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Meal planning, and particularly planning around sales, is a great way to save money.

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Menus and freezers and budgets, oh my! (Part 2)

Okay, so in part 1 I said that next time I would talk about how I shop. But I also said I'm not good at sticking to a plan. So today instead, I'm going to talk about how I cook to freeze. There are three main strategies I use, and they work well for different things.

1. Freezer Day

The idea here is to block out a day (usually a weekend) and to just make a whole lot of food to put in your freezer. Some people call this Once a Month Cooking, and actually make 30 different meals in one day, but I have never managed to do anything like that. Usually I just choose one thing to make a lot of, or a few things that have common ingredients.

For example, this past weekend, my husband and I made 15 pans of lasagna. This honestly isn't much harder than making one or two pans of lasagna. Mixing a ton of filling isn't any harder than mixing a little. We just made the sauce, cooked some ground beef, then assembly lined the lasagna in disposable foil loaf pans. We had extra sauce so I froze that in Tupperware containers for easy spaghetti nights.

I find that this method works really well for me for most casseroles, where cooking the ingredients is really the most time consuming part, and having them pre-assembled means a super easy dinner. I don't pre-bake them; I just bake them on the day I plan to eat.

The problem with this method is that it takes a huge time commitment. Especially with a toddler running around, it's hard to block out that much time. My husband and I ended up doing the bulk of the prep after bedtime, and were up until 11:30 cleaning up. Boo.

2. Just make extra

This is actually the method I prefer. Instead of trying to make a month or a year's worth of something, I just make a little extra. Since it's just the two (and a half) of us, and most of my recipes are for four, I usually have extra anyway. Sometimes I go one step further and double it. Then after dinner, I pack up the extra and freeze it.

This is so easy because it doesn't take any extra time at all in my dinner prep, and gives me fully cooked, microwavable dinners for nights when I don't have time to cook. I like to do this with chili, sausage and peppers, shredded meat for tacos or sandwiches, stews, or anything that might require a long cooking time the first night.

3. Prep and freeze

Some things are just better if you make them the night of, but you can make your life easier and save money by doing the prep work ahead of time. For example, I keep a bag of diced carrots, onions, and celery in my freezer. I can dice it during naptime and then just grab a handful when I need it. I also buy bell peppers when they are on sale (because holy crap they get expensive), cut them into strips, and freeze them in freezer bags. You can even cook your meat ahead of time for recipes that use cooked meat. Browning an entire 3 pound package of ground beef doesn't take any longer than browning a single pound, and then you have some options for fast cooking dinners. Baking a whole bunch of chicken breasts ahead makes life easier too - just defrost as many as you need to make quick enchiladas, salads, or sandwiches.

Some people will even prepare and measure the ingredients for a specific recipe into a freezer bag. For instance, you could freeze sliced peppers and onions along with a chicken breast in a bag for quick, no prep, fajitas. Just dump the whole bag into a pan and sautee it up. I don't have much experience with this, but it's something I'd like to try more of.

Menus and freezers and budgets, oh my! (Part 1)

Anyone will tell you that meal planning is the key to saving money at the grocery store. As far as I can tell there are two main strategies for menu planning, as it relates to saving money.

The first strategy is to plan an entire week's worth of meals before you go to the grocery store. Make a list of all the ingredients you will need for your dinners, as well as anything you may need to make breakfasts and lunches. Buy only those things.

The idea here is that you save money by avoiding impulse buys, by avoiding extra trips to the store mid-week when you realize you forgot something (extra trips which inevitably lead to impulse buys), and by avoiding food waste when you buy something because it looks good but have absolutely no idea or intention of using it.

You can save even more money if you make your meal plan with your grocery ad next to you, planning the main ingredients around what happens to already be on sale. You end up with a little repetition of meat this way, unless you have a lot of great sales, but you can save big.

This is a great way to grocery shop. It is efficient, frugal, and can be very successful. But it's not what I do.

The buy ahead principle

Instead, my goal is to have everything I need for an entire week's worth of meals before I go to the grocery store. On Friday, before I go shopping, I survey my freezer and pantry and make a meal plan based on what I already have. Some of the meals are things that I've cooked ahead and stashed in my freezer. Some of the meals are quick cooking staples in our house, or easy crockpot recipes, that I just keep the main ingredients of onhand. But the idea is before I go to the store, I should be able to count at least 7 easily available dinners in my house. I double check all the extra ingredients and sides for each meal, and add any that I'm missing to my list, but it is a very small part of my weekly grocery list.

Why?

There are a few main reasons for this. The first is that I'm generally just not good at sticking to a plan. When I count my 7 meals of the week, I know I won't get to all of them. I'll probably have a leftover night. I may have a sandwich night. We may go out. DH or I may decide we don't want to eat anything I planned and just make a frozen pizza. If I bought only the week's worth of meals, I would lose that flexibility.

The biggest reason, though, is saving money. I try to buy things only when they are on sale. Other than fresh fruit and milk, which we buy almost every week, almost nothing enters my house that wasn't at least 50% off. This saves me big at the grocery store.

How?

The basic principle here is that you need to start small. Every week, you can add just one extra meal to your freezer stash. This way you won't go crazy overbudget or make yourself crazy with all the cooking.

Then as you start to develop a freezer stash, you'll be able to spend more of your budget on stockpile items and less on weekly need items. If I know I have 5 containers of chili, 5 containers of slow cooked taco beef, and 3 lasagnas in my freezer? Then each week's meals become very easy to plan.

The plan is to write part 2 about how I shop, and part 3 about how I assemble freezer meals, and possible a part 4 with recipes. But I'm not good at plans. Leave a comment letting me know how you meal plan, or what you would like to know about my meal planning and shopping, and we'll play it by ear, okay?

Free breakfast at Chick Fil A this week

Today, I am headed to Chick Fil A for free breakfast. I'm a little late to the party posting this, but it looks like a lot of locations still have "reservations" available for the remainder of the week.

Just pick your favorite chick fil a location, pick a time you can go, and then tell them what you would like to eat (you can choose from any breakfast entree). You will get a voucher in your email to print and bring with you, but when I've gone during previous promotions, they've also had my name on a list.

I will probably buy a coffee and sit and eat, as a nice way to get out of the house, but there is absolutely no purchase required. I have definitely gone in, gotten a free sandwich and left on many occasions. My Chick Fil A usually also gives me a goodie bag with coupons and other little treats.

So, enjoy!

Saving Money: Restaurants are my Kryptonite

I love eating out. I love the food, I love the social aspect. I love getting out of my house, and not having to clean up or wash dishes. I thought once I had the baby I wouldn't do it anymore, and the budgetary problem would take care of itself, but then I had to go and have a happy, social baby who I could take everywhere. (I know, cry me a river, right?)

We eat out at least once a week. Usually more. I know, I know that the best way to cut down on this expense is just not to do it. I know. But it brings us both such joy that we don't want to cut it out entirely.

When we lived in a college town, it was easy to find cheap casual restaurants and to find coupons and deals for them. Here, not so much. So, in order to subsidize my eating out habit, I've had to get a little more creative. Here are some of the ways I'm trying to make eating out more affordable:

• Drink water. Every single time. When a soda costs as much as a salad, it's just ridiculous. I'm not there for the soft drinks anyway.
  
• Go to lunch. Honestly, with the baby, it's easier anyway, and a lot of the nicer places we go to have a lunch menu with lower prices for the same great food.
  
• Split an entree. Okay, my husband isn't big on "sharing" (did I mention we really like food?), but sometimes if the plates are big enough he can be convinced to split one with me and get a salad or appetizer to go with it.
  
• Get gift cards. I use my My Points and my credit card points to get gift cards for places we typically eat.
  
• Get coupons. I have not had the greatest success with Restaurant.com or Groupon, but some people do. I have had success by signing up for email or mailed coupons from restaurants we regularly go to. I also sign up for frequent visit/stamp clubs.
  

I am so open to tips, as I need to fuel my restaurant habit. How do you save money while eating out?

Saving on groceries, part 1: The Basics

As part of my resolution to save money this year, I wanted to work on tackling my grocery budget a little, and I thought I would run a mini-series on ways to spend less on groceries. Before we can get started on juicy insider tricks, though, we have to make sure we have our basics in line. Make sure you consider all of the following:

Your budget. A lot of bloggers talk about starting with your budget as if that were an easy task. Before you can cut back on your grocery spending, you need to know three things: how much you can spend, how much you do spend, and how much you want to spend. If you haven’t been actively budgeting so far, this may involve a lot of math and spreadsheets, and at least sitting down with some receipts or bank statements. You can’t just take someone else’s grocery budget and shoot for that because everyone’s situation is different. You need to actually do all the work.

Your priorities. Is it important to you to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables? To have meat every day? To buy some things organic? Or are you just trying to get everyone fed? Wherever you are, and whatever you want to do, is okay, but it’s going to affect how much you can save and how much you need to spend. This is one reason why comparing yourself to other people is not useful.
Your repertoire. What do you and your family actually eat? What products do you use? If you regularly make only 5 different meals, and they are affordable for you and it works for your family, there’s really nothing particularly wrong with that. Use that list of meals to make your grocery list and stop buying stuff you aren’t going to use, no matter how cheap it is. However, if you are interested in trying new recipes, you can save money by planning meals around the sales. I love allrecipes ingredient search for this; it allows you to search for recipes based on what ingredients you want included (or not included).

Your pantry. If you are starting from scratch and don’t have any food, you are obviously going to spend a little more on staples than is someone who has a fully stocked pantry. If you have a stocked pantry, take inventory. Make sure you aren’t rebuying things just because you can’t find them, and see whether certain things are accumulating because you are buying them without any real purpose or intention.

Your pricepoints. One reason that it is useless to compare yourself or your budget to other people is that grocery prices vary so widely from one area of the country to another. If you're just starting out, you could consider making a pricebook - essentially, you track the prices of your most commonly purchased items over time and at different stores. If you don't have the time for that, at least develop an awareness for the "normal" price and the "good" price for the things you buy all the time. There's no way to know whether a deal saves you money unless you know what you're paying now.

Your time. How much time do you really want to invest in lowering your grocery bill? Do you have the time to go to several stores a week? To dig through forums, or visit a few blogs? Remember to search for that balance in your life instead of trying to meet someone else’s challenge.

So where am I in all this? I currently have a pretty well stocked pantry and a pretty fixed repertoire of meals, but I’d like to try a few new meals. I have a lot of different spices that I would like to plan some meals around. I’m currently spending about $300 a month, but would like to modestly lower that to $250, while keeping as much of my food natural and organic as possible. I am ready to start shopping at more than one store a week if I need to, as long as I can get in and out quickly.

Want to join in? What are your grocery goals?

Give free $10 Restaurant.com certificates

Right now, you can send free Restaurant.com certificates to everyone on your Christmas list. You can send up to 40 free certificates every day until December 31.

Keep in mind, Restaurant.com certificates usually require a minimum purchase (probably $15-$20 for a $10 certificate), so you can't score a completely free meal with them, but if you eat out anyway, it's a great way to save money.

Apples!

My husband and I went to a local apple farm yesterday and picked a peck of apples (haha, yeah, it makes me laugh too). For only $9, we got about 15 pounds of fresh, local, unwaxed apples.

I'm not sure what to do with them all! I have been peeling and cutting all morning and have a pot of applesauce on the stove and a dehydrator full of apple slices. My fruit bowl is already overflowing with apples. Time to look up more recipes.

If I get a chance, and can find my camera, I'll post some pictures later. Right now though, I'm just glad to feel normal and productive again.


Applesauce

Peel and slice approximately 3-5 pounds of apples. Dip in lemon juice to keep them from turning brown. Put in a pot on the stove with 1 cup of water and 1 cup of sugar. Bring to a boil, then lower to a simmer. Cook for 20 minutes, then transfer to a mixing bowl and beat until desired consistency. Add cinnamon as desired.

(Not much of a recipe, I know, but that's how I do it)

Frugal Friday - Shredded Meat

This may seem like an obvious tip to many more seasoned cooks, but it was a new one to me: if you want your meat to go further, shred it.

I discovered this one kind of by accident. I was making chicken tacos for dinner, and I threw two chicken breasts in the crockpot with some liquid and seasoning. I came home, pulled out the chicken, shredded it with two forks and served it with tortillas, cheese and salsa for a really simple weeknight meal. It was then that I noticed the magic of it.

We had leftovers. A lot of leftovers.

Huh? Two chicken breasts is usually my pre-portioned meal for the two of us. When I serve it whole, we each eat an entire chicken breast, easily. But shredded, we had only eaten about half of it.

Curious to repeat, I threw some pork chops in the crockpot with bbq sauce the next week, and yup! We ate less of that too!

The key, it seems, is perception. One chicken breast on a plate seems like an appropriate amount of food, so we eat it. When the meat is shredded, though, our eyes serve as less of a guide than our stomachs and so we eat only as much as we actually want. I've since done similar things by slicing steaks or slicing chicken breasts in half, and have found it to be a universal in my house that when the food is in smaller pieces we eat less of it.

Since meat is one of the more expensive parts of our food budget, this is a great way to make it stretch!

For more tips, check out Frugal Friday at Life as Mom.

Book Review: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

I just finished reading Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and I can't get over how much I loved it. I've read books on sustainable eating before, and I've read Barbara Kingsolver's fiction before, and this book had the best of both worlds. Telling the story of Kingsolver and her family's year of all local eating, this book read like a delicious memoir instead of as a textbook. The descriptions of setting and, of course, of food made this book much more positive than many other sustainable tomes. Rather than primarily a critique of the food industry, this book was mostly a celebration of local food. From endearing stories of gifts of plants to hilarious tales of turkey mating, Kingsolver manages to lend just the right tone to the whole story.

In addition to being just likeable overall, this book taught me a few lessons:

1. Asparagus, though difficult to plant, will grow back every year and signify the coming of spring.
2. If you're ever in Appalachia and someone gives you a plant, don't thank them. Unless of course you want to bring ill fortunes upon the plant.
3. There are chickens that lay multi-colored eggs. Really.
4. In the summer, be very skeptical of anyone who wants to give you squash or zucchini, particularly if you also have your own garden or CSA membership.
5. Acid should be added to tomatoes if you are canning them in a hot water bath because not all varieties have enough acid to make them safe.
6. Making soft cheese is (or at least sounds) fun and easy, and homemade soft cheese have less lactose.
7. It really is impossible to write a food memoir without at some point ending up in Italy (See also my review of Bill Buford's Heat).

CSA and vegetable wisdom

I've written before about how much I love my CSA. Last summer, one of my husband's friends was visiting when I picked up my basket and he got to see me process and cook my vegetables - and he even got to eat some. Apparently it made an impression on him because he went home and got himself a half share in a CSA near him. A few weeks ago, he had a picture of it on his facebook with a caption that read "Now I just need to figure out what to do with all this." I glanced over my husband's shoulder and said "Tell him to steam the asparagus, sautee the swiss chard with garlic and onions, and use the green onions in everything."

I was kind of amazed to hear the words coming out of my mouth. A year ago, I wouldn't have known half that. Some other things I've learned from my CSA:

• I love chard. Collard greens not so much.
  
  
• When it's squash season, you eat squash. And you eat it all because next week there will definitely be more.
  
  
• Most greens don't need to be boiled for a million hours and I like them better when they're not.
  
  
• The fresher the vegetables, the less you need to do to make them taste great. Except for collards which still usually need bacon.
  
  
• When you eat fresh raw vegetables for lunch and dinner, it's hard not to lose weight.
  
  
• In hot climates like mine, by the time the tomatoes come in, most of the lettuce is done, so the salads my mother made in my childhood are hard to make locally.
  
  
• Husbands must be accounted for when planning vegetable sides. Even if they do like their green beans mushy.

Free meatballs at Ikea?

I was at Ikea the other day, helping a friend pick out furniture, and I saw a sign that said:

"Bring in 12 inches of newspaper and get a free meal in the Ikea cafe!"

The newspapers are used to wrap purchases in the checkout lines (Ikea charges for bags now, too, how European), which warms the cockles of my green heart (Reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order). Since I hadn't brought my newspapers and Ikea is almost 2 hours from my house (we were in the city for the day anyway), I haven't tried this, but it sounds excellent. I will gladly trade my newspapers for meatballs any day.

Has anyone done this?

Peasful morning

I spent a peaceful morning shucking peas:






And listening to The Circle of Simplicity: Return to the Good Lifeon Simple Living Radio


(Can you forgive me my punning?)

Filling my freezer little by little

One of the things I've been doing lately to combat my Weakness for restaurant food is trying to put up fully cooked meals in my freezer for days when I just feel blah and don't want to cook. My husband is a big fan of once a month cooking and all its variations, but I tend to get overwhelmed by big projects and making two gallons of chili, a lasagna, and a big pot of beef stew in one day makes me nearly want to crawl under my bed and hide. So, instead, I've been babystepping towards a freezer full of meals.

I was reading Love food, hate waste a lot lately and the obvious idea occured to me: freeze my leftovers. A lot of the meals I usually make tend to be too much for just the two of us, and then the leftovers go in the fridge and I have to either adjust my meal plan or end up throwing out the food when it finally goes bad. Instead, unless I have a specific plan for the leftovers, I'm popping the 1-2 extra servings of dinner into my freezer so I'll have it for another day. Right now, I have two servings of chicken taco meat and a container of barbecue pork (both from my crock pot). Since I also have rolls, tortillas, and shredded cheese in my freezer, it sounds like I have two easy dinners already taken care of. I'm hoping to save them for the first few weeks of school when I'm tired and cranky and overwhelmed.

Now that I also have all my beautiful CSA vegetables, I'm going to have to double time at getting things into the freezer in order to prevent food waste. Anyone know the best way to freeze or preserve summer squash?

Why I love CSA

I recently signed up for a share in a CSA, which stands for Community supported Agriculture. For a seasonal subscription fee, I get a basket every week of fresh, naturally grown vegetables from a local farm. The contents of the basket change week to week based on what's coming up at the time.

At about $25 a week, it may not at first seem like the most frugal choice for me. I don't typically spend that much on fresh produce; it's nearly half of my weekly grocery budget. I probably won't save any money on food by having it However, there are a lot of reasons why I consider this to be a good choice for me, and why it may even save money in the long term.

1. Community. When I picked up my share yesterday, the owner of the CSA offered me homemade lemonade from a pitcher on her kitchen table and then walked me back to show me her garden. I played with her dog and met her kids while she clipped me herbs right off the plant and asked what kind of peppers I liked. I feel much better about buying produce from someone whose dog I've played with than from a huge corporation.

2. Better food. The produce I get is organically grown and locally produced. I know this because I've seen it. It's also in my hand within 4 days of when it comes off the plant. This is the absolute best way to maximize the nutritional content of my vegetables (thus making me healthier, one say it saves money) and also the taste - oh my the taste. Tomato basil salad is practically a spiritual experience.

3. Variety and abundance. A share is really too much for my husband and me, so we are always able to share (hmm, pun unintended) with our friends. In the past, when we had farm subscriptions, we've had more dinner parties and meal swaps because we had stuff we just needed to use up. We're also much more likely to eat more vegetables because we have them, and to eat things we might not normally buy. In this way, we eat less processed food and meat which saves us money in the long term and short term.

4. Environmentalism. Supporting CSA, and buying local food in general, is one of the best ways to reduce your eco-footprint. Transportation of food uses an awful lot of fossil fuel and puts a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. By buying local, you avoid that. I also am using my dollar to support farming practices in my local community that I believe in, thus encouraging them to increase. Plus, I am extremely fortunate in that my CSA offers lower cost shares and donates to local food charities, thus encouraging food justice which is so important to me.

If you are interested in joining a CSA, check out Local Harvest, which is how I found mine.

My spending weakness

I am always fond of the confessional style of personal finance blogposts, so I thought I would spill the beans on my own weakness. My biggest spending weakness, my gazingus pin as the authors of Your Money or Your Life would call it, is eating out.

I like restaurants. A lot. We eat out at least once a week, sometimes two or three times. We don't go to super-expensive restaurants, we go to small local places, but we can still easily spend $10 each on dinner, plus tax, plus tip.

Now, I know compared to a lot of other people my age, I don't really eat out that much. A lot of my friends, many of whom are single and a surprisng number of who are in grad school, eat out most nights. They dont', however, consider themselves frugal, and they aren't (necessarily) trying to pay off significant amounts of student debt.

Sometimes it seems silly to me to save 50 cents a week on electricity by shutting off a power supply or unplugging my phone charger, and then to go out and spend $25 for dinner for 2 in a restaurant, when I could make dinner at home for $5. At the same time, I really do like restaurants, and I really don't necessarily like having my phone charger plugged in. Part of frugality means that you save money in areas that aren't important to you so that you can spend it on things that are important to you.

But, while eating out once a week, in a sit down restaurant, is a treat and really does make me happy, two or three times a week doesn't really make me any more happy than once. A lot of the time I eat out because it's easier, because I'm feeling uncreative, because I'm sick of the food I have in the house. I get that the solution to that is to include more different meals, to experiment, to play, to have fun in the kitchen, but none of that is as easy as it sounds. I read through cookbooks and cooking blogs and touch everything in the grocery store, and I still feel uninspired.

So, if you kicked the eating out habit, how did you do it? Or if you have another spending weakness that you beat, how did you do it?

Recovering from my vacation

So, the day after fall semester ended, hubby and I got on a plane to visit our families. The day before spring semester started we got back. While my Christmas was lovely (more on that another time, if I think of it), I feel like I've spent this past week recovering from my vacation.

Some personal finance/frugality related stuff I've done to get back in the swing:

1. Sorted through my mail. We got a couple of bills while we were gone and had them both paid the second we got back. There's a lot of comfort and security in knowing you have enough money to pay things when they come, not when the paycheck comes.

2. Made a budget. New year, new budget. Hubby and I sat down together and made a template for how much we were willing to spend in each category. We've already spend half of our January budget for eating out, but that as they say is a story for another day.

3. Grocery shopped. Our freezer and fridge were bare, so we had to go out and do a major stocking up trip. It was not our most frugal day.

4. Cooked. We spent today batch cooking, a task I really don't enjoy but which I do appreciate once it's done. We froze 10 waffles, 8 hamburgers, 4 containers of chili and 6 containers of spaghetti sauce. Not only does it save me time and splurges for weeknight meal prep, it allows us to buy things like canned tomatoes and ground beef in bulk, so that they are at least a little bit cheaper.

I'm finally beginning to feel like I'm caught back up with my life, but I'm exhausted. Man can I use a vacation.

CouponMom: A great resource for busy people (like me)

Many of you who have been reading know that I enjoy coupon shopping, and like to shop at at least one grocery store and two drug stores every month. This summer, I was trading coupons, participating in a coupon train, clipping, sorting, filing, store hopping, and rebating like a champ.

Then school started again.

I've been working like a madwoman for the past eight weeks or so, and one of the things that started to fall by the wayside was the couponing. It really just wasn't a priority for me.

Coupon mom has helped me get back on track. Every week, she matches store savings to all the unexpired insert coupons she has on file. I just go to her website, click my store, and it generates a list. I like to sort the list by percent saved, so I can be sure to catch the best deals, but I usually read to the bottom of the list. With a few clicks, I can create a printable list of just the items I want. I then take that list to my file of unclipped inserts, where it tells me in exactly which dated inserts I can find the coupon I need. This saves me hours a week, and I've gotten my grocery budget back down to $40 a week for two of us, even with some luxury items thrown in. Best of all, this is a 100% free service.

$40 a week is not as good as I was doing this summer when I was doing this all out, but who cares? It's good enough and it's helping my family.

Eating out for cheap

(This was originally posted on my old writingup blog.)

My husband and I love food and we love restaurants. I know that this is not good for people who are trying to get out of debt, so we usually limit this to once a week - that way it stays special, and we can keep it within our budget. A few additional tips have allowed us to eat out more often, and at places we really like, while still staying within the $100 a month I have budgeted for it.

1. Always order water This is probably one of the more obvious tips, and the first one people usually mention. Alcohol, or even soft drinks, will drive up a bill pretty fast. We don't need the extra expense, or the extra calories. It's the food we're there for, so that's what we keep the focus on.

2. Make it an experience We have completely cut out fast food and deli lunches. I get my lunch for free in the school cafeteria at work, and my husband brings a lunch I pack. There's no reason to spend our eating out budget on quick food grabbed on the run. That money is reserved for time that we spend together, sitting in a restaurant and actually enjoying the food.

3. Use coupons and discounts There is a pizza place that we really enjoy, that offers a buffet for $8 per person on Mondays and Wednesdays. My husband got a student discount card that allows us to buy one get one free up to 5 times. That means two of us can get all we can eat pizza for $8 - cheaper than a fast food meal. I scour the newspaper and Internet for coupons for places we enjoy.

4. It's your birthday I have signed us up for birthday discounts at just about ever restaurant I've ever heard of. Off the top of my head, I can think of Red Robin, Souper Salad, Cold Stone Creamery, and Baskin Robbins. All of these places offer you something free on your birthday, and sometimes (as with the ice cream) it's enough food for the two of us to share. While some places are fussy about you going on your birthday, most give you enough leeway that we can eat out almost every day for the weeks before and after both of our birthdays for very little money.

5. Got a giftcard? Use it! My husband's family and my students at school gave us several restaurant giftcards for Christmas this year. I have a special compartment of my wallet where I carry them with me so that we don't forget to use them. It's not worth saving them forever, since they do not increase in value like saved money does; if anything, they decrease.

6. Sign up for everything Some places have a newsletter that you can sign up for in store or online, and they often send you an initial coupon for signing up: a free appetizer, a half price meal, a free dessert. I try to wait until right before I know I'm going to go to a restaurant before signing up for their newsletters because those coupons often have expiration dates, and you can't get the initial sign up bonus a second time if you let it expire
Often these places will continue to send out coupons and discounts to subscribers throughout the year, or will offer some kind of a loyalty program. Whatever they offer, sign up. For example, a TGIFridays points card is free, and the points dont' expire, so you might as well get one even if you don't go there often. You never know when you'll be out with friends and they'll suggest stopping somewhere.

7. Mystery shop Lately, this has been a goldmine for me. I googled mystery shop and signed up for several companies, and they occasionally send me shop jobs in my area. I'm not really interested in most of the shops, as I can make more money doing other things, but the restaurant ones are a great way to get a free meal for me and my husband.

Cheap easy meals for 2

Time for another Frugal Friday!

As much as I like good food, I really do like cheap food too. As a stop gap about eating out too much, I like to keep a few cheap easy meals in my pantry and my recipe book that I can make without much fuss.

When you are initially trying to cut your grocery budget, try to include one of these cheap easy meals per week in your regular meal rotation. They're also quite handy if you come to the end of the month and realize you have almost nothing left in your budget.

As always, I really love food, so these are meals that I consider really good eats or I wouldn't serve them.

Baked potatoes

These strike me as really good quality comfort food while being the ultimate cheap easy meal. I always buy baking potatoes from the loose bin rather than using bagged potatoes (which I find useful and frugal for other purposes like mashing or slicing) because I like to hand pick some big beautiful potatoes. I always have trouble getting mine to bake long enough, so I start them in the microwave. I just puncture them a few times, microwave for about 3 minutes, then roll them in oil and kosher salt and put them in a 350 degree oven for about an hour to get a nice skin on them (yes I eat the skin. Mmmmmm. )

You can top a potato with just about anything. It's most frugal, if you're in a pinch, to just eat it with a little butter or sour cream and some salt and pepper, but that's also BORING. I like steamed broccoli (you dont' need much, so I usually wait until I have leftovers) and cheese, leftover shredded barbecue meat, or chili. It's still cheap even if you use chili from a can, but it's yummier and more frugal if you use homemade.

Chili

Yes, in my opinion, chili itself is a cheap easy meal. You can use the cheapest of meats - a cheap roast of beef or pork, or some 70-30 hamburger or ground turkey you got for $1 a pound - or even make it without meat by increasing the beans or adding TVP. I say beans because, in my opinion, chili is better and MUCH more frugal if you make it with beans (my apologies to Texas). Personally I like a variety of white beans, black beans, pinto beans and kidney beans, but hubby just likes the kidney beans so that's how we make it here.

We make a big pot of this at a time. We simply brown whatever meat we're going to use in the bottom of the pot, sweat some onions if you like them, then add in your beans, some tomato paste or sauce, some water, and a variety of spices (we've bought the seasoning mix packets, and they aren't bad, but we tend now to just use chili powder from a can along with cumin, garlic powder, and some pepper). Cook it for hours. You can do this in a crockpot also, and that way you can leave the house while it cooks.

We usually eat it by itself at least once, then portion the rest into several smaller containers. The chili can be stretched even further by serving it over rice (flavored race, from a packet or homemade, is divine), and you can make several different cheap easy meals by making chili mac, chili pie, even frito pie if you are from certain parts of the country. And of course, I always save enough to serve over baked potatoes.

Pasta

Pasta is definitely my drug of choice. I know it's not the most healthy food in the world, but it makes me feel calm and happy. It also makes an incredibly cheap and easy meal.

We try to keep several containers of homemade "cooked all day with a bay leaf and secret seasoning mix" sauce in our freezer for pasta and pizza at a moment's notice, but when we run out, I have a quick fix that carries the day. I buy petite diced tomatoes by the can when they are on sale. When I need sauce in a hurry, I just put some olive oil and garlic, maybe onion if I have it, in a sauce pan, add the tomatoes and some dried basil and toss until it's coated and heated through. If you don't like the tomato chunks in your pasta (as I do and hubby of course does not), you can hit this with a stick blender or throw it in you food processor for a more authentic sauce.

This post has gotten quite long, so I will stop there for today and hopefully get back with more cheap easy meals at some point in the future.