4 Healthy Foods that Can Save You a Bundle in Grocery Costs

With the cost of everything rapidly rising, it's more important than ever to economize everywhere we can. Perhaps you've noticed that when you go grocery shopping these days, you're getting smaller packages, fewer bags of groceries-- and a total on your receipt that knocks your socks off. Maybe you've been passing by some "luxury" items like cookies, resisted impulse buys and bought generic products where you used to buy name brand. There's even more you can do, though: by incorporating the following inexpensive foods into your diet on a consistent basis, you can save big bucks while avoiding some of the cheap, unhealthy prepared foods that seem to be the only affordable items in the grocery store these days.

Frozen juice - The canisters of frozen fruit juice concentrate are something I remember from my childhood, but I probably haven't bought one in ten years. Particularly, I remember the orange juice made from concentrate. It can be very sweet tasting, and once I tried the "not from concentrate" juice, like Tropicana Pure Premium, it tasted so much better that I stopped buying concentrated juice. But with a $2 canister of concentrate capable of making 48 ounces of orange juice (or more, if you want to dilute some of that sweetness away), and not-from-concentrate brands like Tropicana weighing in at 64 ounces for over $4, it's a no-brainer. Especially if you have kids like mine, who drink tons of juice. And if you find that you really miss that fresh orange juice taste, try squeezing a fresh orange into the concentrate juice-it does add a little something!

Also, you'll find that with flavors like grape or apple (far cheaper than orange juice concentrate), you won't even be able to tell the difference in taste from bottled juice. But you'll save about a dollar every time you use concentrate. And did I mention all that vitamin C?

Potatoes - Potatoes are extremely versatile, filling, inexpensive, and they keep well. A five pound bag will usually cost you somewhere around $3.50, or less on sale. You can use them at virtually every meal: for breakfast, try hash browns, home fries, or potato pancakes. For lunch, try raw potato slices with a little salt as a side dish, or bake or fry them into French fries. For dinner, they're great mashed, as a fundamental ingredient in shepherd's pie, or as the beloved baked potato (which can be a side or a meal all its own, depending on how fancy you want to get). Bake them, boil them, fry them, microwave them-whatever way you like them, you'll find that you can easily incorporate the versatile potato into at least one meal every single day, and save big bucks.

Bananas - As costs of produce steadily rise, bananas remain the least expensive fruit available, pound for pound. It's a healthy food that's easy to slip into other foods: add it to a smoothie, slice it into cold cereal or pancakes, or add some ice cream and have a banana split. If your bananas get overripe, there's always banana bread, which is easy to make and requires few ingredients. As an added benefit, bananas are filling, and loaded with potassium. You'll find that there's not a lot of ways to incorporate them into dinner, but filling out a breakfast menu with bananas is easy. Also, they're often on sale, but even if they're not-at roughly seventy cents a pound, you can't go wrong even at full price.

Eggs - With the high cost of meats like pork, beef, and chicken, it can be hard to get enough protein in our daily diet. Luckily, eggs are versatile, inexpensive, and high in protein. They can be used in virtually every meal (and go great with potatoes!). Try them scrambled and placed in a tortilla with some cheese and salsa, fried and made into a breakfast sandwich for breakfast. For lunch, egg salad sandwiches are easy to make with hard-boiled eggs. There's plenty of delicious frittatas, omelets, and baked egg dishes to satisfy everyone at the dinner table. You can make them fancy or simple-either way, at roughly $1.50 a dozen (cheaper if you buy larger quantities), you're getting a lot of bang for your buck.

If you use the above items, either as fillers or as a main component of a meal, you'll save some of those hard-earned dollars that you've been missing lately.

And bonus points if you can find a recipe that includes all four.