Wait... Does It Really Cost More To Go Partial Vegetarian?

Jayson Lusk wrote recently about a recent study he published examining whether or not vegetarians spend less on food:

"This issue is of interest because food costs are often a reason touted for reduced meat consumption. The argument is that meat is expensive and thus eschewing meat (or participating in meatless Monday, for example) will save you money."

Except…. the results Jason Lusk found weren't at all what I expected, at least with regard to part-time vegetarianism:

"...at every income level, partial vegetarians spend more than meat eaters while true vegetarians spend less (assuming same gender, household size, etc.)."

I had to wipe a big mouthful of coffee off my laptop screen after reading that. How can your food costs go up if you reduce your most expensive source of calories? This is the exact opposite of my personal experience over many years of cooking and eating (and writing) at Casual Kitchen. I'm sure many readers feel the same.

Well, fortunately, the study doesn't literally say it costs more to change to partial vegetarian. The study didn't examine households that changed from meat-every-day diets to partial vegetarian diets. Instead, the study analyzes households in a steady state. In other words, it could be the case that people who are highly mindful of the health benefits of eating less meat tend to spend more on food. Or, perhaps those partial vegetarian households who spend a lot on food now spent even more back when they were heavier meat eaters. We don't know.

Furthermore, no dietary change happens in a vacuum. When making food substitutions in your diet, if you take something out, the other things you eat will fill up the space left over. And if you replace the most expensive element of your diet with something else, your costs will go up if and only if that something is even more expensive.

Therein lies the secret. If you replace one or two steak-centered meals each week with equivalent calories from, say, bean-centered or lentil-centered meals, I personally guarantee that you will save money.

On the other hand, if you replace those steak-centered meals with meals of organic, out-of-season heirloom tomatoes, resting on a bed of cruelty-free, gently wilted, out-of-season baby spinach, all carefully dusted with stevia-sweetened, fair-trade certified Madagascar cinnamon... you're going to spend more money. A lot more money.

Am I exaggerating? Okay, okay... maybe just a little. But it makes the point clear: you have to be smart. You can't just cut out one category of foods and pay zero attention to the relative cost of what you replace it with. This is basic, first-order thinking for any budget-conscious Casual Kitchen reader.

READ NEXT: A Superior, Yet Less Expensive, Solution




How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

The Best Corn on the Cob Cooking Hack You’ve Never Heard Of

Since we're right in the heart of sweet corn season right now in many parts of the USA, today's post is a quick cooking hack that saves time, effort, energy and cleanup.

Normally, normal people will just cook corn in a pot of boiling water.

But what if you've got a pot of soup going too? Or better yet, a pot of simmering, homemade stock? Well, the hack is simply this: put the fresh corn right into that pot.

That's right: just gently drop in your ear of corn (you might have to turn up the heat for just a minute or two to get the soup/stock-plus-corn boiling properly), boil it for ten minutes, and then, with a pair of tongs, fish out the ears of corn. Fortunately, they'll be floating on top. You can rinse them off--or not--depending on your preferences.

You can easily cook two, three or even four ears of corn this way. No need to get out another pot, fill it with water, wait until it's heated. And best of all, you won't need to clean up an extra pot once you're done!

CK readers of course know the extraordinary value of making homemade stock (or "bone broth" as iHipsters like to call it these days). We all know how easy it is to make, how much better it is than expensive store-bought stock, and how much it improves the flavor and depth of any homemade soup, stew, risotto, or any recipe requiring broth or water.

Well, just the other day, I had a big pot of stock going, made from the leftovers of an amazing Pernil we had cooked recently. I just dropped in three ears of corn... and ten minutes later I had delicious, gently-flavored ears of corn, ready to eat, at the cost of no effort whatsoever.

They didn't even need butter or salt. Of course, really good corn never does.

Try this hilariously simple cooking hack and see what you think. Enjoy!


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Shopping at More Than One Grocery Store: Worth It, Or a Waste?

A question for frugal shoppers: Is it worth the bother to grocery shop at more than one store? If another store offers certain products at lower prices than your regular grocery store, is it really worth the extra driving to capture those savings?

Unfortunately, the answer is “it depends.”

Here at Casual Kitchen we almost never go to different stores to save money. Instead, we control our grocery shopping costs by avoiding branded products and prepared “second-order” foods, limiting meat-heavy meals, and so on.

Then, we select the one grocery store in our area that best meets our needs. We want a conveniently located store offering the best selection of the goods we typically buy at generally the best prices. As we've seen in a recent post here at Casual Kitchen, we can easily measure this by occasionally skimming a couple of grocery store circulars side by side. Sure, certain items might, at times, be cheaper at other stores, but the store circulars help us make sure we get good value for the preponderance of the items we buy.

In today’s post, I want to share a recent example where I actually did drive to three different grocery stores in a single shopping trip. That’s right: three! I want to show how, once in a while, it is very much worth it to explore other grocery retailers.

However, it’s not worth it to do this every week, and certainly not worth it if your grocery trips cost more in time and fuel than you reap in savings.

Let’s get into our example. Within a 3-4 mile radius of our home, there are four standard grocery stores: Kings, Acme, Stop and Shop and Shoprite (there’s also a Whole Foods, but we’ll ignore it for obvious reasons: this is a post about saving money after all).

Recall that we can let the stores tell us what products to buy, by letting their circulars do the talking as we skim them from home. During one recent week, we saw two legitimate doorbuster items on sale at Acme: a two liter jug of olive oil for $8.76 and a 5 pound bag of potatoes for 99c (perfect for a delicious batch of Easy Potato Peanut Curry!).

But we’re not done. Yet another local store, Shoprite, had its own doorbuster item: 1 lb, 13 ounce cans of tomatoes (crushed, diced, whole tomatoes, etc.) for a paltry 34c a can. So I decided to head over there too, where I picked up a dozen cans, enough to stock my pantry for several weeks.

Thanks to a recent post, we all know the secret to doorbuster sales: buy the doorbuster item(s) and nothing more. But nobody says you can’t spend a few minutes briefly walking around the store to get a sense of the store’s products, their prices (beyond what you see in the circular), and the general experience of shopping at the store itself. Are the prices generally better? Is the store run well?

As an empowered consumer, you don’t just want brands and products competing for your consumer dollar, you want entire retailers competing for you too. Which is why it pays to check out the competition occasionally. Stores will often change up their strategies or their pricing to improve their competitive position. And of course, a store you may have deemed uncompetitive or not worth going to at some point in the past can always improve and become much more competitive later.

In this case, you’re using a doorbuster sale item--and the trip to a different store--as an opportunity to let that store show you what it’s got. Does your “favorite” grocery store still deserve to be your favorite? Why or why not?

Empowered consumers never allow mere habit to dictate their purchasing decisions. This is what makes it worth it, from time to time, to stop in at a competing store and take a look around, while you also capitalize on a genuinely valuable doorbuster sale. Make those retailers compete aggressively for your consumer dollars!


Read Next: "The Consumer Must Be Protected At All Times"

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

What Underwear Teaches You About Saving Time AND Money

Today’s post is about my underwear. Sort of.

********************************

When I was young and broke, I made a discovery.

This was years ago, when I was first living on my own. I was earning almost nothing at my job back then, and I was renting a tiny (and more or less illegal) basement apartment in an old house in Mount Vernon, NY. I had to watch every penny.

Back in those days I had no washer or dryer in my apartment, so I had to go to a local laundromat to wash my clothes.

I also owned about seven pairs of underwear. This actually helped order my life: when I ran out of clearn underwear, I did the laundry. Which meant I could have a stable routine of doing the laundry once a week, on the same day every week.

It might have been orderly, but it was also a pain in the ass. I had to drive to the laundromat, park on the street, feed precious quarters into a parking meter, and feed still more precious quarters into a washer and dryer. Occasionally I had to wait a while for a machine. It was often a multi-hour project and I had to do it every week.

And then I had an epiphany: What if I bought an extra seven pairs of underwear? A load of laundry would be basically the same size whether it has seven pairs of underwear or fourteen. It’s not like the washing machine would notice the difference.

For me, however, the implications were staggering. I’d only have to go to the laundromat every two weeks!

A 416% ROI
And then I thought through the numbers. It cost me maybe twenty-five bucks to buy those extra seven pairs of underwear (hey, it was the early 90s, things were cheaper). That up-front cost enabled me to do laundry half as often: every other week instead of every single week. This produced a savings of $3 for washing and drying, plus another buck or so in savings on parking. And of course it saved me time too. Essentially, I’d be able to cut my laundry costs and my time costs in half.

I kept thinking about the numbers. If this twenty-five dollar investment yielded some four dollars in savings every two weeks, this meant that my new underwear would fully pay for itself in just over twelve weeks! And those seven new pairs of underwear would pay for themselves more than four times over in just the first year. Even more wild was calculating the annualized returns: a staggering 416%.

Let me repeat that for emphasis: I was earning an annual return of 416 percent * on my new underwear.

That is some great underwear.

This was years before I began my Wall Street career, but I’m sure readers can see why I went on to become an investment analyst. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that I looked at this little investment and thought, hmmm... can I push the numbers even further? What if I bought an entire month’s worth of underwear?

If it cost me twenty-five bucks to take my underwear collection from seven pairs to fourteen pairs, it would probably cost another sixty-five bucks to buy, say, another eighteen pairs of underwear, bringing my total collection comfortably above thirty. Enough underwear to last more than a month.

Now I’d have to go to the laundromat once a month instead of every two weeks, which would save me another incremental $4 a month.

This, then, translates into an attractive 86% return ** on those additional eighteen pairs of underwear. They’d almost pay for themselves in just the first year, and I’d save still more of my time.

Diminishing returns
Of course, you’d have to be blind to miss the diminishing returns. The 400+% returns on underwear pairs #8-14 are truly extraordinary. World class. However, the incremental value of pairs #15-32 are just really good.

You could see then how the thousandth pair of underwear probably wouldn’t add much incremental value at all to my life. I’d have other clothing to wash in the meantime, so I wouldn’t really save money, or trips to the laundromat. Worse, I’d be living with bales of underwear everywhere in my basement apartment, which might inhibit my social life.

But it sure is fun to imagine doing laundry just once every three years, isn’t it?

The point
Okay. The point of this post isn’t about trying to save a little money by owning 30+ pairs of underwear. To be honest, this post isn’t really about underwear at all. The underwear is just a metaphor.

The point of this post is to think about your possessions, your activities and your time using a lens of efficiency and scale.

Many of us presume there’s an unavoidable trade-off between saving time and saving money. That in order to save money, you have to waste time, and vice-versa. That applying a frugal, money-saving idea to your life somehow means things like laboring for hours making your own laundry detergent or painstakingly grinding your own cashew nut butter. Or something.

This is an either-or fallacy. Yes, sure, sometimes there are tradeoffs between time and money. But often, if you think carefully and creatively, there are amazing solutions in many life domains that save both time and money.

Of course if you don’t believe these kinds of solutions exist, you’ll be right. You won’t find them.


Read Next: Stacked Costs and First-Order Foods: A New Way To Think About Rising Food Costs


* The math: $4 a week in laundry x 52 weeks = $208 in costs annually.
$4 every two weeks = $104 annually, a savings of $104 a year.
$104 in savings / $25 in underwear costs = 4.16, or a 416% return.

** Once again, the math: $4 every two weeks (or $104 annually) drops to $4 a month (or $48 annually), a savings of $56. ($104 - $48 = $56)
$56 / $65 = 0.86, or an 86% return.


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

What Recipes Are In Your Heavy Rotation?

A comment from reader Sarah S:

I'd love to read a post, or an ongoing series on what is currently in your heavy rotation.

Thanks for the idea! First, a quick explanation for newer readers on what "heavy rotation" actually means. From my post Seven Ways to Get Faster at Cooking, where I first used the phrase:

Heavy Rotation:
Build a short list of your cooking "hits"--recipes that are both popular with your family and that you can make quickly and easily. Then regularly rotate one or more of these hit recipes into your weekly menu. The key here: if you make the dish regularly you'll get faster and more efficient at making it until you can practically do it blindfolded.

I've found that if you have a short list of five or six truly easy-to-make "hits" and rotate one of them into your menu each week, you can use this system indefinitely without getting sick of any of the hit recipes. Believe me, that's a far cry from a typical radio station that plays the same song every three hours! Moreover, you will find that you get quicker and quicker in finding the ingredients in the store, keeping them handy at home, and preparing and scaling up the meal itself. If you double the batch size of your heavy rotation recipes, you can efficiently take care of 1/3 or more of your meals this way, depending on the size and appetite of your family.

If I might channel my inner Michael Pollan, we could boil this down to: Find easy recipes. Make them. Not too often.

Now, to answer Sarah's question. Right now, the recipes we've got on heavy rotation are:

1) Easy Lentil Soup (the last few times I've made this I've included four cups of homemade rich chicken stock, and this soup has turned out better than ever).
2) Hilariously Easy Slow Cooker Bean Stew
3) Black Beans and Rice
4) Homemade Burritos

What grabbed me about Sarah's comment was this: it made me realize that here at Casual Kitchen we have our own rotation of heavy rotation recipes. How meta! And there are specific commonalities to these heavy rotation collections beyond just their being easy-to-make recipes.

For example, usually our heavy rotation recipes include at least one highly scalable soup or stew (often vegetarian) that leaves us plenty of leftovers. We do this for a couple of reasons: First, when our key meal of the week is vegetarian, this often translates into big savings on our food costs--a central advantage of part-time vegetarianism. This simple tactic of building a heavy rotation around a double (or triple!) batch of vegetarian soup or stew probably saves us more time and money than anything else we do in the kitchen.

Second, we eat the leftovers of this scaled-up meal on alternate days with another recipe. Why alternate days? Well, while it's true that there's no easier way to get dinner on the table than reheating something you've already made, it's also true that eating the same thing for multiple days in a row gets... tiresome. Alternating leftovers solves this problem.

Another thought: we often have a crockpot recipe in our heavy rotation. This might be something like our Chipotle Crockpot Chile, Crockpot Beef Stew, or Easy Slow Cooker Beef and Barley Stew. All of these recipes are delicious, simple, and make a ton of extra food.

Finally, Black Beans and Rice tends to show up regularly in our heavy rotation just because it's hilariously easy and we never seem to get sick of it, ever.

So, readers, now it's your turn! Share a few of your family’s favorite, easiest recipes in the comments below, and feel free to include links back to your site. Let's help each other put delicious, easy home-cooked meals on our tables!

What recipes are in your heavy rotation?


Read Next: Fair Trade: Using Poverty To Sell... More



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Review: The New Evolution Diet by Arthur De Vany

"There is no failure, only feedback."
--Arthur De Vany

Readers, I'd like to recommend an extremely useful and insightful book to you: The New Evolution Diet: What Our Paleolithic Ancestors Can Teach Us about Weight Loss, Fitness, and Aging by Art De Vany.

I'll start with the author's three central dietary and fitness principles:

1) Do not count or restrict calories.
2) Do not starve yourself, but do go hungry episodically, for brief periods.
3) Exercise less, not more, but with greater playfulness and intensity.

Interesting. Now granted, I know people who have had exceptional success counting calories. And I've seen (and have myself followed) advice to do extended exercise, particularly extended cardio workouts like distance running.

The thing is, most of us hate doing these things. Which is why a book that suggests you do neither is pretty intriguing.

Early on in his book, De Vany offers what I consider to be one of the best brief explanations I've ever read of why we humans are literally built to overeat and underexercise:

"We humans evolved when food was scarce and life was full of arduous physical activity. Hence, our bodies instruct us to eat everything we can lay our hands on and to exert ourselves as little as possible.

That's right. We are, in essence, hardwired to be lazy overeaters.

This was a perfect strategy for success thousands of years ago. No human could survive in 40,000 BC unless he or she ate anytime food was available. Our ancestors knew that famine was always close at hand--feast now or suffer tomorrow. They were also careful to expend as little energy as possible, because burning more calories than absolutely necessary was a threat to survival."

In short, the human body was designed for an insecure food environment. Which is why it's so easy to get fat today, when we're constantly surrounded by an abundance of delicious, tempting and high-calorie food. And it's not like we need to chase down any of this food either! In the mechanized, modern era you can go your whole life without intense exercise. It's easy to see why obesity is our primary health problem.

Thus when De Vany turns the standard diet/fitness advice on its head, it's with full awareness of this critical concept: our bodies are not designed for the modern era. Therefore, we need to imitate--as much as is practicable in modern day-to-day life--the food and fitness environment we are designed for. This is the central thinking behind paleo living. Not just paleo eating--but paleo exercising too.

De Vany tells you to mix your exercise routine up so you won't get bored, and to challenge your body in new and different ways to avoid repetitive stress injuries. Boring, repetitive exercise isn't a recipe for getting in better shape: it's a recipe for, well, getting bored. And quitting.

And De Vany's notion of avoiding boredom extends to eating too. Just as Mother Nature never intended us to exercise on a fixed, rigid schedule, she never intended us to eat on a fixed, rigid schedule either. The human body craves--and benefits significantly from--variation and randomness.

Which is why this book calls for a widely varied diet, not some self-parodying low-carb diet of slabs of meat and bacon. Carbs aren't forbidden: they're okay in moderation--usually in the form of fresh, seasonal fruits and vegetables. The author also suggests experimenting with brief and intermittent periods of fasting: "just remind yourself that your ancestors endured many episodes of hunger and that your metabolism is designed to handle brief fasts."

And while junk foods like processed chips, sugary cereals and soda are generally off limits, even the author himself indulges in a once-a-month piece of cheesecake. This flexibility and allowance for enjoyment is the central strength of De Vany's eating style. As De Vany says: "We are not trying to literally live in the Ice Age, just to emulate aspects of that diet."

Finally, The New Evolution Diet offers readers striking insights and new, healthier paradigms for how to think about food, fitness and the human body. Ideas like:

1) Focusing on building muscle instead of dropping pounds.

2) Using the 80/20 Rule and other non-linear paradigms (e.g., cascade effects, butterfly effects, even outright randomness) to think about the body and how it functions.

3) Adding "kurtosis" in various forms to your life. This might mean adding significant randomness to your workout routine, or varying your diet significantly. As we mentioned before, the human body craves variation. This is the kind of stuff that can make life fun, unpredictable and--most importantly--healthier.

Readers, I strongly recommend this book. It’s rational, practical, thought-provoking and an easy read. Have a look at it and let me know what you think!

Finally, a few things I'm planning to add to my life after reading this book:

1) Add some light exercise before dinner to raise my insulin sensitivity. De Vany explains that this helps train your body to turn food into fuel rather than fat.

2) Make my exercise routines much more varied and unpredictable. I'm the kind of person who craves steady routine, so this may be a challenge for me.

3) Add a few specific foods to my diet: canned salmon and canned shellfish. Both are great sources of lean protein, vitamins, minerals and essential oils.

4) I'm going to try some small personal experiments with intermittent fasting and see what the effects are.

Share your thoughts!





Related Posts:
Cookbook Review: Mollie Katzen's The Heart of the Plate
Ask CK: How Do I Find Good Books To Read?
Interview with Jayson Lusk, Author of "The Food Police"
Review: Wheat Belly by William Davis

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

What Happens Once You've Cooked a Recipe 100 Times?

Readers, do you have any recipes you've cooked so many times that you've lost count?

When you reach this point with a favorite dish, interesting things happen. You barely need to look at the recipe. Preparing it becomes relaxing, even meditative. You don’t think about the process steps and how to do them. Heck, you hardly need to think at all, and the recipe comes out great every time.

Despite all I've written here at Casual Kitchen, you'd think cooking would be meditative and relaxing for me all the time. You'd be wrong. Usually I try to avoid cooking--or even better, shirk it off onto somebody else. But there are several key recipes here, recipes like Chicken Mole, Risotto, Black Beans and Rice, North African Lemon Chicken and Groundnut Stew, that I've made hundreds of times, and I’m so comfortable with these recipes that preparing them becomes as mentally demanding as folding the laundry. Which is my idea of a meditative exercise.

My introduction to this idea was in New Zealand. Our friend Richard, who owns a cafe and catering company in the city of Christchurch, was teaching me how to make a "flat white" (like a cappuccino, only better). Coffee is a refined art in New Zealand and I was struggling to get it just right. The grounds needed to be pressed just enough, the milk needed to be frothed just right, and everything needed to be combined with just the right amount of flair. I screwed up several that went right into the wastebasket. Then, finally, I made one that got a passing grade. Maybe a C-minus.

Richard told me, "after you've properly made 200 of these, I'd let you in front of a customer." I stared at him. As naive as I'm sure this sounds, this was the first time I'd really thought about the concept of making something so many times that it becomes second nature, that you don’t have to think about it, and you can start to add your personality to the process rather than just complete the process.

These are the kinds of things you can do after you've cooked a recipe 20, 50 or even 200 times:

1) You can carry on a conversation while you cook, and pay sincere attention to both tasks.

2) You can scale up the recipe for a large dinner party or a big group with little additional stress.

3) The cooking experience becomes easy, even effortless.

4) You confidently modify the recipe, or add improvisational flourishes as you cook. You know exactly how the recipe works and you know what variables you can and cannot tweak.

5) You make it... and it tastes amazing every time. You may not even know why it tastes amazing, but it just does.

Perhaps this is the home cook's version of the so-called 10,000 Hour Rule. Then again, you certainly don't need 10,000 hours to get good--really, really good--at cooking. Why? Well, just do the math: It only takes fifty hours to make a 30 minute recipe one hundred times (the majority of the recipes here at CK can be made in under 30 minutes for $2 a serving or less). Using the time-saving strategy of heavy rotation--rotating in the easiest, least expensive and most-loved recipes on a twice- or three-times-a-month basis--you could hit the I cooked this 100 times mark with four or five favorite recipes within just a few years.

Which makes cooking healthy food for your family an even easier part of your life than it already is.


Related Posts:
Thoughts On Recipe Development
Making It a Treat
Re-Seasoning: Never Be Bored With Leftovers Again
The Paradox of Cooking Shows

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Five Laughably Easy Timesaving Tips in the Kitchen

Here at Casual Kitchen, we're all about making cooking at home as easy and efficient as possible. My goal is to show that even the most time-pressed family can cook great meals at home and literally save a fortune over restaurant meals or takeout.

In today's post I'll share some of our most useful tips and techniques to save time in the kitchen--with some unintended bonus sarcasm thrown in for free. Which of these tips do you use, and what additional ones would you suggest?

1) Be Coarse.

If you're making a recipe that requires a lot of chopping, you can cut back on a ton of prep time if you don't worry so much about the beauty and elegance of your knifework.

An example: With my popular Groundnut Stew post, does it really matter if the tomato is cut carefully or not? (Nope.) Does it matter if the cabbage is in uniformly-small, bite-sized pieces? (Nuh-uh.) Skimping on steps like these can save as much as half of the prep time in a recipe, making a significant dent in the amount of time you're forced to spend cooking.

Now I know there are some kooks out there who consider the chopping of an onion to be a meaningful, zen-like experience. I, however, consider it an obstacle standing between me and my dinner. If you can get yourself into a zen state while chopping onions, have at it. But for my part, I'd rather hack that onion to shreds as quickly as possible, get a healthy meal on the table and start eating. Then I'll be in my zen state.

2) Eliminate prep steps.

Even better than doing your prep work more efficiently, how about leaving it out entirely? If you're making something containing peeled potatoes, seriously, do those potatoes really need to be peeled? No! In fact, skipping that step not only saves time, it yields a more healthy and nutritious meal. After all, the skin of a potato contains lots of nutrients and fiber.

What about painstakingly peeling ginger before grating or mincing it? Not necessary. Taking the papers off of garlic cloves before putting them through your garlic press? Skip it.

Skipping steps like these can change some recipes from marathons to sprints. What types of prep steps do you normally leave out?

3) Get everything out first.

One of the least considered timesinks in cooking is the wasted time, motion and mental energy spent when you have to fish around in your cupboards and drawers for the items you need to cook, especially when there's food smeared all over your hands.

A classic example that I've faced with my Chicken Mole recipe: I'd be (coarsely) cutting up the chicken and then suddenly realize that I didn't have any of my spices out to season it. Guess what? In order to avoid getting chicken goo all over my kitchen, I'd have to wash my hands, dry them off, open the cupboard, pull out the spices, open the jars, remove the inner lids and then have them handy when it comes time to season the meat. My life is growing shorter by the year, and I've just squandered several minutes of it, needlessly.

Now when I cook, I always have spices, tools and anything else I need out and ready to go. When I want to season chicken or other meats, for example, I use my (clean) knife hand to shake the spices onto the chicken as I manipulate it with my (chicken goo-covered) right hand.

Any time you're working with doughs, batters, meats or other messy (or potentially unsanitary) foods, you can waste a ton of time when the things you need aren't at hand. Having everything out and within easy reach will speed your cooking process enormously.

4) Clean up at the end.

Most tasks can be done far more efficiently en masse, and cleanup is a classic example. Save all the cleaning and dishwashing until the end, and you'll avoid interrupting your cooking process with wasteful and inefficient time and motion. This can translate into big time savings.

Note, however, that there's a big exception to this rule: if you're cooking a recipe that has a natural lull in the middle of the cooking process, you can get the cleanup done during that lull, and thus make good use of idle time that would otherwise be wasted.

5) Double, Double.

One of the key factors I think about whenever I consider making a recipe is this: Can it be easily doubled?

A recipe that can be easily doubled offers an enormous advantage to the busy cook: the advantage of scale. For example, you can make a double-batch of my laughably easy Black Beans and Rice in literally the same amount of time it takes to make a single batch. Think about it: measuring out double the spices takes no extra time (uh, especially if you've followed tip #3). Cutting up a whole green pepper takes the same time as cutting up half, since most of your time goes towards washing it and cutting out the seeds. And how much time does it take to open a second can of black beans?

Each of these steps takes at most a few incremental seconds, which means doubling this particular recipe might cost you at most a minute or two in total. And yet you get double the food. Better still, you'll have laughably easy-to-prepare extra leftovers for the next couple of days! Remember, there is no easier way to get a low-cost and low-effort meal on the table than to reheat a delicious meal you've already made. Go ahead and choose your next few recipes with an eye for doubling, and sit back and enjoy the benefits.

A few final words:

Look, I still have readers who make the ludicrous claim that cooking healthy food at home is either a) too time-consuming, or b) too expensive. Spend 15 minutes perusing the recipe index here at CK, and you'll find dozens of easy and ridiculously healthy recipes that can be made in under 30 minutes, cost $1.00 a serving or even less, and yield days and days' worth of laughably easy to prepare leftovers.

Readers, what are your favorite time-saving tips in the kitchen?

Related Posts:
The 25 Best Laughably Cheap Recipes at Casual Kitchen
How to Feel Less Hungry on Fewer Calories: Hacking the Satiety Factor of Foods
The Worst Lie of the Food Blogosphere
A Reader Asks for Help


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Ten Frugal Things We Do--And a Giveaway

One of the primary goals of Casual Kitchen is to help readers make the most out of their food spending. In today's post, I'll share ten useful frugal habits we've adopted here at CK, and I invite readers to share their favorite food habits in the comments.

PS: I'm offering a giveaway prize for one lucky commenter--details at the end of the post!
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1) We practice part-time vegetarianism and eat meat in fewer than half our meals.

2) The majority of the foods we eat are simple staples like pasta, rice, brown rice, lentils, beans, and vegetables.

3) Laura brings her own lunch to work every day, almost without exception.

4) We eat out rarely, perhaps three times a month. Even a relatively inexpensive dinner out can cost more than our typical weekly food bill.

5) We avoid buying heavily advertised products. We have no interest in paying for the biggest part of a product's cost stack.

6) When buying staples, we generally buy store-brand or generic products. They're almost always of equivalent quality.

7) We tend to make infrequent purchases of staple foods--and when we do buy, it's in huge volumes of on-sale items. When the 20-lb bags of rice or the 3-liter jugs of olive oil are on sale, that's when we pounce.

8) We've bought a grand total of just three new cookbooks in the past two years. There are just too many untried recipes just waiting to be exploited in our existing cookbook collection.

9) We buy junk food occasionally, but we never keep any stashes of it in the house. It's our way of practicing moderation in our moderation.

10) The brand of wine we drink more than any other is Carlo Rossi--simple, unpretentious table wine that comes in a gigantic one-gallon jug. Who'd guess that for a paltry twelve bucks we can ease our pain for an entire month!

Readers, now's your turn--what frugal things do YOU do? Share them in the comments!

And now for the giveaway: I have a spare copy of Emeril Lagasse's excellent cookbook Emeril at the Grill: A Cookbook for All Seasons available for one lucky reader [take a look at my positive review of it from last year].

To enter, just leave a comment sharing your favorite and most effective frugal food habits (and be sure to include a link to your blog or an email address so I'll be able to reach you). I'll run this contest until Thursday, December 2nd, 8pm ET, and I'll announce the winner with my weekly links post on Friday December 3rd. Good luck!



Related Posts:
Review: Cooking Green by Kate Heyhoe
Almost Meatless: Cookbook Review
Ten Tips on How to Cut Your Food Budget Using the 80/20 Rule
What Have You Given Up That You Don't Miss?



Help support Casual Kitchen by buying Jules Clancy's exceptional new e-cookbook 5 Ingredients, 10 Minutes (see my rabidly positive review here). Or, support CK by buying Everett Bogue's revolutionary book The Art of Being Minimalist. (These are both affiliate links, so if you decide to make a purchase, you'll help fund all of the free content here at CK!



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

The Ick Factor: Balancing Cost with Time and Effort in Your Kitchen and Home

What tasks do you refuse to do in your kitchen--regardless of the costs savings?

I had a reader once tell me that raw chicken meat grosses her out so much that she gladly pays extra money for pre-wrapped chicken breasts.

Sure, she could de-bone her own chicken breasts at home. It's not that hard to do, and it's meaningfully cheaper. The problem was it crossed too far into "ick" territory for her. And despite the fact that she's on a tight budget, this particular job grosses her out enough that she's happy to pay extra to avoid it.

In truth, we all have our own Ick Factors. We all have some gross or highly undesirable task in our kitchen or home that we will happily pay to avoid.

What's yours? Some people draw the line at making certain foods at home. The idea of making homemade hummus (and dealing with the cleanup afterwards) could be a preposterous "ick" exercise for some--especially when it's so easy to pick up a tub of decent hummus in your local grocery store. (On the other hand, if making homemade hummus is definitely your kind of thing, be sure to visit Casual Kitchen's huge blogroll of hummus recipes.)

Perhaps you'd rather pay extra for store-made hamburger patties because it skeeves you to handle raw ground beef. Maybe you're happy to pay extra for store-baked cookies, muffins or cupcakes because you can't bear to spend the extra time and mess of making them by hand at home.

Heck, I've got a great homemade tortilla chips recipe here at Casual Kitchen, but sometimes, when I think about the effort it will take to deal with the hot oil and the greasy cleanup (and when I compare it to the incredible convenience a $3.99 bag of Doritos), my Ick Factor alarm goes off too.

Where do you draw the line? And is it always a cost-based decision? Or are certain tasks so undesirable to you that you completely ignore the cost?

The thing is, in the world of frugal cooking, there's a mentality--a home-cooking samurai code, if you will--that we should always do everything at home. After all, most foods made at home are cheaper, healthier and of better quality (once we get good at making them, that is).

But is this true in all cases? I don't know for sure, but I don't think so. Heck, here's an obvious example: Homemade ice cream. For me, the idea of grappling with eggs, cream and an ice cream maker will never match up to the ease of buying Ben & Jerry's. And this will remain true for me no matter how much a pint of Cherry Garcia costs.

The Ick Factor question shows up outside of the kitchen too. One of the most popular posts in Trent Hamm's The Simple Dollar is his "recipe" for homemade laundry detergent. I absolutely love reading Trent, but for me, this particular post had Ick Factor written all over it.

Sure, many people gladly pay extra to have their cars washed, their toilets cleaned, their shirts ironed, their driveways shoveled, their burgers pre-made or their chicken breasts deboned. If there's a gross or irritating task that you are dying to avoid, it very well might be worth it--in terms of time, money and happiness--to pay extra to have someone else to make it or do it. You can then apply your time and effort towards accomplishing things that are more important to you.

Readers! What jobs or tasks set off your Ick Factor? What are the tasks in your home or kitchen that you just flat-out refuse to do yourself?

Related Posts:
Applying the 80/20 Rule to Diet, Food and Cooking
Speed-Weaning: How to End Your Caffeine Addiction in Just Three Days
Why Spices Are a Complete Rip-Off and What You Can Do About It
Stacked Costs and Second-Order Foods: A New Way to Think About Rising Food Costs
Malcolm Gladwell Was Completely Wrong About Cooking

Casual Kitchen would like to thank the Kitties x 3 blog for the spurring the ideas behind this post.

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

How to Master Last-Minute Meal Preparation

A reader recently emailed me an excellent question on making last minute meals:

Q: It's 2:45 PM and I have no clue what to make for dinner tonight. What do you do when you're in this situation?

A: I order a pizza.

Just kidding! Seriously, this is a common problem that at times strikes even the most experienced cooks, and it brings to mind that wonderful quote from former Gourmet Magazine editor Ruth Reichl about dinner planning: "if it's 4 o'clock and you're in your office and you haven't figured out what you're having for dinner tonight, the battle's half lost." The bottom line is you usually need to plan your dinners with at least a few days' lead time. There's just no way around it.

But most Casual Kitchen readers lead extremely busy lives, and inevitably there will be days when a pre-planned dinner just isn't possible. For those situations, we have a few solutions here at Casual Kitchen.

First, we always make double batches of whatever foods we cook. This way, we almost always have a stash of leftovers available in our fridge. There's no easier way to get a decent dinner on the table than to reheat something you've already made.

Second, try and keep a relatively well-stocked pantry, and focus your pantry supplies on food items that you can use to whip up a simple recipe at the last minute. Which recipes and which items, you ask? Well, start by perusing The 25 Best Laughably Cheap Recipes at Casual Kitchen. Pick out the easiest recipes that appeal to you the most (I suggest starting with Black Beans and Rice, Chickpeas, Pasta and Tomato Salad, Red Lentils and Rice or Smoky Brazilian Black Bean Soup). Then, stock extra supplies of the key ingredients to those recipes in your pantry at all times.

This way, you'll always have an option or two for a simple meal, and you'll be able to get dinner on the table in half an hour or less--even on those days when you have absolutely no clue what to cook.

Readers, what ideas would you add?


Help support Casual Kitchen by buying Everett Bogue's exceptional book The Art of Being Minimalist. (This is an affiliate link for an e-book I strongly recommend to my readers--and if you decide to make a purchase, your purchase will help fund all of the free content here at CK!)


Related Posts:
If It's So Cheap to Cook at Home, Then Why is My Grocery Bill So Huge?
Spreading the New Frugality: A Manifesto
Guess What? We Spend Less Than Ever on Food
Finding Inspiration In an Uncluttered Kitchen

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Finding Inspiration In an Uncluttered Kitchen

What percent of your kitchen cookware and dishware could you get rid of and not miss? Could you do most of your cooking with a fraction of the stuff you own?

This is a question I'm thinking about while we are neck-deep in the process of moving to a new home. It occurred to me yesterday morning when I opened a cupboard and, for once, didn't see forty coffee mugs of various sizes jammed every which way. Instead, I saw just two. Our two favorite coffee mugs, plus one backup mug just in case. Laura had boxed up everything else the night before.

I'd normally have a series of choices to make at this point (Hmmm, let's see: the Hawai'i mugs? The Somerset Eye Care Mugs? The "You're 40!" mugs?), but on this morning, I didn't have to agonize at all over which mugs to use for our morning coffee. I literally had no choice! It was a relief.

This was tantalizing, so I opened another cabinet. And there, instead of our stash of twenty wine glasses, I saw only two. Our two favorites.

Amazingly, 70-80% of our stuff is gone, yet nearly everything I need is within arm's reach and easy to get to. There's got to be a lesson here, if I could just put my finger on it.

And it can't be just a coincidence that my desire to cook--which has gone AWOL for the past few weeks--instantly reappeared in this now-uncluttered kitchen.

(Permit me a brief tangent: before this move I smugly thought of myself as quite the minimalist. Sadly, that notion was horribly, horribly flattened under an infinity of boxes I personally lugged over to our new townhouse. Moving doesn't just suck, it crushes your illusions too.)

A final point. I've talked before about how there's an 80/20 Rule at work in cooking. Most of us do the majority of our cooking and eating on a small fraction of our equipment and dishes. The rest of our stuff collects dust, takes up space, or just gets in the way.

I guess I never thought how much further I could go to exploit this rule, and how much of a relief it could be to get rid of even more stuff in my previously-thought-to-be-minimalist kitchen. Of course, like any idea, it can be carried too far, but every household is highly likely to have plenty of items that are rarely or never used. Why not give them away to someone who will use them?

Which brings me back to my original question: What percent of the items in your kitchen could you get rid of--and not miss?

Today, when I opened my kitchen cupboards, I discovered that it was a much higher percentage than I thought. How about you?

Related Posts:
How to Give Away Your Power By Being a Biased Consumer
Scarred For Life By a Food Industry Job
Guess What? We Spend Less Than Ever on Food
A Few Thoughts on Habits and Food
Overpriced and Overengineered: Kitchen Gadgets for the Non-Frugal

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Seven Rules On the Value of an Experience

Since my last post on forgotten restaurant meals, I've been thinking quite a lot about the value of experiences, and I've come up with a list of rules of thumb you can apply to help you assess whether an experience will be worth the cost.

This is of course a food blog, and therefore much of this thinking is geared towards food experiences, but I think today's post could be broadly applicable across all sorts of experiences.

You'll notice the appearance of my trusty 80/20 Rule in this list, along with several other counterintuitive (and even one or two contradictory) thoughts.

One final note: My goal isn't to be prescriptive--I'm not here to tell you what to do. My goal with this post is to help you think about what gives you real value in life and thus help you think about what things are worth the extra money.

1) Money spent on experiences you don't remember is wasted money.

2) The "rememberability" of an expensive meal may have more to do with its infrequency than its absolute cost. If you have expensive dinners out several times a week, they are likely to blend together, be forgotten, and thus become a waste of money.

3) However, if you truly value expensive restaurant meals, it may be optimal to have just a few fancy and pricey restaurant meals per year. Frequency and rememberability are generally inversely proportional.

4) Rethink what paying for an experience means to you. Will you remember this experience? Will it be salient to you in a year or two? Or three? This might be a better measure of value to you than the cost.

5) At the same time, the value of an experience may be directly related to its cost, all else equal. Extremely expensive dinners tend to be more memorable, assuming they are relatively infrequent. Regular restaurant meals that you have for no reason at all will probably end up being utterly forgotten.

6) You can waste enormous sums of money on regular "forgettable" experiences.

7) By cutting out one or two weekly "forgettable" dinners out, you can save an enormous percentage of your entire food budget without sacrificing any long-term happiness whatsoever.

Readers, what would you add? And which of these do you agree with or disagree with?

Related Posts:
Spending to Save: Frugality and Expensive Food
Ten Tips on How to Cut Your Food Budget Using the 80/20 Rule
Doing Your Favorite Thing: How to Spend Exactly the Right Amount of Money For an Important Celebration
Results of the Casual Kitchen Reader Food Spending Poll

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

On the True Value of a Forgotten Restaurant Meal

I had an interesting moment of clarity about the true value of restaurant meals when I recently went through a pile of credit card receipts from a year ago. In that pile were receipts from fifteen or so restaurants we had been to in mid-2008.

These dinners were from barely a year ago, and yet I hardly remembered any of them. Heck, I couldn't even remember the names of some of the restaurants, much less what kind of food they served. And yet the aggregate cost of these culinary experiences was hundreds and hundreds of dollars.

You'd think after spending all that money I'd remember more of these experiences, but sadly, I don't. The ones that really stuck in my mind boiled down to a couple of really fancy restaurant meals we had, Laura's 40th birthday dinner, and the spectacular all-you-can-eat ribs we had last fall during our visit to Belgium. That's three or four restaurant meals--out of fifteen.

In complete contrast, I remember nearly every dinner party I've hosted at our home, going back many years. Those dinners were all truly salient and meaningful experiences, full of fun conversations, good eating (well, I did make the food after all!) and good times with friends. And yet the entire cost of all the food--for everyone--for a dinner in our home was usually far less than what Laura and I would end up spending on just ourselves for the average forgettable restaurant meal in this forgotten pile of receipts.

Readers, get ready, because here's the punchline of this article: you will completely forget most of your restaurant meals, making them an utter waste of money. Only a select few of your dinners out--the ones with particularly special circumstances--will stick in your mind.

Moreoever, you'll get more value from your experiences by going out to eat only for really, really important occasions. Otherwise eat at home. And host lots of dinner parties. You'll spend a lot less money, and you'll probably keep more meaningful and salient memories.

What is the point of spending extra money on an experience if the odds are you'll end up forgetting all about it?

Readers, what do you think about the value of forgotten experiences?

Related Posts:
The Dinner Party: 10 Tips to Make Cooking for Company Fun and Easy
Doing Your Favorite Thing: How to Spend Exactly the Right Amount of Money For an Important Celebration
A Recession-Proof Guide to Saving Money on Food
A Simple Way to Beat Rising Food Prices


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

If It's So Cheap to Cook at Home, Then Why is My Grocery Bill So Huge?

This article discusses why we often spend much more money than we expect to in the grocery store, and it offers several solutions--including one counterintuitive idea that could help you save half off your grocery bill.
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The other day I made dinner for the two of us: a delicious Cajun meatloaf, courtesy of my favorite gourmand Paul Prudhomme. Despite being meat-heavy, the cost of this meal was an inexpensive $11.49--less than $2.00 per serving--and it should feed us for at least three meals each.

Ha! Further proof that cooking meals at home is practically free, right?

Wait. Then why did my grocery bill that day run me more than $70?

This, in a nutshell, is why many readers get frustrated with those of us in the world of frugal food blogs. We all love to talk about how such and such a meal costs only 60c per serving, or how many recipes are laughably cheap. And yet when I went out to buy supplies for a supposedly inexpensive meal, my grocery store bill ended up being six times the cost of the recipe.

Here's the rub: when people spend a lot more money than they planned at the grocery store, it makes cooking at home seem more expensive than it really is.

A cheap meal doesn't exist in a vacuum. There are other issues--and costs--to consider. That's why it's somewhat misleading to read the cost of a recipe on a food blog, choose a bunch of recipes for the week, add up those food costs and then assume that's roughly what you'll spend at the store. If you want to manage your food buying efficiently, your responsibilities won't end there.

Obviously, I did not manage my food buying efficiently in this grocery store trip. In this post I'll share what I did wrong, and I'll walk through five reasons why my grocery bill turned out to be so much steeper than expected. My hope is that you can walk away from this post with a handful of simple rules to help you dramatically reduce your grocery budget.

But let's have the conclusion first, and it's a piece of good news: almost all of these cost overruns can be easily avoided with a bit of awareness and a couple of good habits.

Reason #1: I bought items that weren't on my list.
We've been in Hawaii until a couple of weeks ago, so I just had to buy a pineapple. Um, make that two. I also bought fresh cherries (sort of on sale at $5.99/lb) and some local blueberries too. I also gazed at the delicious cheeses in our store's budget-killing gourmet cheese section and walked away with a $4.89 block of Jarlsberg cheese. Total extra cost: $20.11

Lesson: Make a grocery list and stick to it.

Reason #2: I mindlessly bought expensive splurge items.
On my grocery trip, I went wild and bought a 24 pack (!) of ice cream sandwiches (ostensibly for Laura, but I'm probably going to end up eating most of them), Klondike bars, and a big bar of dark chocolate. These were all examples of second order foods, all expensive, and--excluding the chocolate--all unnecessary. Total extra cost: $13.57

Lesson: Splurge items are fine if you make a willful, conscious purchase. Splurge items are not fine if you make them mindlessly.

Reason #3: I bought staples and pantry items.
We just returned from four months away, so I've had to stock up on some staples, including a 20-lb bag of white rice as well as brown rice and jarred pasta sauce. Both the white rice and the pasta sauce were on sale (the rice massively so at $9.99 for a 20-lb bag). The brown rice I could have postponed until a sale came along. Total extra cost: $15.97

Lesson: Stock up on pantry items only when you have to, or when there is a meaningful economic incentive (like a big sale).

Reason #4: My grocery list contained non-food items.
I also bought toilet paper, batteries and sandwich bags. Granted, these items have absolutely nothing to do with the cost of the food I made, but they did add costs to a grocery store bill that left me with a vague feeling of "gee, the food this week sure seemed expensive!" Total extra cost: $9.70

Lesson: Your overall grocery bill may not accurately represent your meal costs.

Reason #5: I had to buy more than I needed of most recipe items.
This is highly typical in cooking. I needed only 25 cents' worth of breadcrumbs, but I had to buy an entire canister for $1.29. I needed a 1/2 cup of ketchup, but I had to buy a full bottle (on sale) for $2.09. I only used about half of the meat that I bought. And so on. Most people cite this as a primary reason why cooking at home is too expensive, but keep in mind these items have now been paid for, so they'll essentially be free the next time I use them. Note with some perishables, especially fresh herbs and greens, this can still be a frustrating source of waste. Total extra cost: about $8.00

Lesson: Select additional recipes for your weekly menu that use many of the same bulk ingredients. You can scale your grocery purchases over several meals and significantly reduce your costs and any leftover ingredient waste.

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How to Save Half Off Your Grocery Bill

Okay. I'll conclude with one final (and surprising) conclusion from my grocery store run: Reasons #1 and #2--off-list items and unnecessary splurge items--together drove 50% of my extra costs.

Let me repeat that. Fifty percent.

Believe it or not, this is the most encouraging news of all. It suggests that you can save an enormous percentage on your grocery bill by making just two changes to your grocery store habits: 1) cut back dramatically on splurge items, and 2) don't buy anything not on your list. That's a powerful example of the 80/20 Rule in action, and it's something any of us can do.

Readers, what additional advice would you add?

Related Posts:
A Recession-Proof Guide to Saving Money on Food
Cajun Meatloaf
Applying the 80/20 Rule to Diet, Food and Cooking
A Simple Way to Beat Rising Food Prices
Cooking Like the Stars? Don't Waste Your Money


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Ten Tips on How to Cut Your Food Budget Using the 80/20 Rule

I'm always searching for new ways to apply creative and counterintuitive thinking to help my readers cook more and spend less. And after I asked my readers last week to share how you are adjusting to the economic crisis, the wide variety of interesting responses inspired me to apply one of my favorite rules--the 80/20 Rule--to arrive at still more ways to help us all save on our food bills.

Long time readers of Casual Kitchen will be familiar with my freakish obsession with the 80/20 Rule. I love using this conceptual framework to solve problems, because it suggests that enormously effective results can come from making just a few key changes. Today, by using a narrow application of the 80/20 Rule, we'll come up with a barrage of ideas to help you save money on food and other kitchen expenses.

For those of you unfamiliar with this powerful rule, or for those of you who would like a quick review of some of the ways we've already applied it towards cooking, please have a quick look at my first essay on the subject.

First, let's start with two basic 80/20 premises:

A) Roughly 80% of your food spending will come from 20% of your purchases.

B) Some 20% of the things you own (ingredients, cookware, cookbooks, etc.) will be used in 80% of the meals you prepare.

Seems simple enough, even a bit obvious, right? But if we think a bit more deeply about some of the ramifications of these two seemingly obvious statements, we can derive quite a few secondary conclusions that should give us some intriguingly easy ways to save money on our food budgets:

1) Identify and remove a only a few key grocery items.
The best thing about 80/20 is that it tells you that by making only one or two key changes, you can drive significant results. Thus by identifying and removing just a few particularly costly items on your grocery bill, you should be able to meaningfully cut your weekly food budget.

2) Cut out just one or two restaurant outings per month.
The 80/20 Rule doesn't say you have to suffer and cut out all restaurant meals. It suggests that you only need to cut out one or two key restaurant meals each month to drive a disproportionately large reduction in your food budget. Replace these dinners out with healthy home-cooked meals, or consider patronizing a less expensive casual ethnic restaurant in your town instead. You can still enjoy an interesting eating experience, but for a lot less money.

3) Extrapolate the 80/20 Rule to cookware items.
Okay, it borders on the self-evident to say that you will use 20% of your tools and equipment for 80% of your recipes. But the converse of that statement is a bit less obvious: you will rarely use some 80% of your kitchen gadgets. Therefore, you can easily justify indefinitely postponing the purchase of almost all new kitchen equipment, tools and gadgets--at least until the recession is over. The odds are quite good that any new tool you buy will not be one of your critical few.

4) No need for new cookbooks.
You are likely using only 20% of the recipes in the cookbooks you already own. This means you have an enormous resource of additional recipes just sitting there on your shelves! The 80/20 Rule implies that you can wait until economy recovers before spending another dime on any more cookbooks.

5) You're getting killed by just a few spices, ingredients or pantry items.
Pay close attention to the nature of the "critical few" 20% of your ingredients that you stock in your pantry. Do you have a weakness for expensive canned sauces or prepared salad dressings, unusual spices (saffron comes to mind), or other non-essential pantry items (croutons, nutrient-free fruit roll-ups or brand-name junk foods)? Cut out just a few of these key expensive items and you should be able to save a meaningful amount of money. An recent example from our home: just the other day we foolishly paid a nauseating $3.70 for a medium-sized bottle of Ken's Caesar Salad Dressing, when a splash of olive oil and vinegar would have been a much healthier and far cheaper alternative.

6) Likewise, a few recipes are killing you.
After thinking about which pantry items to cut out, you will likely begin to come up with some good ideas on specific recipes that you should emphasize (or de-emphasize) in your heavy rotation. Reduce the use of recipes that are made from the most expensive ingredients. A few tweaks like this to your weekly (or monthly) meal rotation could result in enormous savings on your food bill.

7) Be ruthless with spending on meat.
Meat is often the most expensive item in a family's grocery bill--in other words it's part of the 20% of items that drives the 80% of your expenses. You'll likely drive significant savings if you practice part-time vegetarianism by eating 30% of your meals meat-free.

8) Take advantage of staples.
Take a look at many of the world's most common staple foods, such as rice, potatoes, beans, oats, brown rice, etc. These foods are surprisingly cheap, surprisingly nutritious and they make up a large percentage of the aggregate calories of the diets of many of the people of the world. Can you use this to your advantage, perhaps by supplementing many of your meals with these inexpensive foods? At Casual Kitchen, we've used rice for years as an inexpensive and easy-to-make staple to accompany our home-cooked meals.

9) You probably have one or two key bad habits in how you run your kitchen or your household. Fix them and generate large savings.
People do inefficient things all the time, and many of us are consistently inefficient in some of our habits. Maybe you're not making a regular weekly grocery trip with a well-thought out list, causing you to make multiple trips to the store per week, each of which include expensive and extraneous purchases. Perhaps you don't make a coherent meal plan each week, causing you to waste food or buy unneeded and expensive prepared foods at the last minute in order to put dinner on the table. Perhaps you have a habit of buying certain fruits and vegetables out of season, paying extra money for produce that's not even that good anyway.

The great thing about 80/20 thinking is that it implies you only need to adjust or correct a very small number of these bad habits to drive a disproportionately large effect on your spending. Start by tweaking a couple of easy-to-change habits and observe the results. They may very well be "critical few" habits that drive amazing savings in time, money and effort.

10) In your household, 20% of your family consumes 80% of the food.
The 80/20 Rule indicates that there is likely to be one or two family members living under your roof who consume household resources far out of proportion to their number. Do you have a wolfish teenage son, or a husband with an unusually large appetite? Kick those family members out of the house and you'll generate immense savings. :)

Readers, can you think of any other ideas that I've missed?

Concluding Thoughts
The great thing about the 80/20 Rule is that it suggests that you don't have to make wholesale radical changes in your life to get what you want. Instead, it may only take just one or two tweaks to a couple of seemingly minor things to create consequences completely out of proportion to the changes you actually made. Most systems in our lives are highly non-linear in nature, and if you can make changes, even small changes, to the right "critical few" inputs, you can get enormously powerful results.

Good luck, and feel free to share in the comments section any applications of the 80/20 Rule that you've found effective in your homes!

Related Posts:
Seven Ways to Get Faster at Cooking
How to Team Up in the Kitchen
The Dinner Party: 10 Tips to Make Cooking for Company Fun and Easy
Cooking Like the Stars? Don't Waste Your Money




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