Save Money with Simple Cooking Tips

The following is a guest post from Erin at Coupon Cravings. Please give her a warm welcome!

Make Weekday Cooking Less of a Chore

It’s fairly obvious that you can save money by cooking meals at home rather than eating out. Some days though, it’s not easy to get motivated to cook, which is what inspired me to jot down several ways to make weekday cooking easier while maximizing your dollar.

Plan Your Menus: Pick a day of the week to plan out an entire week’s worth of meals. You’re less likely to be tempted to call for take-out if you can head into the dinner hour with a game plan. Base your menus on what’s on sale at the grocery store and what you have on hand.

One site to check out is Thrifty Kitchen. It’s a subscriber service that generates menu plans and shopping lists based on local grocery sales (Southern California only), but you can also sign up for a free weekly newsletter with tips, recipes and more. Another to visit is I’m an Organizing Junkie and her weekly Menu Plan Monday.

Cook for a Week: I do not like to cook. I generally make spaghetti on Mondays to ease myself into cooking for the week. One goal I’m moving toward is cooking on Sundays for the entire week and freezing the meals. My hope is that this will make cooking a lot easier on days when cooking is the last thing I want to do (and we end up having chicken nuggets for dinner).

Seek Out Recipe Finders: I have a few Southern Living cookbooks that I head for when I’m stumped on what to cook. Unfortunately, for most recipes, I have all the ingredients but one. If this happens to you too, check out RecipeMatcher or SuperCook. Input the ingredients you have to get suggested menus and avoid an extra trip to the grocery store.

Make Substitutions: You don’t always need to have every recipe ingredient on hand and it’s easy to make substitutions on-the-fly. For example, you can easily make do with chili powder in place of cumin. This is helpful when you need only a dash of an expensive spice, such as saffron, and you don’t want to buy an entire bottle. For a list of spice and herb substitutions, click here.

Erin Gifford is a deal seeker and a coupon lover who writes at Coupon Cravings. She has three kids and enjoys saving money and watching her grocery spending shrink a little bit more each week. Thank you, Erin!