Healthy eating on a budget

Is the topic of conversation today on Bariatric Foodie! I give you the financial breakdown on some of BF's most budget friendly recipes and I invite you all (especially you Kelly, someone needs to rep the vegetarians!) to share your suggestions as well. Check it out!

http://bariatricfoodie.blogspot.com/2011/10/bf-money-saving- meals.html

Good topic!

I'll tell you what I only recently figured out.  And yes, sometimes I learn things very slowly.  People often say they can't afford to eat really healthy stuff, and it's true that organic produce usually costs more at the grocery store and veggie burgers often cost more than hamburgers and free range eggs cost three times as much as regular eggs from the chickens in little cages.  But most of the time, what's the most expensive is the heavily processed stuff that's not good for us anyway.

Like, I might spend $2 on a can of good vegetable soup or $4 on a box of red beans and rice that I just have to add water to.  But I could make 14 ounces of vegetable soup for much less than $2 and I could make red beans and rice with dried beans and rice for much less than $4 for the same number of servings.  Sometimes when you first go shopping for ingredients to make a di**** looks like it's costing more because some ingredients you have to buy, you're only going to use a tiny bit of.  But you usually can't buy 1/2 tablespoon of cayenne pepper in the store.  You gotta buy the whole jar of it.  So you might spend as much on that cayenne peppe as you would spend on the whole box of beans and rice - but you'll have cayenne pepper to use in all kinds of dishes for weeks to come.  In the end, the price to make it myself is usually cheaper.

Plus it usually tastes better if I make it myself.  And I can make it healthier because I'm not going to put all the chemical additives in it and there are not lots of chemicals in that bag of dried beans like there are in that box or beans and rice.  And even if I want to use organic carrots and celery in my homemade soup, it will still come out costing less to make myself than to buy it already in a can.

Basically, the way to eat healthy on a budget is to make your own food, instead of buying things that you just add water to or just heat up.  I think many people are intimidated by that idea because a lot of us were not taught to cook growing up.  When my  mother made dinner, that means she heated up frozen fish sticks in the oven or made mac n cheese out of a box.  You know the kind with the orange powder that passes for cheese?  I love that stuff.

But anyway.  I always had the idea that cooking from scratch was really hard.  Bake a cakie from scratch, not a mix in a box?  Oh no, there was no way I could do that!  Make red beans and rice from a bag of rice and a bunch of dried beans?  Oh no, that would be too hard!  Then I decided to try really cooking, and honestly, if you can read a recipe and know how to measure ingredients, it's not that hard.  It takes some time, but it's not that hard.

Great points! My biggest challenge post op is that I didn't have a good collection of "staples." Now I have some things that I always have in stock (homemade chicken stock, veggie stock, beans, tuna, spices etc.) so then I just buy things to switch those up every now and again. But building up your staples can be challenging at first.

Yeah, building up those staples can be expensive.  I've done it kind of gradually over time.  I didn't plan a bunch of meals all in one week that required a bunch of spices that I didn't have.  I actually looked for more than one recipe that used a particular spice so I could get more bang for my buck when I went shopping that week.  And it was the same way with baking supplies.  I didn't have flour, baking soda, baking powder, any of that stuff.  So I just bought a little each week. 

I so totally agree with you.  I spent the day cooking up a storm.  All from scratch too! I started with a recipe from eggface... her WLS friendly oatmeal cookies turned out pretty good.  From there I decided to venture out on my own journey and made WLS friendly pumpkin bars made from real pie pumpkins that I baked and pureed.  NO sugar added ofcourse!  I also made Collards green and with smoked pork from the last of our garden season.  Sure am going to miss the fresh produce the garden gave us this year.  Will definetly be doing a garden again next spring!  Made chicken stock for the freezer so that on the cold winter days that are coming I can do some quick and easy soups, stews, etc.. and for dinner did chicken and rice casserole.  (Ofcourse I ate very little rice but still a very cost effective meal when we are on a tight budget and still healthy.)

Collard greens are food for my SOUL! And I will know them intimately soon. I'm the collard green girl in my family for Thanksgiving. Thirty pounds of 'em. Washed, cleaned, cooked. But we use corned pig tails. I can't get my family to switch to smoked turkey, which is what I use at home. So I just eat a little (animal fat and me are not friends).

Oh!  I also thought I'd add, if you shop at your local farmer's market or buy directly from local farms, you can often get organic produce that is cheaper than the regular produce at the grocery store.  A lot of small farmers aren't certified organic because you have to jump through a lot of hoops to be certified organic and it's expensive, but if you ask about how they grow their food, many are essentially organic.  And you can actually visit the farm and see your food growing if you want!  I actually go to the farm and see the chickens that lay my eggs.  It's cool.

Of course, if you buy from local farms you can only get the produce that's in season.  But that's what's cheapest, too.It costs a lot to fly produce in from the other side of the country or from south America.  Next year, I am going to try canning a few things so I can buy it cheap when it's in season and then have it for the winter.  Canning is something else I always thought was really hard, but apparently, from what I've read, it's really not.  You boil some jars, fill them up with your food, put lids on them and then boil them again.  Even I can boil water!

That's really all there is to the simple canning method? I had it all made out to be sooo complicated. Heck I can do that!

 Yeah, apparently so.  They sell some sort of utensil you use to grip the hot jars and take them out of the pot, and you could just use some regular tongs or something but I'd probably buy the utensil, I forget what they call it, because you don't want to be dropping super hot jars and breaking them.  But you can use any really big pot, you don't have to buy a special pot for canning (although they do sell those).  And it's recommended that you use a funnel to get the food in the jars so you don't make a big mess.

Also, I always had the idea that you needed to can huge amounts of food at one time.  I don't know why I thought that.  but you could can four jars of tomato sauce or any amount you wanted.

Canning really is that simple and can be cost effective over a period of time. My hubby and I can tomatoes, apple sauce, jam, pickles, relishes, and anything else that sounds good and that we can grow or buy cheap at the farm market.

There is a really inexpensive source that I just LOVE. It is called, "The Ball Jar Blue Book of Canning". It is a paper back available in the canning sections of most supermarke for about $7. It makes canning so simple! I bought my ho****er bath canner at an auction for a fiver and have been going strong since. There are also lots of tutorials on youtube to walk you through it.

Start with something simple like pickles and you will be hooked.

One of my favorite low cost weekly staples in the kitchen is boneless, skinless chicken breasts. One of the two local supermarkets will always have them for about $2 /pd. I get the family sized package and bake them all at once. Then I refrigerate them and use them throughout the week in salads, for a quick on the go lunch or snack and then I can easily get protein in my daily food plan.

String cheese is also a staple in our house.

One note about low cost eating is that we do not eat the amounts we used to pre-op, so ultimately, you can spend a little more as the food is higher quality and you are eating less----it lasts longer.

And along with what Kelly was saying, today in the car the kids and I figured out that for $5.75 we could make 5 of their favorite coffee house breakfast sandwiches at home. The cost of this sandwich at the coffee house is $3.50 for 1! They were hooked on the homemade version.