Recently a friend asked me what I do to keep my budget manageable in the grocery department. That is a complicated answer so over the next little while I'm going to post things as I think of them. One of the biggest is to realize that all veggies do not cost the same. Peppers for example can be very expensive but cabbage on the other hand is not. Go through your grocery store and take a look at the per pound prices and think about how that veggie is going to fill you (or not) and the price tag attached. We love eating the chicken lo mein from primal-palate.com (we have their book "Make it Paleo"). The lo mein is a filling dish with cabbage instead of noodles... mmm, I want some now.
Also, there are usually racks with discounted produce on it. Sometimes it's worth a look, sometimes not so much.
One of my favorite things to do is save by buying bulk and freezing. Where we live there is a farmer's market twice weekly in the summer. At the end of every summer one of our favorite producers has a sale, she gets rid of her peppers at by the bag prices. $10 for a grocery bag full of peppers, green, orange, yellow and red sweet peppers. We will buy 2 or 3 and freeze them and they last the winter and ours this year are well on into the spring, maybe even the summer. Spinach goes on cheap here too, $12 worth was enough to hurt my hand as I carried it to the van. Frozen it will be more nutritionally dense than the stuff that is grown out of season, and it's cheaper too.
Look for free options too. Why not go berry picking if you can? Fiddleheads anyone? Rhubarb? Apples, pears, peaches... so many things can just be picked cut up and frozen. Canning is easy too depending on what you are doing with it. Last year we did pears canned in apple juice and man, they didn't last long!
That's all that I can think of now. Post comments if you can think of any other tips, I'm always looking for new ideas to save!
Happy eating!
Liv
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