Healthy Cooking Without Busting Your Budge

Is it possible to have good tasting food with a healthy conscience on a budget? The resounding answer is “Yes”! But, it takes planning and preparation. The following suggestions are intended to help balance the time constraints of a normal busy person with the desire to make healthy meals on a budget.

• What is the most expensive food in your kitchen? The biggest budget buster in your kitchen is wasted food. Food that goes bad or gets thrown away can wreck a budget without even knowing it. One tip to help save food waste is to invest in a vacuum packaging machine, like a Food Saver. These machines remove air from the packaging, helping to preserve food for up to 5 times longer in the refrigerator or freezer. (Even Oprah likes these machines. The Food Saver was one of her favorite things in December 2003!)
• Buy produce in season. Produce purchased in season saves a great deal of money over out of season stock. Apples are less expensive in the fall. Melons are usually less expensive in the summer months. Growing and preserving produce out of season requires a great expenditure of energy through greenhouses mimicking the natural growing conditions and use of unnatural substances to preserve the freshness and color of the product. Farmer’s markets are a great place to find produce in season. If you find a good deal but have to buy a larger quantity, you an always vacuum seal and freeze it for later.
• Cook from scratch. It is often tempting to pick up fast food when you are tired after a long day at work. Convenience items, like dinner-in-a-box can also suffer the same pitfalls to your budget. Plus, fast food and convenience foods generally have a nutritional cost that should be considered. Fast food or convenience foods usually have a higher sodium content and include higher fat and calories to preserve the taste quality than items you could make at home.
• Make healthy substitutions. Drink water or milk instead of soft drinks. Soft drinks are expensive and unhealthy. Every adult and child needs to drink water and milk every day. Substitute fruit or vegetables for snacking instead of chips or cookies.
• Watch your portion sizes. Cook only enough of those foods to give everyone the recommended amount. For a family of 5, 1 pound of ground chuck would be enough to give Dad 4 ounces, Mom 3 ounces, a 10 year old boy and 8 year old twin girls 3 ounces each. Those are the serving sizes recommended by the new USDA guidelines. (A 3-ounce portion of meat is about the size of a deck of cards.)
• Pick your proteins carefully. Use beans frequently as a meat substitute. There are many varieties, they can be prepared in a crock-pot so that dinner is ready when you get home, and they contain lots of fiber to improve regularity. The USDA recommends eating beans 4 times per week. If you have a problem with gas after eating beans, try washing them, covering with water, bringing water to a boil, then draining off water and refilling pot. Skip the bacon. Bacon is expensive, very high in fat, and offers little or no nutritional value. Lean meats are more expensive than meats with lots of fat, but still substantially less expensive than paying high medical bills incurred from consuming a high fat, less nutritive diet.
• Turn to generic. Generic brands are often a lot less expensive than brand-name products. If, for example, a brand-name cereal has the same nutritional value as the generic one and your family likes them both, it's often a better bet to go with the generic. Even if you have a coupon for the well-known brand, chances are the generic cereal will still be cheaper. Shop the weekly sale ads to get good deals on staples. Compare prices at various stores to find which is the cheapest. Some stores offer double or triple coupons that could make a non-generic item more cost effective.
• Make a list with a budget and follow it. Figure out how much your monthly budget allowance is for food and other items purchased at the grocery store. Divide that number by the number of times per month you go to the store. Develop your list of items that you need at the store and approximate pricing. Be sure to budget for non-food items that you may need, but realize that most non-food items can be purchased less expensively at a dollar store. The usual adage of “don’t go to the grocery store hungry” applies as well – shopping when you are hungry increases the likelihood that you will buy items that are not on the list or in the budget.
• Cook once, eat twice. Being budget conscious includes more than just the basic cost of food. Part of saving money is to use all of the food you have purchased and to conserve energy when preparing it. Using a stove or oven during the hot summer months creates extra heat in the house, which then requires use of energy to cool off. Using a toaster oven is an alternative when cooking a small meal, instead of turning on the big oven. Also cooking once and using what you have prepared to eat twice can conserve both money and time in the kitchen. For example, if you make a pot roast in a slow cooker one night, save the extra portions to freeze and use later for beef tacos.
• Watch breakfast items. Frequently, mornings do not lend time to cooking a meal, and fast, convenient food is preferable. However, such breakfast items as poptarts or breakfast bars usually contain high amounts of sugar and are expensive. Comparison shop for cereals and look at generic brands. The convenience packs of oatmeal are more expensive and higher in sugar. One alternative is to use regular oatmeal, which is significantly less expensive and, frankly, tastes better. Regular oatmeal can even be sweetened with fruit or applesauce or splenda. Eggs are also an inexpensive breakfast food, that provides an immediate shot of protein first thing in the morning.
• Bigger does not always equal better! Be careful of big "value size" packages. Often a smaller size product can be more cost effective than the larger size of the same product. Sometimes they are packaged for price value, but often they are simply packaged only for convenience.