This week we'll focus on shopping for food and I'm guessing that will mean vastly different things to most of you. Some will be buying everything they eat, some will be producing a small amount - maybe herbs or eggs, some will produce most of their food and many of us will buy raw ingredients so we can home-make some of the products we used to buy.
I’ve gone from being an ordinary housewife, using my food
budget to provide as much as I can for the money I have, to being someone who
looks for fresh food that’s produced locally and ethically. I only want to buy into a food chain that considers kindness and quality of life in close alliance with nutritional values and profit. I always check labels and never buy products from compromised
locations such as China and Thailand. I silently sigh every time I pick up a food product that I know is grown in my own country, but it has been imported from somewhere else. We are shooting ourselves in the foot doing that.
It gives me a feeling of purpose to select, prepare and
serve our food here at home. I believe one of the most important parts of my homemaking is to
provide food that will keep us healthy, supports our values and is within the budget I've set for our grocery shopping. It's an ongoing job and something that takes planning and organisation as well as the actual shopping itself. But the selection of that food and growing some of our own fruit, vegetables and eggs, allows me to use many of the skills I've developed along the way. I didn't start out with any sort of expertise in budgeting, menu planning, stockpiling, food storage, gardening, seed collection, pruning, composting, animal husbandry, preserving, pickling, baking or cooking from scratch but teaching myself as I went has allowed us to develop a life far better than the one we used to live.
Making the most of your food budget
I have no doubt that if you do all your food and grocery
shopping at the supermarket, you’ll miss some of the bargains that can be found
out in the community. Ask your friends and neighbours if they shop at the local
butcher, greengrocer, dairy or fishmonger. Find out which local markets are the
best. Many markets are open every weekend, and if you find a good one, you may
be able to shop there for fruit, vegetables, fish and meat.
Home grown greens are usually easy to grow and can save you a few dollars while providing the freshest nutrition.
If you have good neighbours, close family or friends near-by, you might do
some bulk-buying with them to make real savings. Don’t rule out bulk-buying
even if you’re single or there’s just the two of you. All you need is a good stand-alone freezer. Sometimes we buy a side of pork or lamb but you can also buy a fore quarter or hind quarter and have
it cut and packed to order by the butcher. If you bulk-buy meat you’ll pay the same reduced price per kilo for
the whole side or quarter. That price varies, but often it’s about half what
you’d pay in the supermarket. Find a butcher near you and phone them for a
quote. If you live in a city and you’re close to the fruit and vegetable
markets or fish markets, you might be able to do the same thing there.
Make your own spice mixes, sauce and gravy bases. They are preservative-free and much cheaper than store bought ones.
Living well on a small amount of money is not about the big choices. It’s a series of consistent decisions to live on the budget you’ve defined for yourself. It’s about shopping for value for money bargains and making as much at home as you can. If you have the time to make some of the things you now buy - such as sauces, bread, yoghurt, jams, spice mixes, pickles etc, you’ll save money, and probably get a better product. If you can reduce your grocery bill you’ll be able to make savings every time you shop and that will probably mean big savings over the year.
Living well on a small amount of money is not about the big choices. It’s a series of consistent decisions to live on the budget you’ve defined for yourself. It’s about shopping for value for money bargains and making as much at home as you can. If you have the time to make some of the things you now buy - such as sauces, bread, yoghurt, jams, spice mixes, pickles etc, you’ll save money, and probably get a better product. If you can reduce your grocery bill you’ll be able to make savings every time you shop and that will probably mean big savings over the year.
But before you’re
faced with those choices, you have to organise your money, and that means
making up a food budget. If your eyes just glazed over and your pulse started
to race, it’s not as bad as you think. You set your own limits, you write your
budget according to what you need and the money you have coming in. You are the main
definer of your fate.
Menu planning
An easy mid-week meal - lamb chops, potatoes and cheesy cauliflower.
Homemade cake is just flour, eggs, sugar, milk, butter and natural flavourings - no preservatives.
I encourage you to start menu planning in an organised way.
You have to deal with recipes, calendars and shopping lists, so if you can
combine them all in one app, book or spreadsheet, it will make the task much
easier. I use the Paprika app and it's made a new woman of me.
There are two common ways to menu plan: you can shop with a
shopping list and buy what is on special and in season, then menu plan when you
have your supplies. Or you can collect the flyers and plan the menus before you
go shopping. I think the second method is the safest, because you will be able
to shop for everything you need if you already know what you’ll be making. Make sure you use leftovers as part of the overall plan and use the seasons as your guide to better quality and cheaper fruit and vegetables. Just
remain flexible, and if you see something that isn’t on your list that you can't resist, either buy
it for the following week if it will keep, or change one of your meals to
include what you find.
Permanent shopping list
Menu plans don’t work for everyone – that’s
when a permanent shopping list comes in handy. This is a list of all the
groceries you regularly buy. It lives in your computer and you print one off
before you go shopping, and just tick the items you need that week. It’s much
easier than compiling a weekly shopping list because you’re not trying to
remember brand names and sizes, and if it’s not you who does the shopping that
week, you know you’ll still have the products you usually buy. Remember to
include brand names and sizes if they’re important to you. I don’t care about
brand names for their own sake, but I want to buy Australian-grown and Australian-made,
so we check that before we buy.
You can make drinks at home too. Above is lemon cordial, below ginger cordial, both can be added to black tea in winter.
It takes a while to build a permanent shopping list. Start off with headings, and as you think of certain products, add them to the list under a heading. Here is an example of the categories you can use for your permanent list - add any you need and delete those you never buy:
Baking
|
Bathroom
|
Bread
|
Canned food
|
Cleaning
|
Condiments and spreads
|
Dairy
|
Drinks
|
Dry goods and grains
|
Fresh
fish
|
Frozen food
|
Fruit
|
Meat
|
Odds and ends
|
Oils: cooking and salad
|
Paper products/bags
|
Pets and chickens
|
Seasonings and spices
|
Sugars and syrups
|
Vegetables and herbs
|
Other
|
Stockpiling groceries
The thing that will support you cooking from scratch more
than anything else is to have the ingredients you need on hand. Whether you’re
in a large family or live alone, stockpiling groceries will give you the
convenience of having a cupboard full of groceries available to you twenty-four
hours a day. If children come home from school and hand you a note saying they
need to have some cupcakes for the school fair the next day, no problem. If
someone drops by out of the blue for dinner, you won’t be frantic wondering
what you’ll feed them. If you live alone and get the flu, you won't have to go out and shop. And it’s a great time-saver, too. When you have filled
that cupboard to the capacity you want, you won’t have to shop every week.
You’ll do your regular big shop, then keep scanning the sales flyers and shop only when you see a bargain, or
to pick up fresh milk, fruit and vegetables.
Just remember, a pantry and stockpile serve difference purposes. A
pantry is full of the foods you’ve opened and are currently using. Generally
everything will be in a sealed container. A stockpile is a cupboard full of
goods not opened, waiting to move to the pantry when they’re needed.