Is anyone else suffering from sticker shock at the grocery store?
Like my frugal mom, I have a number I don’t want to pass each month for the grocery bill. In 2022, I’ve watched food prices go up almost every week. I’m sure you’ve seen the same thing and felt it in your wallet.
I hoard butter and freeze it this time of year (holiday baking is imminent). Target was my butter destination this year until recently. March $2.99, June $3.69, July $3.99. Now it’s $4.69. Believe it or not, it’s cheaper to buy butter at Whole Foods Market here at $3.99.
My mom cut coupons and shopped sales. Impromptu spending wasn’t on the agenda. She had a budget and she stuck to it. Money was a topic of stress in our household. My parents argued about it throughout my childhood. Mom was a saver and Dad was a spender. Both my mom and dad suffered layoffs. At one point my dad worked two jobs.
Still, I had weekly piano lessons for years. Braces twice. The annual mall spree for school clothes, although I did give them a break. By age fifteen, I never grew out of anything anymore.
(Around that same age I started to notice the cost of cartons of cigarettes they both had to buy. Mouthy teen me, “Maybe you actually don’t value money as much as you’ve said.”)
When I look back at some of Mom’s dinner go to’s, I realize how smart she was with her shopping strategy. Round steak was used to make pepper steak, Swiss steak, steak and ketchup noodles. She used hot dog buns to make garlic breadsticks. We had breakfast for dinner. What’s funny is that I always felt those options were comfort food, not we-don’t-have-a lot-of-money food. To this day, I make cabbage and noodles for when I need to console myself.
In my twenties, I worked at an ad agency. Work started at 8:30 A.M. Five mornings a week, my co-workers would arrive and then promptly go to Starbucks together. I never joined them. All I could think about was the amount of money they were spending on a weekly, monthly basis getting coffee together. (I was the definition of fun as a young person.)
When I was laid off in 2001, my inherited frugality went up a notch. No travel, no concerts. I borrowed movies from the library for free. I found Rachael Ray on the Food Network and thought, hey if a goofball like that can cook, maybe I can. I walked to the grocery store and started to entertain my unemployed self by trying her recipes. For the first time, I enjoyed playing in the kitchen.
After my parents split up and Mom remarried, I’m embarrassed to say that she and I went on a bender. Her husband made a good amount of money, especially by our standards. Mom and I had a moment there where we shopped ’til we dropped. She was probably giddy from shedding her constant need to save money and worry about bills every month.
I’d get a phone call, “Hey, are you free today? Want to meet up and go to the outlets?”
We had so much fun shopping and buying whatever we wanted. Things that weren’t even on sale!
Even if I wanted to, I don’t think I could change my spending habits. I am my mother’s daughter. This year I’ve upped my game as I’ve strategized to spend within my budget.
There are things I just stopped buying to compensate for paying higher prices for eggs, butter, and meat. I’ve made salad dressing and marinara sauce all year. I’ve bought rotisserie chickens and shredded the meat for G’s lunches. I usually eat vegetarian lunches so this just eases the grocery bill. Then I use the chicken carcass for homemade stock. Whatever vegetable shreds I have I put in a freezer bag for stock instead of tossing them away, same goes for shrimp shells for seafood stock.
I buy dried beans instead of canned and use the Instant Pot for batches of beans to use all week. I add beans to all kinds of dishes to bulk them up from huevos rancheros in the morning to salads or pastas for lunch and dinner.
Besides coupons, sales, and buying generic, some other money saving tips I’ve learned over the years: wash your own lettuce instead of buying bagged/pre-washed; grate and shred blocks of cheese; buy cheaper cuts of meat and cook the heck out of them in the slow cooker; bake your own sweet treats; and buy produce that’s in season!
Now I take it as a challenge to make meals from what’s already in the fridge and pantry, like my own personal version of that TV show, Chopped. A few weeks ago, I looked around my fridge and found some forgotten zucchini and a lonely cob of cooked corn. Hmmmm…I don’t want to let them go to waste…
Brainstorm: zucchini corn fritters!
Thanks again for reading! I care about you. Please don’t forget to eat your greens.
You are singing my song! We grew up without a lot of money and I’ve carried those frugal skills with me my whole life. They’re serving me well right now because the price of everything is skyrocketing up here…the grocery bill has just kept creeping and now my modest budget doesn’t go nearly as far as it used to. Still, it’s very smug-making to be able to feed us all on less, especially as that means mostly scratch food and inventive leftovers 😆