Saving Money With An Organized Kitchen
In this difficult economic time, everyone is thinking about how to save money. Avoiding waste in the kitchen is a sensible way to prevent your grocery bill from ballooning, and you can also save time and effort by following a few basic rules.
First of all, always know what day your garbage pick-up is, and plan accordingly. Every week on the day before garbage pick-up, you should clean out your fridge. Get rid of anything you can’t or won’t eat, nearly-empty containers with remnants too little to be useful, and anything that may have passed its expiry date or shelf life.
Make the night before your garbage pick-up day into Leftovers Night. Try to use up anything perishable from your fridge that you can, especially things that won’t keep for another week until the next garbage day.
Once you’ve cleared your fridge, it’s a good idea to make sure your garbage and recycling containers are put outside that evening ready for pick-up. That way, you don’t have to rush around in the morning and risk missing the garbage and recycling trucks.
With a clean fridge and empty garbage pails at the ready, it’s time to plan your meals for the week. Do you usually eat out or order in one night a week? With that and Leftovers Night, you’ll only need to plan for five evening meals, not seven. When calculating breakfast and lunch needs, take into account whether you tend to eat a brunch meal on weekends—in which case you might not need three meals on those days.
With your meal plan in mind, make your grocery shopping list—you’ll always want to shop on garbage pick-up day to restock your fridge for the week ahead. Make your list at a time when you are not hungry or cranky, and make a commitment to yourself to stick to your list when you shop; you will save money by avoiding quick fixes and impulse-buy treats in the grocery store. For quicker shopping, make your list according to the different sections of the grocery store—try to list your fruit and vegetables together, your meat and fish, items from the dairy section, breads and bakery goods, and so on. This way, when you are in the store, you can pick up all the items from the same section at once instead of having to double back all over the store.
These simple steps to kitchen clarity will mean that you never have to stare into a scary fridge and wonder just how long that hidden half-empty jar of pasta sauce has been sitting there or how much money you’ve wasted on pasta sauce you’ve thrown out on suspicion of its being old. You may think that clearing your fridge every week means throwing out more food than you already do, but actually you’ll throw out less since you’ll use things up before they go off and build leftovers into your plans. Plus, you’ll find yourself saving money at the store as you shop with a meal plan and list, and maybe you’ll even eat more healthily without those impulse buys.
