends and myself, spending only 8 dollars for the ingredients I needed in addition to the things I already had at home. Cooking for people can be a pretty generous thing, and fun, and cheap too! I love it.
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