Save 60% or MORE on Food

Throughout my life one of the things I cut back on when I was short of money, was food. I would buy the cheapest things I could find to eat, but now I see that the savings were not savings at all. They were expensive by way of the chunks they took out of my health. What I wish I'd known, and did, actually, but I didn't consistently use what I knew, was that beans and rice are much cheaper than spaghetti and other pastas, and they are much healthier. I don't mean VanCamps Pork and Beans, I mean cheap, pinto beans from the grocery, dry and in bulk, and brown rice. But not just pinto beans, there are black beans, navy beans, black eyed peas and more. (The only kind to be extremely careful of is raw kidney beans because if they do not reach a boiling temperature for a certain amount of time they can be poisonous. I learned this when I lived in England and people who cooked them in Crock Pots were dying from the poison because Crock Pots were not hot enough to eliminate it.) Crock Pots actually play a part in my way of saving money on food. The way they do that is that food is not just nourishing and physically essential for health, it's also warming to our spirits and emotionally comforting. For instance, when the utility company shut off my heat and lights on April 4, 2007, it was still very cold and I wasn't prepared to be without my electric oil filled radiators. So by the afternoon I would be shivering and chilled to the bone. Then, come late afternoon or early evening a meal would be delivered to me because of how sick I've been, and after I ate it I would feel so warm and comfortable, even though my house would be colder because it was now dark and the temperature lower. In a way it reminded me of living in London when I was a silversmith. There were days when I'd pick up my little son from play-school and I'd be so tired, exhausted really, that I didn't see how I could go home and make dinner and not yell at him if he wanted more from me than my attention to making food for him and me. What I would do on days like that was take us to the "working man's calf" -- that's what John the Topologist called it -- and order us a slightly soggy but warm and effortless meal. (It was fun because Sadler's Wells Theatre was nearby and dancers and actors from the companies performing there regularly ate at the restaurant. Once it was particularly embarrassing because the lead dancer in Rambert Ballet was talking about doing lifts and how hard it was if the female ballerina was taller. I accidentally stood up to leave just as he and his friends did, and I towered over him and felt my height and weight to be more unwieldy than I ever had before.) More important than the times it was fun to eat there, however, was the consistent way it was relaxing and reassuring that things weren't harder than I could handle. From that experience, I can see why people go to McDonald's and Burger King and the like, even though the meals are very much more expensive in terms of money than can be made at home. The meals are extremely valuable because of the element of relaxation they involve, and the sense of reward that they may instill for a hard day's work. This being true, it's important to find a way to make quality, but cheap food at home that has the same sense of comfort and reward to it without huge effort when you are already tired. And, here's how: when you go food shopping buy dry beans, brown rice, lentils, and spices and herbs if you don't already have them. Onions are good because yellow onions reduce the incidence of skin cancer, so having some on hand is good so that you can quickly chop one up and add it to your Crock Pot of beans in the morning before you go to work. It only takes five minutes to put beans, water, an onion, maybe celery and some carrots, and for sure olive oil, salt, pepper, thyme, rosemary, sage, a bay leave and maybe an allspice or two into a Crock Pot with water, cover it, turn it on, and forget it till you come home to be greeted by the smell of a lovely home cooked meal. I know beans may not sound like much. And, if you aren't familiar with beans they may sound wanting in flavor without a bit of meat to jazz them up. But in reality they are wonderful tasting and very healthy for us, to boot. You can change the meal by adding tomato paste one day, a bullion cube another (I use only a portion of a cube at a time), brown rice still another day. When you think about it, you don't order vastly different things each time you go to McDonald's. Mainly you order the convenience and that greasy good taste we've become accustomed to, if not addicted to. Speaking of that rich, oil texture and flavor, you can make beans without olive oil, and if you're not used to olive oil you may find the taste a little odd to begin with, but it totally ratchets up the flavor and richness of the beans. You could also use other cooking oils, only olive oil is really good for us. And then, there's brown rice. Brown rice is very healthy making. If you have digestion problems or swollen ankles, it helps. Plus, brown rice is great for slimming because it makes us lose weight. I first heard about brown rice being able to make us lose weight some decades ago when several of us tried it and it worked for each and every one of us. At that time it was touted as "the brown rice diet" and it was said that you could eat anything you wanted with the brown rice and still lose weight, even if you ate the brown rice with sugar, raisins and whipped cream. For those of us that tried that extreme, it did seem to be true. The great thing about brown rice is that it has a sort of dumpling and gravy consistency if you cook it with chicken. I totally love that! Brown rice takes several hours to cook, so it's great in a Crock Pot, just be sure to put enough water in to allow it to plump up and not burn. When I compare how I feel after eating a Rammen Noodle dinner, or spaghetti and sauce, with how I feel after eating brown rice or beans there's no comparison. There's a huge contrast, in fact, because rice and beans are rich in actual nutrients. For instance brown rice is rich in B vitamins and beans are known to reduce the incidence of cancer. Rice and beans are satisfying and when cooked in the fall and winter in a Crock Pot while you are out at work they also make the home warm and inviting when you return. (I have brown rice cooking right this minute, as I do most days.) One neat thing is that if you get into the habit of cooking fresh every day you won't have to run your refrigerator, and that's an additional savings. Another neat thing is to freeze what you don't need at a particular meal, so that later you can prepare it as quickly as a frozen dinner from the grocery store, only WAY less costly.