• Any one of them can be made at any time with the stuff on my Pantry Basics list.
• See How I Save Tons of Money by Grocery Shopping Once Every Three Months.
• The pantry is supplemented with an inexpensive, year-round CSA. I've had them in SoCal, and in Boston. Even in a Boston winter, there are plenty of goodies in a CSA box. But most of these recipes were developed in the long, cold New York winters with no really good fresh produce. So if the CSAs in your area are too expensive or nonexistent, never fear. You can still eat well—on beans, frozen spinach and peas, canned tomatoes, dried fruit, winter squash, and winter greens. Those things are all just as nutritionally complete—if not more so—than salad-in-a-bag, and taste better, too. (Plus you don’t have to worry about those things going bad before you get around to eating them.)
• I go grocery shopping as little as possible; maybe four times a year. I start at the warehouse club, and buy as many things in bulk as possible. Only then do I move on the ‘regular’ grocery stores.
• If I run out of something, I add it to the next shopping list and figure out a way to do without it.
• But I don’t run out of many things, because a) I shop in bulk and b) I know how much of everything I have on hand and shop accordingly. (Otherwise I'd always be running out of things.)
• This method does require start-up costs; setting up a pantry like that from scratch will take at least several hundred dollars. But remember, you’re amortizing that cost across the life of the ingredients.
• This method dropped our monthly food expenditures from $500+ to around $160. For two people. For every meal, every day. That includes the pantry start-up costs and the CSA cost.
• (Keep in mind those numbers are just for food—that doesn’t include what we spend on booze, household stuff like cat litter and laundry detergent, and personal care stuff, like shampoo and lotion. But we buy those things in bulk, too.)
• We rarely eat out. When we do, we'll pay top dollar for it; I'd much rather spend $200 a person for one incredible five-hour meal than spend the same amount on five visits to Applebee's for patently mediocre food. For me, eating out is not about convenience; it's about having an experience I can't recreate at home.
• While I now live in a house, prior to this house, I spent my entire adult life in apartments. With a small apartment-sized kitchen, with one standard refrigerator-freezer combo, with one closet-sized pantry. And no, I wasn't hiding potatoes under the bed or anything. Here’s what's in my kitchen. If I can work with those space limitations, so can you.
• Here’s what NOT in my kitchen:
- Soda
- Juice
- Bottled water
- Cereal
- Lunch meat
- Bread (I make my own)
- Ice cream, cookies, cakes, or any other dessert (I make my own)
- Chips or pretzels
- A lot of ground beef or expensive stand-alone cuts of meat (pork loins, steaks, racks of lamb)
- Anything pre-made, and that includes frozen hamburgers
- Anything containing high-fructose corn syrup
- Anything containing something I can’t pronounce
- Anything containing instructions (“Microwave for three minutes on high,” “Peel back corner to expose plastic wrap,” “Add one egg and one cup of milk,” “Add spice packet and stir,” etc.)
- Anything with a marketing budget
• Even with your schedule the way it is.
• Even with kids.
• Really.
• I don’t spend all my time in the kitchen. I spend an average of thirty minutes a night in there during the week, and maybe an hour each day on the weekends, prepping and bulk cooking for the week ahead. Every dinner is big enough for four portions: dinner for my husband and me every night, plus lunch for the two of us the next day. I make our breakfasts on the weekends and portion them out. So every morning, I open the refrigerator and pull out one breakfast and one lunch for each of us. There. Done.
Side benefits of this method:
• We’re not always running out to the supermarket to pick up one or two things. Which means there’s no impulse buying. (Let’s face it—no one ever manages to walk out of the supermarket with only one thing. You always end up with like 12 things.) Which means we save on gas. Which means we’re not fighting lines after work or on the weekends. Which means I don’t have to watch the sale flyers, or clip coupons. Which means we never have to worry about what we’re having for dinner, because I have the tools on hand to throw together any one of dozens of recipes.
• So much less waste. No take-out containers, pizza boxes, cereal boxes, microwave dinners, water bottles, soda cans. No food scraps, since we eat all our leftovers and I turn vegetable scraps into either vegetable broth or compost. We never have to worry about the trash turning stinky, since there’s no food in there. We fill up a trash bag maybe once every two weeks. Maybe. If it weren’t for the cats, it would take us six weeks or more to fill up a trash bag. Which means less waste for the environment. Which means we don’t have to buy nearly so many trash bags.
• No impulse purchases at all. (How many times have you picked up a Starbucks while out running errands? And while you were at it, you were right by Best Buy and you ran in and realized they were having a sale on DVDs and picked up a couple? And then you realized you were thirsty, so you picked up a bottled water while getting gas and since you’re doing that, you might as well get some chips too? And all that took longer than you thought it would, so you grabbed some fast food on the way home because you’re hungry and tired? And then at the end of the month, suddenly you’re $370 over budget and you have no idea where it all went?)
• My cooking tastes better than any convenience crap.
• And WAY better than any chain-restaurant crap. (Which is why our precious eating-out dollars go to fine dining, and not to fast food crap.)
• We’ve both lost weight.
• When my husband gave up soda, Red Bull, and 900-calorie Starbucks drinks, he quit snoring. Completely. And lost ten pounds in a month. And dropped his cholesterol 50 points within five months. And quit having chronic back pain.
• So by not buying convenience food crap, we actually have more time. More time for the important things—snuggling with my husband. Playing games with my stepson. Going to the beach. Reading a good book. Watching a good movie.
• And we have way more money, which goes right to paying off our ginormous debt. Which is why we're doing it this way in the first place.
