Shopping….Learning to Cook
I have always maintained that cooking is not difficult if you have the ingredients in the house. So the key to being an effective grocery shopper is to have all the ingredients in the house when you decide to cook a particular recipe.
The frequency of shopping options:
• Every 2 or 3 days.
• Weekly, this is what we do and I am most familiar with.
• Bi-weekly, again for the very organized family
• Monthly, I know a family that uses a comprehensive spreadsheet and cooks most of their meals one weekend a month. That said the woman admits that she does shop once a week for perishables.
I started cooking late in life, so I will explain where I started and where I am at now.
Learning to Cook
Picking meals that you want to learn to cook are the start of the process. I had some of my families recipes including spaghetti, meatloaf etc. There are many recipes online as well. I would caution you to look at the number of ingredients and the number of steps involved. You don’t want too many of either when you are starting. Try to pick eight to ten recipes, try them and decide which ones you want to cook again and get rid of the balance.
Shopping every 2 or 3 days worked best for me to learn the whole process. Picking two or three recipes and only picking up the ingredients you need for those, is very manageable. It also allows for time to eat leftovers. It is also how I built my spices to a reasonable level. I will admit that there was more than one day that I would have a recipe halfway done and realize that I need one or two more ingredients to complete it.
Going to the Grocery Store
Most grocery stores are set up with packaged goods in the center and fresh food, dairy, bakery around the perimeter of the store.
The dairy is generally in the back corner of the store, which is done so you have to walk all the way through the store just to pick up milk.
Many grocery stores ‘reset’ the store periodically; basically this means they rearrange the store to force the shoppers to search longer. They have figured out that sales increase when they do this. Personally it just upsets me because I just want to get in and get out. I have actually stopped shopping at a particular store because of this. Who knew making it more difficult to buy from a retailer actually help sales?
Maybe as Amazon gets into the business there will be less of this.
I would recommend picking up a flyer as you enter the store. There can be considerable savings on key items.
One key method, for me, is to process the groceries when I get home. That means if I buy a large package of say, chicken breast, I repackage them into meal portions. If I buy mushrooms, I either dice them and put them in the freezer or put them in a brown lunch bag and into the refrigerator. I also buy bigger pieces of fish which I cut into meal portions and package those portions separately. That allows me to only use the number of portions that I need for that meal. If I buy a large piece of salmon I generally cut it into 6 pieces that are 6 to 8 ounces. This has become a habit for me, and I can determine how many pieces I need for a given meal, depending on how many of the kids are home.
© 2016 T.K.Frawley.