I realized that in my last post I didn’t dive into as many individual foods as I had planned. Here are some additional thoughts on these.
- Oatmeal
- I have a brand that I care about, whom I think actually tries to do the right thing and create the right products, but their original line of oatmeal bags is no longer sold in stores (only online), and their new line of oatmeal comes in small packets. The new packets are about $1.16 per packet (55g) at their cheapest, whereas the old bags have a price that bounces around quite a bit, but which is decidedly under $1 per 55g, closer to $0.90. That may not sound like much, but it does add up, and if only I could find my own mixture of oats, sugar, salt, and maybe something like raisins, I could save massively more. I have given up my attempts to replicate these recipes, but that doesn’t mean I can’t find new ones that simply work.
- Eggs
- I sometimes like these 2 packs of frozen omelets, but they come out to be about $6 total, or $3 for each omelet. Now, I prefer to buy those fancy organic pasture-raised eggs, and those often come out to be $0.66 per egg, but if you’re comfortable buying pre-made omelets that don’t use those eggs, you may as well at least have some conventional eggs on hand and make your own omelets. That I don’t ever make my own is kind of crazy to me, so I would like to start. Even at $0.66 per egg for the fancy kind, I could make a 3-egg omelet for $1.98 (with a minuscule amount of cheese), a whole 30% less than the pre-cooked frozen ones.
- Sub sandwiches
- With those sub sandwiches I mentioned last post, if only normal provolone had been on hand, I could have saved a bit there, and if I had made the hoagie buns myself I could have saved even more. The buns were $5.50 for a pack of six, and the cheese was almost $7 (oof!). I’m not sure what the cost of the flour would come out to, but I could probably have dropped the cost of those ingredients by over $5 total pretty easily, which would have dropped the cost per sub substantially. Making your own meatballs could save even more, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself here, as that’s an extra step I’m not sure I’m willing to take yet.
- Tortillas
- I have a brand I prefer which uses very few ingredients and refrigerates their tortillas, which have to be cooked. I love that they use so few ingredients. They come out to $0.25 per tortilla, or $0.50 per meal. That’s honestly very little, and I’m partly content to leave it at that. However, it is interesting to see KA all purpose flour on sale for $4 per 5-pound bag sometimes, and I can’t help but wonder how many tortillas I could make with a 5-pound bag of flour. The tortillas say they are 47g, and 5-pound bag of flour is 2278g, so that means the bag could make roughly 48 tortillas ($0.08 per tortilla!), or whatever that comes out to if we factor in the water weight and other ingredients, such as canola oil and sugar. It could be a lot of work, but I already have bread machines capable of using a dough cycle, and the tortillas I buy already have to be cooked, so…it really makes you wonder what a few hours of prep could accomplish.
- Chicken
- I’ve always been pretty bad at cooking most chicken, but I found that I can work with ground chicken quite comfortably. That’s fine, but my nearest grocery store sells a pound of ground chicken for about $7, whereas at the same store you can buy two pounds of chicken breast or tenderloins for $10. You have to work with what you’re capable of doing, so if it has to be ground chicken, it has to be ground chicken, but I feel like I could get this price a lot lower if I tried, and sometimes I wish I diced my chicken the way the restaurants do. It might be worth exploring.
- As a side note, my only hesitation with buying tons of chicken is the general disgusting-ness of our modern food system. A lot of those factory chickens are so big with meat that they can’t stand on their own legs, and I think that’s a crime against nature. I’m not going vegan any time soon, but I feel conflicted on buying “cheap” chicken because of this. If nothing else, though, there’s nothing special about the ground chicken I buy, so I’m already buying into this system, if that means anything. You may as well consider buying in bulk to save money, just sayin’.
- Treats and Desserts
- I mentioned last post that I finally put my foot down when I saw a favorite candy bar selling for $3.78. Ridiculous. However, I have toyed with the idea of finding a good cookie recipe. I have absolutely no control around sugar, so making a batch of cookies is a very bad idea, but if I have a quick recipe I can throw together to make a big homemade cookie or two, I would gladly make that instead. It’s mostly just flour, sugar, and a few chocolate chips, you could probably make a large one for under $0.50.
- Ice cream is a different story. I would never buy an ice cream machine because I would want to use it all the time, so in the long run I don’t think that’s worth it unless you have a large family and the discipline to only bust it out once or so per month. Nonetheless, ice cream that only uses real ingredients can be stupid expensive for what you’re getting, but I can very rarely bring myself to buy the cheap stuff. A recent trip to DQ for the first time in months wrecked my intestines, which tells me that for all the flaws in my diet, I’m still doing way better than I ever did before the big shift several years ago.
- Pizza
- Oof, I don’t want to write about this one. I am NOT skilled at making my own pizza, but most frozen pizzas are packaged with garbage ingredients. A year after that big dietary transition, I ate a deep dish pizza I used to have every now and then, and just like the DQ, it destroyed my guts, but worse. I still have nostalgia for some of these pizzas, but they are crazy high in calories and full of junk, but if you want a cleaner pizza with simple ingredients, be prepared to pay $9 or $10 for it, and it will be smaller, too. The actually ingredients probably come out to less than $2, but cooking it won’t be as easy as popping it in the oven, and you’ll want a good recipe. I know of a place to get pizza that I really enjoy, so I just go there every great now and then, but make no mistake, the ingredients are crazy cheap.
Now, the potential problem with all of this is that it assumes you have the time to prepare and cook your meals. I despise spending too much time in the kitchen, so I’m definitely not here to tell you that every meal should take an hour to prepare and that you should love your misery, but I also don’t think meals have to be nearly as complicated as they are made out to be. I hate online recipes because they are always bloated with stupid shit. It took me some experimenting to realize that homemade hamburger buns are way better without egg in them, even though all of the recipes have egg, and you absolutely do not need to put milk or oil in your bread to make delicious bread, even though the recipes love to include milk for some reason.
I almost made a section for beans, because if you buy a large pack you can cook beans for an absolute pittance, but I’m not at that level yet and use a can of organic refried beans (~$1.20) that I mix with water for the bean spread in my burritos. It takes maybe 20 minutes to cook up a pound of ground chicken. Toss a few spices in, you’re done, and the 12 packs of tortillas cook up in about 20 minutes, too (if you factor in the time to heat up a cast iron skillet). I aim to spend less than 30 minutes in the kitchen at a time, and only really break this rule if it’s something I simply have to check up on every now and then, such as my bread machine, or frozen fries. So…I want to acknowledge the challenge, but I also think most people can do this, and can probably do it better than I can.
“But Risky! What about the time ROI!” If you’re wasting 2 hours every evening on social media, you can carve out 30 minutes to cook. Personally, I’m sick of spending $500 per month on food, and I have the fewest excuses of anybody to not be trying more of this. Again, I’m not trying to say there’s some kind of virtue to spending as little as possible on food, but there seems to be this deeper principle that we have all been tricked into getting less value out of the things we buy, tricked by a massive marketing machine that operates at seemingly insignificant quantities, while promising us a convenience that costs us tremendously more than we expect in the long run.
Anyway, I’m only just starting to see groceries this way. Again, if you want to buy organic flour, it still costs less to prepare things yourself. If you want organic pasture-raised eggs, it still comes out cheaper. You can choose what you consider higher quality ingredients to your heart’s content, and it still works in your favor to not outsource your cooking to fast food companies. And everybody comes at this from different comfort levels. Making my own hamburger buns probably saves me a lot more money than I know, and they are way better for me than the store-bought buns, but if you aren’t comfortable making your own breads, I’m not here to judge you for that. Again, I suck at cooking chicken, so it might take me longer to really benefit in that area. I just think there’s value in thinking about these things, and how the little stuff can add up in the long run.