A Styled Homelife Food Management Tips to Deal with Expensive Groceries
In our modern world, we are enjoying many conveniences. In this post, one of the conveniences I will discuss is about the convenience of getting take outs, ordering meal deliveries, and shopping for ready-made and even already prepped food items from our grocery stores. No doubt, availing of these services and convenient offerings have their place in our busy lives. In the concept of a styled homelife, read below my experience about the use of such services and conveniences. This post also talks about the simple things we can do at home so our food expenses is sustainable for our family income as well as the important role meal planning and an organized kitchen in a styled homelife.
In the early days of my going back to work full time, there was a time when my meal planning routines got interrupted and I had to resort to ordering takeaway food. It meant rotating between pizza, chicken, burger, and sandwich fast foods, Mexican and Chinese takeout foods and ready to heat foods from the supermarket. Ordering our takeaway meals this way seemed appreciated by my family on the first week and the alternate weeks after that. Of course, takeaway foods used to be treats for my family and when it became a solution for our family meals for a few weeks, we enjoyed the novelty and variety of flavours so we just ran with it at that time for a few weeks more until I got back to meal planning.
How did that go, you may ask? For our family, we enjoyed it in the first few weeks and I certainly appreciated the convenience. By the time I got back to cooking homemade meals, we were truly ready to eat our home made meals again. We were ready for the wholesome and "cleaner" taste of foods cooked at home and the wellbeing that we feel from eating our home cooked meals. I got to make our family's go-to meals and our favourite meals again and focused on meal planning more strategically to make cooking at home happen even with my busy job.
Looking back at that hectic time when I did not meal plan, I realized that it was not a sustainable practice, health wise and budget-wise. It seemed that a lot of my pay was ironically eaten by our fast food practice. Even then, I know that spending on food this way just wasn't sustainable and so I was keen to get back to meal planning, shopping for food and managing our food at home better. It felt great to be back on track with preparing food at home. There were even many months that followed when we did not buy takeout meals and we did not even miss those foods. As a result of sticking to my meal plans, our family even agreed during some mealtimes that we think we're even eating better at home than when we eat at restaurants to a significant degree because we can enjoy tasty and nourishing meals and save money on food.
The other benefit of meal planning, of course, is how we can stick to a very reasonable food budget. Below, I'm sharing with you 12 ways that can help you manage your food at home better. I have used the following tips, and they make a big difference on how I prepare our meals at home. I also found that these tips are helping me shape the homelife that I want my family to have -one that is sustainable for our health and our finances.
- Have some form of a written meal plan. You can make it digitally, too, and print your plan.
- Know what you have on hand and what you ran out of, when writing your shopping list.
- Decide on what meals to serve your family. This could be meals for two days, three days, a week, or more.
- Ask your family what foods they want you to make for the week.
- Check your recipe binder if you have one or look up recipes from cookbooks or online for inspiration. The Styled Biz and Home website have recipes that you may want to include in your meal plan.
- Get your pantry in order, to make prepping meals easier.
- Clear your bench tops for food prepping.
- Equip your kitchen with essential kitchen equipment. You may also consider kitchen gadgets that make food prep easier. For me, one kitchen gadget I love is an onion chopper.
- Prepare marinated chicken, pork, beef, etc. and freeze them.
- Stock up on emergency convenience food. My family loves barbecue pork buns and dim sums.
- Find ways to save on groceries. One way is to check their catalogue of special deals for the week and include the cheap food items in your shopping list.
- Packaged foods, I've noticed, have gone very expensive for what you get. Consider baking your own muffins, cookies, and desserts.
- Clean your fridge/freezer regularly so you will be aware of foods that need to be used up first. I like to clean my fridge before a big grocery shop and I try to make one meal from the fridge before I do my shopping. This practice clears up your fridge for the new foods that you will store in it and help minimize food waste.
What simple tips from the above-mentioned tips will you be using this week? Extra tip: Write those tips in your daily or weekly planner.
