Frugal Food Life: How to save money on big family eats

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Samesies. Anna is a beautiful, handier, version of me who happens to have nice things. Otherwise, samesies. She blogs at In Honor of Design. Anna posted some tips for saving money on food for a big family, and I wanted to jump in and offer our suggestions as well.

Although our family size has increased every two years, our grocery budget hasn’t. With seven solid-food eaters home for three meals every day, the dollars add up fast. Here’s how we keep the kitchen stocked and the tummies full.

Find Your Favorites

I’ve never been able to get a real meal plan going.  But what has worked for us is writing down a list of our go-to meals and making sure we have ingredients on hand for those easy dinners when time is short. 

We eat other things than this, but these are our favorite always-ready-to-go meals.

Spaghetti
We always have whole wheat pasta and 28 oz cans of crushed tomatoes from Aldi (do you have an Aldi? They are the best!) in the pantry.  Add a little oregano and garlic to those crushed tomatoes, and viola! Tomato sauce without any added sugar. Whole wheat spaghetti has more fiber and protein than regular pasta.

When we have more time, we’ll saute an onion before cooking the sauce and add in some cooked meat of some sort.  But the kids are okay with quick-quick pasta and sauce as long as we allow generous sprinkles of the Parmesan cheese.

Tacos
I’ve experimented with how much pinto beans I can mix with ground beef and still call it “taco meat.” We can do 2 lbs of dried beans (cooked ahead of time) per pound of ground beef. As long as we add enough salt and cumin, no one notices or cares.

The kids like tacos best with cheese and black olives, which aren’t super frugal, but we can get by with one can of olives for the whole family.

Roast + Veg
On winter Sundays we do a roast in the oven along with carrots and onions. We serve roasted (from frozen) broccoli or roasted green beans (which I pick up for $1 to $1.50/lb) as a side. Here’s our broccoli recipe.

Breakfast Burritos
Whole wheat tortillas, scrambled eggs, and cheese are one of our quickest frugal go-to meals. We’ve found that scrambled eggs are one of the first foods that kids can “cook,” so that makes breakfast burritos a meal that can be outsourced if one of the littles needs extra mom attention.

Grilled Cheese/Egg Sandwiches/Toad in a Hole
These are all just variations on a theme. As long as we make sure we have sufficient whole wheat bread, some cheese, butter, and eggs, we can be prepared for dinner. It’s easy to drum up some carrot sticks or applesauce as a side.

Minimize Waste

General Veggies
I don’t know about your house, but at our house, leftover pizza, lasagna, bratwurst, etc. is not a tough sell. We reheat our leftovers for lunch/dinner so that they pretty much never have to get tossed.

But no one is really excited about re-heated cooked carrots or broccoli. Or green beans. They get a little sad in the fridge.

Although we don’t always stick to it, typically Monday is soup day. On Sunday I start the dried beans soaking, and after the kids go to bed, I dice up all the sad vegetables in the fridge to plop in the soup the next day. (I’ll also dice up some fresh carrots/onions/celery then, since the cutting board is dirty anyway.)

We use bone broth and sometimes add in a pound of ground beef or diced chicken. The key is seasoning and tasting repeatedly until it’s perfect. We add chili powder and cumin to make it “chili” or bay leaf, sage, and thyme for generic vegetable soup. 

If it cooks all day in the crockpot on Monday and the veggies are diced pretty finely, no one complains.

If your family isn’t super into soup, you can transition by offering lots of crackers and cheese. And as long as you keep tasting your soup and adding a little salt and seasoning til it tastes right, it’s easy to be successful.

And if your family really isn’t into soup, you can try the other trick of pureeing any leftover vegetables hanging around in the fridge and adding it to spaghetti sauce or taco meat. No one wants leftover mushy carrots, but they don’t complain when it’s added to the spaghetti sauce in small amounts.

Spinach
Other than getting some whole romaine heads in the summer for grilling, we don’t buy lettuce anymore, just spinach. (Side note: the kids *did* notice when there was leftover romaine in the soup. We won’t be trying that again.) But when we don’t use our fresh spinach before it starts getting moist-y. I throw it into the freezer when it starts to turn.

Once frozen (we just keep it right in the original plastic bag with a twist tie on top), the spinach can be massaged so that it is no longer leaves but tiny, seasoning-sized crumbles. (The massaging process makes a jolly crunch-crunch sound.)

Those crumbles get added into eeeeeverything in our house. Spaghetti sauce. Taco meat. Sprinkled on pizza. At first the kids balked at it, but I was sure to tell them that my goal is to make it so they don’t taste it. The key is to start with only adding a little bit at a time, stopping juuuust before it’s tasteable in the dish.

Meats
We don’t have trouble with leftover meat going bad, but the best tip is to chop up leftover meat right away. Chicken, pork, ham, or beef can be diced and put into sandwiches, quesadillas, casseroles, eggs (mostly just ham), or soup. If we don’t have a plan for our leftover meat, it gets diced, labeled, and thrown in the freezer. Then on Sunday when we’re getting ready for meals for the week, we can grab a bag for soup or whatever.

Just Don’t Buy It

I guess it sounds simple, but if something isn’t nutritious or for a special occasion, we don’t buy it. No pop. No chips. No granola bars. Chances are if it’s convenient and tastes good, it’s probably also expensive.

Breakfast
We stopped buying cereal (unless it’s a special situation, like for an early doctor appointment) and switched to buying oats and making oatmeal. The kids sometimes add a little peanut butter or diced apple and cinnamon. (They’ll sneak in a squirt of honey if I’m not around, the rebels. We get individual stevia packets from Aldi, too, which better regulates the sweet-i-fying.) We also offer the option of eggs. In our house, breakfast is oatmeal and eggs. Maybe occasional toast if we’re in a hurry.

Snacks
For snacks, we primarily get apples, oranges, carrots, and bananas. I watch the prices so we don’t pay more than $1/lb for apples or oranges and below $0.50/lb for carrots and bananas. Occasionally we’ll have nuts available for snacks as well.

As a special treat, we’ll air pop some popcorn and drizzle on a little melted butter and salt. That’s all. Nothing else for snacks for us, because otherwise it adds up veryveryvery fast. “If you’re not hungry enough for a carrot, you must not be that hungry” is our motto. 

Since raw carrots, apples, and nuts are still sort of choking hazards for Mateo, we do also get unsweetened applesauce and plain Greek yogurt for snacks as well.

We were gifted a set of popsicle molds, so we will pick up some 100% juice and use the molds to make popsicles. After perusing the “healthy” popsicles at the grocery store, it’s clear that investing in a set of molds and some juice is much a more affordable treat.

(Though because the molds we have had are plastic, undergoing extreme temperature changes, and subjected to vigorous force in order to free the popsicles, we have broken several molds. It might be worth it to invest in a silicone set or even a stainless steel set. This guy is holding up well.)

Lunches
For lunches, the kids make themselves pb and j almost every day. We get the 100% whole wheat bread from Aldi that’s $1.49/loaf as well as the organic peanut butter (so no added sugar) and Polaner All-Fruit Spread from Walmart.

We sometimes will do something with eggs or leftovers for lunches, depending on what breakfast was. I make myself a salad using baby spinach from Aldi.

In All Things, Gratitude

We’ve been gifted with leftovers from gatherings, windfall apples, and surplus meat on occasion. Those gifts have brought to life the idea that “every baby is born with a loaf of bread under his arm.” God always provides, even when it’s not on our timeline or how we expect.

It may not be all that exciting to eat simply, but it’s worth remembering that there are benefits beyond saving money.

– It helps our kids to be grateful for the special family celebrations and gatherings. (The individual bags of Cheetos at a church lunch or cake at a cousin’s birthday party are veryvery appreciated.)

– We’ve had lots of good family conversations about how we choose to use the family budget and how other people in the world eat.

– We save a lot of mental energy by not searching out and trying new recipes that may or may not work.

Ultimately the best tip for feeding a big family on a limited budget is to maintain a grateful heart, even when pressing on seems excessively boring or difficult.

In what ways does your family cut food costs? We’re always looking for new ideas!