$15 + Smart Strategies = Dinner for Four
By Will Ashenmacher, Duluth News Tribune
Published Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Wanting to give readers tips on how to prepare meals while keeping one eye on their checking accounts, we challenged Diane Bailey, the baker and pastry chef at At Sara’s Table/Chester Creek Cafe, to come up with a meal that would serve four for less than $15.
We set some ground rules. Common kitchen ingredients that every home cook could be expected to have on hand, such as salt and pepper, didn’t count toward the $15 total, but Bailey had to get all her ingredients at a grocery store or farmers market — ordering ingredients from a restaurant supplier in the interest of saving money was out because the average home cook can’t do that. Bailey was undaunted: “I can bring this in cheap,” she said. A home economics major in college, the single mother put her classroom lessons to work feeding three sons as a single parent. “I always had to budget,” she said.
Five Ways to Stretch Your Dollar
Duluth News Tribune
Published Wednesday, August 20, 2008
* Think globally, cook locally: For this assignment, Bailey chose to make an Asian Beef-Broccoli stir-fry.
Bailey said Asian dishes are good to work with because they incorporate healthy and inexpensive vegetables and don’t make meat, typically the most expensive ingredient in a recipe, the main attraction.
The lesson here: Look around to other cuisines for inspiration and don’t think dinner has to be anchored with meat.
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* Buy only what you need: In the produce section, Bailey sorted through the broccoli before finding the one-pound package she needed. When it came time to pick an onion, she spent 30 extra seconds looking for a medium one instead of grabbing whichever was closest. Getting only the size you need eliminates waste and, therefore, saves whatever you would’ve spent on what you threw away. * Flavor frugally: Bailey’s stir-fry called for fresh garlic and ginger root. A whole head of garlic only added 22 cents to Bailey’s grocery bill, and a good-sized chunk of fresh ginger root also cost less than a quarter. |
* Don’t be afraid to improvise: Bailey had planned to use a red pepper in her stir-fry, but they clocked in at $3.98 apiece, which is almost as much as the pound of sirloin tip steak Bailey bought for $4.23. Bailey instead went with tomatoes. They’re not common ingredients in Asian cooking, but she said they’d add color, which is all she was looking for in the first place. “With baking, you have to be a little more precise,” Bailey said. “But with cooking, the recipe is just a blueprint. You don’t have to follow it to the letter.” That means if one ingredient is too expensive, go ahead and try to substitute something cheaper. * Consider the source: Bailey would have liked to use fresh mushrooms in her stir-fry, but a 63-cent can of pre-sliced mushrooms was much cheaper. “The recipe doesn’t care,” Bailey shrugged. But when it came to oyster sauce, an ingredient that would give her stir-fry much of its flavor, Bailey decided to, as she put it, “splurge.” The moral of the story: Consider which ingredients and flavors are crucial to your recipe and spend on those. It might be OK to cut corners on the accompaniments, however. In the end, Bailey’s total bill came to $12.60 for a total of nine items. “And that’s with splurging,” she said. |
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Tips When Grocery Shopping
Duluth News Tribune
Published Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Even if you’re not trying to make a meal for four for under $15, Bailey had some shopping tips that can come in handy.
* Buy store brands: Bailey said shoppers can save money by buying store brands instead of marketed ones. “You’re not paying the ad markups on that,” she said. “You can find the same products under a store label.”
* Make a list and stick to it: Having a clear idea of what you need when you go into a grocery store makes it less likely you’ll end up buying extra things you shouldn’t. “It’s really easy to get tempted by impulse buys,” Bailey said. “Especially when you have kids.”
* Clip useful coupons: Coupons save you money, of course, but only if they’re for things you actually use. “You’re not going to save money unless you have a coupon for something you’ll actually use,” Bailey said.
* Compare sizes as well as prices: Bailey bought a one-pound bag of white rice for this assignment because she was trying to stay under $15. But had this been a regular shopping trip, she said she would have gone for the two-pound bag. Why? At $1.49, the two-pound bag was only 40 cents more than the $1.09 one-pound bag. That works out to 4.6 cents per ounce for the two-pound bag versus 6.8 cents per ounce for the one-pound bag. Don’t be deceived by sticker prices — bigger amounts can actually be cheaper per unit.