5 ways to stretch your grocery dollars

3. Plan a menu
Elizabeth Frank, a professional dietitian in Lunenberg, N.S., raised four children – her youngest is now 35 – while working full time. “I planned exactly what I was going to have for every meal – breakfast, lunch, supper, snacks, everything,” says Frank, who owns South Shore Healthy Diet and Nutrition Services. “That way I didn’t walk in the door and wonder what I was going to cook tonight.”

Menu planning allows you to use everything you purchase by building leftovers into the plan. If you’ll be roasting a chicken on Sunday, says Diane Collis, coordinator for the Vancouver Community Kitchen Project, then plan on a chicken casserole for dinner on Wednesday and chicken sandwiches during the week. “If you don’t meal-plan, it’s harder to keep your costs down,” she says.

Frank recommends planning a weekly menu based on Canada’s Food Guide to Healthy Eating, which provides the recommended daily servings from each food group as well as portion sizes. “Portion control is half your money management,” says Schutz. “If you understand what you need, then you buy and serve according to that. It’s not how much fits in your stomach; it’s how much your body needs.”

TIP: In the beginning, Schutz says it will take about an hour to plan a menu for the week with the help of store flyers (most major grocery outlets post their weekly flyers online), Canada’s Food Guide to Healthy Eating, a peek in the cupboard or freezer to see what’s already at home and locating the appropriate recipes. Once you have the menu, make your list of groceries for the week and don’t leave home without it.

4. Make it yourself
“If you’re buying anything that’s prepared, then you’re paying for the labour,” says Schutz. To save grocery dollars while increasing nutritional value, consider cooking from scratch and preparing as many ingredients, such as roasted red peppers, yourself as you can.

Cooking from scratch sounds pretty unrealistic, especially with the lack of time facing most families, but it is possible, and the money you’ll save may just convince you. A bowl of cut-up pineapple, for example, costs about $13 per kilogram. If you prepared a pineapple yourself – and it’s not that hard – the cost per kilogram would be about $3.50. Ah, the sweet taste of saving money.

Preparing ingredients is as simple as making your own broth for soups or cutting up your own veggies for a stir-fry. You can always buy a package of precut butternut squash, for example, which is about $7.48 per kilogram, but buying a whole squash and cutting it up yourself will cost about $2.18 for the same amount.

Instead of buying a can of chickpeas ($1 for 540 millilitres), for example, buy a bag of dried chickpeas (about $2 for 900 grams) and rehydrate them yourself; the bag can produce three times the quantity of the canned chickpeas for just twice the price. An added bonus to creating your own ingredients is being able to use what’s appropriate for your family’s dietary needs, such as less fat, sugar or salt.

TIP: Learning simple kitchen tasks, such as how to cut up a chicken instead of buying boneless skinless chicken breasts, will save you money.

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