Saving Money on Groceries!

In these tough economic times, everyone is trying to save money. People are turning off cable, Xbox live accounts, their llama grooming services–I've even put my butler on a two-day work week!

Death By Children knows you have little time to spend researching ways to save money–and that most of you are too young to remember a back-in-the-day before we had wireless phones, blackberries, inflatable tennis shoes, and Twitter. So to help you, I am doling out the benefit of my significant experience as a former poor person. Welcome to Saving Money from Death By Children.

How to Save Money on Groceries: Give Up Prepackaged Food!

After our mortgage, car payments, and cellphone bills, most families spend the most of their money on food. And by food I mean prepackaged crap. I know what you're saying already. You're already opening up a comment to say I DON'T BUY PREPACKAGED FOOD! I COOK FROM SCRATCH! You think you do but you don't. Most people have been using pre-packaged food for so long, they forgot what scratch is.

For instance: which of these is a prepackaged meal?

1. The Bell a' Doccio "Italian Supper," pack which includes pasta, sauce, herbs, garlic bread, grated romano cheese, and a tiny little bottle of olive oil.


2. Paul Newman Marinara sauce. And a box of pasta. And a loaf of bread.

If you said "1," you went to public school. If you said "2," you might've gone to Our Lady of Perpetual Hangnail, but you didn't pay attention. They're both prepackaged meals.

We're so used to tossing a couple of bottles of Prego in our cart, we're forgetting how incredibly easy it is to make simple red sauce. And it's cheap. And it takes about the same time to make simple red sauce as it does to heat up Paul Newman.

Cooking from Scratch Costs Less

I did the math. A store–bought taco dinner costs $9.69 for a family of four (that includes the onion, lettuce, garlic, and cheese.) A home made taco dinner costs $5.98 and feeds six. AND it tastes better. Over a year, you'd save more than 88 bucks a year making tacos on your own.

Of course, there are problems with this plan. For one thing, time is money and I didn't factor time into the math I did today (because it took me so much tiiiiiiiiime).  We're all freakishly busy these days and the maybe the 88 bucks we save over a year isn't worth the twelve hours of prepping it takes to cook from scratch. It took me seven and half years to make my own tortillas tonight then another fourteen hours to roll the little balls of flour into paper thin shapes that were really really nowhere near the shape of a tortilla which is probably Mexican for "you can't make these at home no matter how hard you try, idiot gringo."

And of course, I'd prepared the steak ahead of time because that's what you do when you're cooking from scratch. I bought flank steak that was on sale, because that's what you do when you're saving money, then I froze it and thawed it out tonight to put it into the super cool amorphous tortillas (which is now Mexican for 'looks like it fell on the floor then was mauled by a dog') with some cheap bulk shredded cheese then baked at 400 degrees until they're bubbling and all melty and look like huge poorly constructed models of human cells for a middle school science project that got a D-minus. Which is exactly how your kids will react to them. Right before they hurl.