Meat doesn't have to be the centerpiece the rest of the time, either. Serve a playing-card-sized amount along with a couple of sides (e.g., potatoes, quinoa, beans, vegetables, salad). Make chili with half a pound (or less) of meat. Rather than put a chicken breast on every plate, use just one in a stir-fry with rice and your favorite vegetables.
Speaking of vegetables: I promise you will not suffer serious malnutrition if you choose frozen corn over the "fresh" green beans (which may have been picked 10 days ago). Look, I love fresh produce. But when it's more expensive than meat, my fallback positions are frozen vegetables and dried or canned fruit.
Two more produce tips:
- Pre-bagging is an inexact science, so weigh a few bags if you have time. I wound up with 2.25 pounds of carrots that way, i.e., 12.5% more for free.
- Look for "manager's specials." Slightly overripe bananas are great for smoothies or banana bread. I turned a 99-cent bag of apples into almost five cups of applesauce.
I mention rice a lot because I eat it a lot. At a nearby Asian market it's $2.50 for a 5-pound sack; easier for me to store, and still only 5 cents per serving. The dollar store might sell it in smaller bags but at similar discounts.
What about snacks and desserts?
I didn't end every meal with a sweet, but I could have. My frugal dessert hacks:
Candy. Thanks to drugstore sales and stacked coupons I got 14-ounce bags of M&Ms for a dollar. Post-holiday clearance tables are another place to find cheap sweets. Chocolate freezes well.
Coupon cookies. Nabisco introduced a new variety of Oreo with a dollar-off coupon. A nearby supermarket doubled the Q, so I paid 69 cents, or about 2.5 cents per cookie.
Old-fashioned puddings. Rice pudding cost me about 5 cents per serving. I also did a coconut bread pudding with part of a 50-cent baguette from a Jimmy John's sandwich shop, for less than 10 cents per serving.
Homemade yogurt with fruit or a little jam (see below).
You can have snacks, too. Among my between-meal nibbles during these two weeks:
- Hard-boiled eggs (10.75 cents apiece).
- Crackers with peanut butter (on-sale-with-coupon Wheat Thins, about 6 cents per serving; scraping of peanut butter from a 99-cent jar, practically nothing).
- Dried plums or apricots (16 cents per serving).
- Pretzel sticks, with or without mustard (8.5 cents or less, depending on how many I ate; the mustard was free with coupons).
- Yogurt with fruit or jam (27 cents or less per serving).
These treats were much healthier than chips or cookies -- and much cheaper, too.
The yogurt, made in a slow cooker, was hands-down my favorite treat. Remember that milk may be cheaper at the drugstore or mini-mart than the supermarket. For breakfast cereals, consider buying whole milk and diluting it with water.
Note: When you see a super deal on milk, buy it and freeze it. Watch for close-dated milk -- I've paid as little as 99 cents per gallon -- and either stick it in the freezer or make pudding or yogurt.
Get over your squeamishness about "old" food. Bakery outlet breads and scratch-and-dent groceries can really prop up a budget. I pay between $1 and $1.50 per loaf for multigrain bread.
Look for the day-old breads in supermarket bakeries, too, and see if sandwich shops in your area sell the previous day's rolls. After making bread pudding, I used the rest of that 50-cent Jimmy John's baguette as toast with jam for a snack, and as pizza bread (lightly toasted and then topped with a spoon of homemade spaghetti sauce plus a sprinkling of "reduced for quick sale" cheese.)
These are not fancy meals. But they were tasty and filling and allowed me to eat for just over $4 a day. I still have leftovers in my freezer and unused ingredients in the cupboard. I could have spent considerably less if I'd eaten the same few dishes over and over, but I wanted to feature a variety of meals.
It took a little work, but not that much. If you're willing to put in a few hours a week reading ads, maybe collecting coupons, making menus and doing some basic cooking, you can weather a rough financial patch or tighten your food budget and send those extra dollars elsewhere.
Donna Freedman is a freelance writer in Seattle. You can find more of her writing on MSN Money's Frugal Cool blog and at Surviving and Thriving (motto: "Life is short. But it's also wide.").
