Yet another food snob observation

[KLynn]

Does anyone else find that they can't AFFORD to be a food snob? As my tastes become more disriminating, my grocery bill keeps increasing. How do you balance the two???

[Mandy]

I agree! But just look at it this way...most people spend a lot of $ on eating out. As food snobs on the other hand, we prepare most of our food ourselves...saving $ in that respect. Justification.... http://www.cookinglight.com/bbs/biggrin.gif

[funnybone]

There was a discussion similar to this a while back about the cost of eating healthy food.
http://www.cookinglight.com/bbs/Forum1/HTML/006355.html

[gertdog]

YES!!! KLynn, I totally agree with you.
Last year our grocery bills were getting waaaay out of control. There were two reasons that we could see. One was that I was making so many new recipes, and they all called for special ingredients. So every week I was buying new condiments and packages of different kinds of rice, pasta, etc. The other was that I did a lot of shopping according to what appealed to me in the grocery store (I am the queen of impulse purchasing). But I always got carried away and bought too much, and we ended up wasting a lot of things that went bad before we could use them.

So, we made a few changes to our system. Now I plan a weekly menu and only buy the ingredients I need to make the items on the menu. Every week I base at least one of the meals specifically on things that are already in the fridge so I can use things up. And I only buy what's on the grocery list... no more impulse purchases!

So far this year our grocery bill has been much, much more reasonable and I'm still getting to make lots of new recipes with cool ingredients.

But I think the other major reason that the bill has gone down is that we've hit our "exotic ingredient" saturation point... I don't have to buy special vinegar, because I already have every possible kind! Ditto spices and other condiments! http://www.cookinglight.com/bbs/wink.gif