Reduce Your Grocery Bills The Old-Fashioned Way

Are you handy in the kitchen? If so, you have probably found that cooking from scratch saves you tons of money in grocery bills. How about extending your skills to other types of activities that can help save you even more? It can also come in handy in a pinch, when some emergency bills steals your grocery money. While you can opt to get a short-term loan, like a payday loan, the other possibility is to have your food stored away in the pantry or refrigerator to allow you to weather the small financial setback.

Harvest Is Here

Notice food prices being low right now in grocery stores? That’s because the harvest is here and with that comes an abundance of produce. A large supply and average demand means lower prices. Take advantage of that to buy up large quantities of cucumbers for pickling, fruit for jams and jellies, and vegetables for freezing. Take them home and have yourself some fun in the kitchen, while preparing an edible emergency cushion.

Canning

This requires some equipment to do, but it’s relatively inexpensive. Be sure you can raise the temperature of the water in your canner to boiling. Some older electric stoves have too small a burner and difficulty reaching the right temperature. Take a canning class at your local community college or check out a book from the library. It’s not as hard as it sounds and the jars are reusable for next year. Once you’ve invested in some quality canning equipment, it can be re-used year after year, except for the lids that need to be replaced.

Canning can allow you to store items on a room temperature shelf without fear of spoiling. You can make pickles, jams, and jellies very easily at home, and for a fraction of the cost it takes to buy them. After you start experimenting you will find that the produce tastes better too, than canned goods from the grocery store. It allows you a way to be creative with recipes and provides hard to beat enjoyment during the winter time, when fresh foods are costly.

Freezing

If you don’t want to go to all the fuss and bother of canning, there is still freezing. This is the modern way to store lots of food. You don’t even have to cook it, if you don’t want to. You can buy an entire steer from a butcher, share it with a family, and freeze the rest in a large chest freezer. You can take extra produce from the farmer’s market, and freeze fruits and vegetables for use in pies, casseroles, and stews in the winter time. Freezing is very easy, but may have less “shelf life” than canning. It also tends to taste fresher than canning. It can be used with herbs, butters, cheese, and other types of unusual products that you would never consider canning on your own too. Just buy the items when they are cheap at the store, and store them in the freezer until you have a need for them. Add the date you refrigerate them, so you know how old each item is and don’t eat anything too old.