Learn These Kitchen Skills to Save Money

In times of financial stress, it's difficult to know what parts of the budget can be cut to save money. One of the best and easiest areas of a household budget to cut is the food allocation. Some expenses are static and cannot be reduced, like mortgage or insurance costs. Food spending, on the other hand, is very flexible, so it should be one of the first areas to be revamped when adjusting to a smaller budget. Here are five simple things to learn in order to reduce the grocery budget and save money in the kitchen.

Menu Planning

Planning a weekly or bi-weekly menu based on what is available in the freezer and pantry and which foods are the best deals listed in the ad flyers will avoid many common problems. The plan will let the whole household know what is for dinner, and avoid spending on expensive restaurant meals. It's also the best way to ensure that all the food in the home will be used in a timely manner, and won't spoil or go to waste. For more information about Menu Planning see

Bake Everyday Foods and Treats

Baked goods from the store have huge markups and making cookies and other treats at home is both easy and rewarding. Invest in a good cookbook, like the Betty Crocker Cookbook, and practice with simpler things like cookies before moving on to cakes and pies.

Everyday foods, like breads, tortillas, and rolls or biscuits can be made simply from scratch as well. A bread machine makes it simple, but learning to make bread by hand is not much more difficult. It's also fun, and smells absolutely wonderful. For a less time-consuming approach to home bread making, see, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes.

Calculate Recipe Costs

It's not very difficult to calculate recipe costs per serving, but many people don't know how to start, or just don't bother with it. It's an important skill to learn, in order to make sure that the meals being served are as good a deal as they seem. Here is an example of calculating recipe costs from my own bread making.

1 C. Water - Free

1 ½ t. Salt - Negligible

2 T. Oil - $.05

2 T. Sugar - $.02

3 C. Flour - $.22

1 ½ t. Yeast - $.03

One loaf of bread costs me $.32 to make at home.

Here is a demonstration using one of the ingredients of how I arrived at those costs.

I pay $7.19 at Sam's Club for 25lbs of bread flour. This comes to a cost of $.29 a pound. There are four cups in one pound of flour. $.29 divided by 4 is $.07 per cup. There are three cups of flour in my bread, so the total amount of flour costs $.21.

Knowing how much ingredients cost per unit is important because it can change considerably depending on the store or the brand.

Make "Take-Out" Food at Home

Making pizza from scratch is simple and can be done at a fraction of the cost and in the same amount of time as having one delivered. Pizza night can include the whole family, and allow lots of personalization of toppings as well. There are plenty of delicious recipes to experiment with, and one is sure to become the winning family favorite. Many families think that take out food and restaurant food is faster and cheaper than cooking real dinners, but in true costs this is not always the case. The costs in health aside, cooking is not as time consuming as most people think, and the ingredients for a great stir-fry or pizza can easily be kept on hand in the fridge and freezer. Knowing the true cost of ingredients will show that restaurant food easily costs ten to twenty times more than the same dishes made at home.

Skip Convenience Items and Cook from Scratch

Learning to prepare and serve real foods is a major money saver in the kitchen. Boxed convenience foods are full of chemicals and unhealthy ingredients, but most importantly when it comes to saving money, they're full of empty costs. The most basic ingredients will always be the best deal, because the consumer is not paying for fancy packaging and advertising. Roasting a whole chicken or making mashed potatoes from scratch is cheaper, and not so difficult as one might think. The more food that can be bought whole, with less processing and packaging, the more a shopper will save at the grocery store.