I’ve never been one to stick to a grocery list. My primordial brain grabs packaged salads and barbecue chips without a flicker of thought.
But I recently set out to slash $50 from my typical weekly grocery budget, so I had to start paying attention. My goal was to shop and feed my family of three — breakfast, lunch and dinner, no dining out — for one week for about $200. That sounds like a nice, big number, but broken down, that’s less than $10 a day for each of us.
My wife, Anne, and I live in the Chicago suburbs with our picky 10-year-old boy, Liam. Statistically, we are middle class. For the purposes of this experiment, we looked to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Plans, whose “Thrifty” option, the least expensive and used to determine SNAP benefits, meant a weekly budget of $196.25 before tax, not counting the salt, oil, rice and leftover snacks already in our pantry. (While many consider the thrifty plan insufficient and out of date, others do still use it as a starting point, as it was for our purposes.)
It is also somewhat unusual for us to cook every meal at home — we do dine out once or twice a week — but I was hoping to approach it as a creative cooking exercise, to learn lessons and write some recipes I could share.
As always, meal planning started on Sunday. But rather than writing down what sounded good and learning the damage at checkout, I worked backward from the number.
No more impulse buys permitted, we walked the aisles of our favorite grocery store, Fresh Farms in Niles, Illinois, with purpose. Liam’s peanut butter sandwich called for strawberry jam, but grape jelly was cheaper, so grape jelly it was.
We could stretch our budget even further if we didn’t insist on buying some things organic. How big of a difference will it make? Questionable. But we feel good doing so. We don’t buy organic everything, but we do often opt for it when it comes to eggs, milk, cream and certain vegetables that are tougher to wash.
At checkout, we nervously watched the total creep toward $196.25. When it went over, we asked the cashier to swap the $4.35 baba ghanoush for the $3.77 hummus still on the belt.
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WHAT WE BOUGHT
Produce
Fava beans ($6.40), two boxes of cherry tomatoes ($5), two avocados ($5), organic broccoli ($3.41), cauliflower ($2.89), white peaches ($2.15), lacinato kale ($1.99), seedless cucumber ($1.99), organic bananas ($1.90), organic carrots ($1.29), lemons ($1.10), scallions ($1), Idaho potato (92 cents), garlic (88 cents), ginger (67 cents), lime (58 cents), yellow onion (57 cents), jalapeño (15 cents)
Meat
Pork shoulder ($14.98), ground beef ($8.16), chicken thighs ($7.68), chorizo ($7.29), bacon ($5.49)
Dairy
Organic 2% milk ($6.29), dozen organic eggs ($5.99), organic heavy cream ($5.19), butter ($4.99), ricotta ($4.59), two containers of Greek yogurt ($3.38), shredded cheese ($2.79), sour cream ($1.99), peach kefir ($1.49), mango kefir ($1.49)
Bread and Pasta
Granola ($7.99), whole-wheat bread ($4.99), sourdough baguette ($2.99), sesame flatbread ($2.79), noodles ($2.29), flour tortillas ($1.49)
Pantry and Other Items
Instant coffee ($9.49), mayonnaise ($4.99), Cheddar Sun Chips ($4.99), tomato passata ($4.49), ketchup ($3.99), hummus ($3.77), toasted sesame oil ($3.49), chili powder ($3.45), rice vinegar ($2.99), chunky peanut butter ($2.99), grape jelly ($2.99) soy sauce ($2.29), bucatini ($2.29), canned refried beans ($1.79)
Pretax Total: $196.22
With Sales Tax: $200.63
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WHAT WE ATE
With our shopping done, we did a little meal prep: We roasted broccoli, tomatoes and cauliflower, blanched some fava beans and made pork carnitas (using just water, salt, pepper and chili powder from our pantry), setting aside a few pork cutlets to fry later in the week to eat atop rice and Japanese curry.
Day 1
Breakfast: Yogurt and coffee (Kevin); two scrambled eggs, half of a banana and coffee (Anne); granola, milk and half of a banana (Liam)
Lunch: Hummus, sesame flatbread, cucumber, ricotta, tomatoes and fava beans (Kevin and Anne); peanut butter and jelly sandwich and Sun Chips (Liam)
Dinner: Fava beans on toasted baguette with ricotta, garlic, herbs and lemon zest (Kevin and Anne); sesame flatbread with hummus and cucumber slices (Liam)
Day 2
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Breakfast: Poached eggs, wheat toast, peaches and coffee for the grown-ups
Lunch: Flatbread, hummus and roasted broccoli (Kevin and Anne); peanut butter and jelly sandwich and Sun Chips (Liam)
Dinner: Bacon cheeseburger meatballs, burger sauce, oven fries and roasted broccoli
Day 3
Breakfast: Wheat bread, ricotta, roasted cherry tomatoes and fava beans (Kevin and Anne); granola, banana and yogurt (Liam)
Lunch: Grilled cheese with roasted tomatoes (Kevin and Anne); peanut butter and jelly sandwich and potato chips from the pantry (Liam)
Dinner: Chorizo amatriciana
Day 4
Breakfast: Cheese omelet (Kevin and Anne); granola and banana with milk (Liam)
Lunch: Leftover chorizo amatriciana and sautéed kale (Kevin and Anne); grilled cheese sandwich (Liam)
Dinner: Carnitas, flour tacos, guacamole, homemade salsa, pickled onions and shredded Mexican cheese
Day 5
Breakfast: Eggs poached in salsa, guacamole and charred flour tortilla (Kevin and Anne); yogurt and banana (Liam)
Lunch: BLT and chips from the pantry
Dinner: Sesame soy chicken with ginger-scallion noodles
Day 6
Breakfast: Scrambled eggs and wheat toast
Lunch: Flour tortilla, cucumbers, pickled onions and roasted tomatoes (Kevin and Anne); Carnitas tacos (Liam)
Dinner: Cauliflower bacon toast (Liam and Anne. Kevin ate at a work event.)
Day 7
Breakfast: Granola, yogurt and coffee for the grown-ups
Lunch: Cauliflower bacon toast (Liam and Anne); stir-fried noodles with leftover ginger-scallion sauce with a fried egg (Kevin)
Dinner: Japanese curry, rice and fried pork cutlet
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WHAT WE LEARNED
We ate really well all week long, but — and this is a big “but” — it did require a lot more work on the front end. (And I’m a recipe developer by trade who works from home, so I’m ahead of the game.) The additional $50 we’d normally spend is for convenience — a microwavable frozen dinner here, a jar of marinara there — and, for working parents with children, it’s a premium many don’t have a choice but to pay.
In the end, I developed a few money-saving habits that also pushed me to cook more creatively with simple ingredients.
1. Assign a role to everything in your cart.
Instead of buying whatever looks good and figuring out what to do with the leftovers once I had them, I planned for them. I bought a 3-pound hunk of pork shoulder with two futures already assigned to it: carnitas and fried cutlets. I sliced several thick cutlets off, and tucked them into the freezer.
2. Give leftovers a new life.
Dinner one night can be transformed to something else entirely the next day with a few additions. We made pasta amatriciana one night, and the following, I added a dollop of ricotta and chili crunch. It tasted like a different dish. Simply changing the texture can make leftovers taste new: Chewy boiled noodles become crispy when stir-fried the next day.
3. Use your sheet pan.
When I took on this challenge, the country was in the throes of a cyclosporiasis outbreak. Lettuce, which would normally fill several lunch and dinner salads, was off the table, so we relied on the Jalen Brunson of kitchen equipment: the sheet pan. We roasted broccoli, cauliflower and tomatoes, then saved them to tuck into grilled cheese, spoon over ricotta toast or pile onto a charred tortilla with cucumbers and pickled onions. We felt so Mediterranean.
4. Buy produce that lasts.
By Day 6, I was running on creative fumes, and it was mainly an inventory problem. Much of the delicate produce — peaches, fava beans — was gone by the third day. Sturdier fruits and vegetables like apples and cabbage, or frozen fruits and vegetables, which often have more nutrients because they are frozen at peak freshness, could have carried us further.
5. Add a twist to traditional dishes to make them exciting.
Try taking a well-known dish and altering one ingredient to make the meal feel novel to get you excited about it. Liam thought of adding bacon and cheese to meatballs, resulting in bacon cheeseburger meatballs, a new family favorite. Instead of guanciale in the pasta amatriciana, I subbed in the less expensive Spanish chorizo, which gave the sauce a lovely smokiness no amatriciana has any business having. It was delicious.
6. Put an egg on it.
There’s nothing more magical than the mighty egg. Now that egg prices have stabilized a bit, we enjoyed them many ways during the week. For breakfast, a soft-boiled egg with one end lopped off and a knob of butter dropped into the yolk became an “egg dipper” to my son. For dinner, I topped ginger-scallion noodles and chicken with a fried sunny-side-up egg.
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Recipe: Bacon Cheeseburger Meatballs
One night right before dinner, my then-9-year-old son, Liam, announced that he had invented a recipe. Bacon cheeseburger balls was exactly what it sounded like — his love for meatballs and for bacon cheeseburgers, rolled into one. He had written out the ratios of beef, bacon, cheese and onion so that they added up to exactly 100% because he was studying percentages in school that week. We made it a few days later, and it was good! I tweaked a few things, and the result is, in Liam’s words, “better than really good”: a tender, juicy, beefy meatball with bacon, sweet onion and melted cheese in every single bite.
By Kevin Pang
Yield: 4 servings
Total time: 1 hour
Ingredients:
For the Meatballs
Nonstick cooking spray or olive oil
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4 slices thick-cut bacon, or 5 slices standard bacon
1/4 cup water
1/2 medium yellow onion
1 egg
1 pound ground beef (preferably 20% fat)
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt (such as Diamond Crystal)
Black pepper
1/2 cup panko or standard breadcrumbs
1/2 cup shredded Cheddar
For the Sauce
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1 tablespoon ketchup
1 tablespoon yellow mustard
1 tablespoon sweet relish
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
Preparation:
1. Line a rimmed baking sheet with foil and spray with cooking spray (or brush foil with olive oil). Heat oven to 450 degrees.
2. Combine sauce ingredients in a small bowl. Keep in fridge while you make the meatballs.
3. Finely dice bacon. Add bacon, along with a quarter cup of water, to a medium skillet over medium heat. Cook until just about crisp, around 5 to 7 minutes. While the bacon cooks, finely dice half an onion.
4. When the bacon is just shy of crisp, remove with a slotted spoon into a medium bowl. With skillet still over medium heat, add diced onion and cook in bacon fat until soft, around 5 to 7 minutes. Remove onions with slotted spoon (leaving excess fat in the pan) and add to bowl with bacon. Allow to cool for at least 10 minutes.
5. In a separate large bowl, lightly beat one egg. Add raw ground beef to the bowl, along with garlic powder, onion powder, salt, a few grinds of black pepper, panko breadcrumbs, Cheddar and cooled onion-bacon mixture. Gently combine using a wet hand, taking care not to overmix, which can make the meatball tough.
6. Roll beef mixture into 16 balls, about 1 1/2-inch diameter each. Place onto the prepared baking sheet with space between the meatballs. When oven is heated, cook on the middle rack for 12 to 15 minutes, until the meatballs are nicely brown on top.
7. There will be a lot of excess oil from the balls, and some of them may still stick to the foil because of the cheese. Gently pry the meatballs off the baking sheet and place on a large plate lined with two sheets of paper towel. Serve with sauce.
Recipe: Chorizo Amatriciana
Our family returned from a trip to Rome, newly obsessed with the city’s beloved pasta all’amatriciana — crisped cured pork jowls cooked in a spicy tomato sauce. Finding proper guanciale in the United States, however, can pose a challenge, so one night we subbed in Spanish chorizo. Although it’s not at all authentic, the resulting dish was a delicious, smoky twist. When shopping, keep in mind that Spanish chorizo can come in different forms (and Mexican chorizo is a completely different product). Use the dried link-version colored a deep ruby red, which are the ones typically used in Spanish paella.
By Kevin Pang
Yield: 4 servings
Total time: 30 minutes
Ingredients:
Salt
1 pound bucatini or spaghetti
1/2 medium yellow onion
1 clove garlic
1/4 pound dried Spanish chorizo
2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for serving
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper
Black pepper
1 (14-ounce) can of crushed tomatoes
1/2 teaspoon sugar
Grated pecorino or Parmesan
Preparation:
1. Bring a large pot of generously salted water to a boil. Add pasta and cook until al dente according to package instructions. Drain, reserving 1 cup of pasta cooking water.
2. Meanwhile, dice the half onion, mince the garlic clove and finely dice the chorizo. In a large (12-inch) skillet over medium-low, lightly sauté the chorizo until the fat starts to render. Once the chorizo gets shiny and turns a solid color, about two minutes, remove the chorizo using a slotted spoon, leaving the orange oil in the pan. (Be careful not to overcook the chorizo or it will become tough.)
3. Turn heat to medium-high and add the olive oil to the pan. Add the onion, garlic, red pepper, a good pinch of salt and pepper, and sauté until the onion turns soft and translucent, about 5 to 7 minutes.
4. Add the crushed tomatoes, then add the cooked chorizo. Turn down the heat to medium-low, stir in the sugar, and allow the sauce to simmer for 5 minutes. If at any point the sauce starts to look chunky, add 1/2 cup of water, and more if necessary.
5. When the pasta is cooked, add it to the sauce and toss, along with enough pasta water for the tomato sauce to enrobe the strands.
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6. Divide into four bowls, and top with pecorino or Parmesan, a few more grinds of black pepper, and one more glug of olive oil for good measure.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.