[quote=CA renter]Would you mind sharing your recipe, AN? 🙂
We still struggle (a lot) with the grocery bills. We are nowhere near $500/month with our family of five. Does this include things like paper towels, toilet paper, soap, shampoo, deodorant, etc., etc.? Sometimes, our grocery store has a better price than places like Target, so we sometimes buy these items at the grocery store.
You and UCGal were really inspiring me to become more thrifty with groceries, but it’s just not happening in real life. It might not help that we often have other kids here for dinner. We love having others over to eat, so won’t give it up, but it does affect our bills a bit. I still think that our family is the main culprit, though; we really like good food.[/quote]It’s all about the type of food you eat. Of course when we eat steak and potato, it’s quite expensive. I don’t think it’s possible to stay within my budget if our daily staple is steak and potato. Luckily, our daily diet is not steak and potato. You can look at the many different noodle dishes from various Asian countries for examples. Besides noodle dishes, which are quite cheap to make, here’s another example of a dish that we eat: http://gastronomyblog.com/2007/03/20/thit-kho/. Then we would buy fresh vegetable like Ong choi. A big bunch would only cost a few $. You can stir fry some and make soup with the other. That’s typically how our meals would be broken up. You have some kind of meat dish, when you make it very flavorful, you don’t need a lot of meat. Then we would have some kind of veggies, then some kind of soup. Rice would tie it all together. The meal I just described probably will cost you about $10 and would feed about 10 people.
As for paper towels, toilet paper, soap, etc, I buy from costco. We don’t go through those stuff too often, but I guess you can budget about $50/month for all of those.
I have family parties quite often, but we still eat Asian food at those parties. An example would be eating the chicken pho that I stated earlier. It feed a party of 15 people for $15.
I can list many more, but you get the point. A lot of these dishes only about about 1lb of protein. So, it’s not that expensive to make. Also, where you shop for grocery makes a huge difference too. Checkout Zion and H-Mart for veggies and herbs and you’ll be shocked as to how expensive those same thing are at Vons/Albertson/etc.
