Get Cooking to Start Saving

I recently read a really great blog about how to save money each month by "shrinking your bills and growing your pantry". If you're interested in learning more about this, then check out the Grocery Shrink. If you sign up for her online newsletter, you'll learn more about her strategies and get recipes to make your own cleaning supplies. Those stinking things cost so much money, and I'd rather spend money on food we need than cleaning supplies any day! Here's the catch to Grocery Shrink's money saving tricks, she only spends $50/person for a month on groceries. Wowzers! So if you have a family of 4, you would spend $200 a month on groceries for your whole family.

I don't know how she does it, but if any one's up for a challenge... it's me! She does say that stocking your pantry is extremely important, because then that leaves you to purchase meats and fresh foods each week. If you stock your pantry with goods you can find on sale, then you save money and have a ton of food on hand to create meals. I know that we spend way more than $100/month on groceries for just the two of us, and I would love to figure out how to stick to this $50 per person budget. It's going to be tough, but we might as well try.

We enjoyed some steaks from Mike's Meat Market in Sterling, CO.... we received a gift certificate for the meat market from Mike's mom! We've got more in the freezer where this came from :)

Cooking never used to be so enjoyable for me. It used to be more like a chore, but I now find it fulfilling because I can use my creativity and artistic skills to create meals that nourish others. There's also something sort of relaxing about cooking.... standing over a hot stove watching things change from raw and rough into something delicious and edible. It's almost like paint by numbers.... you fill in all these spaces each number at a time, and in the end you have a completed work of art to enjoy. Oh the joys of cooking!

I hope that cooking more often will help us reduce how much money we spend on food each month. By eating out less and cooking in more, I really hope to shrink our grocery bills! I'd much rather use the money we save on groceries to pay off debt so that some day we can have a house, because then we can have a garden with our own fresh food. I need to keep that image of our future garden as a mental note to motivate us to save, save, save.