Budgeting Tips: Learn to Cook

You might be asking yourselves, why is Financial Aid posting about cooking? Beyond wanting you guys to be as healthy as possible while you're in school, here's why - your food purchases make up a large chunk of your living expenses, and we care about your financial know-how as much as we do about what food you're fueling yourself with, so in order to get you guys on the right financial track we're throwing out some usable life lessons! This is one of those posts that’ll be more useful for those of you currently living on your own. So real quick, just to start us off, here’s some advice for everybody still in the dorms or living at home; learn to cook before you get out on your own. No joke, this is a skill that can potentially save you hundreds of dollars a month, and it’s something you can pretty much learn for free (thanks, Youtube). And if everything you’re cooking is really bland and gross-tasting, here’s another tip: use more herbs and spices. Most recipes are written to appeal to the greatest number of people, which means they’re pretty bland. As a general rule of thumb, double the spices in any given recipe, provided you like that particular flavor, and your food is going to start tasting a lot better or at the very least, a lot more interesting. 

Okay, now back to those of you currently in charge of your own kitchens. If your fridge is anything like mine was when I was living downtown and going to Cornish, beyond being shared by four to five people, it’s probably only got a few things in it and none of them are particularly healthy or geared towards providing multiple meals. Sometimes we got really fancy and had milk in our fridge. Other than that, mostly weird snacks we got on sale. One of the things we’re going to be doing on this blog is providing you with some basic financial education and life skills that high school no longer provides and one of those things is learning how to shop and cook on a budget – which can be particularly helpful around the holidays. So without any further ado, here’s some tips and tricks for you to start practicing over the next month.

Schedule one day a week to cook

Time is a massive issue. I won’t treat you like you’re special and tell you it’s ever not going to be a massive issue; you’re going to be just as busy when you’ve got a job as you are right now as a student. If you can’t make time now to feed yourself, you won’t be able to make time later either, unless you start practicing. It seems overwhelming at first, but if you actually budget your time it’s going to start feeling a lot more manageable. 

My food technique during school was to buy massive amounts of boxed red beans and rice and related foods whenever they were on sale and cook as it was necessary, or survive pretty much exclusively on Wheat Thins and half-sandwiches. This is not something I would recommend. Also, much like spending little bits of money here and there, spending little bits of time per week actually ends up meaning you’re spending a lot more time per week than if you just set aside two hours on (for example) Sunday and cooked a whole ton of food.

Generally speaking you have about five days before your food becomes questionable, and probably slightly longer especially if your fridge is particularly cold. So here’s what you do – find a couple recipes that make multiple servings and are full of ingredients like cheap vegetables, whole grains, and cheap filler like tomato paste, get your ingredients, and on Sunday set aside two hours and just make all of the food. Freeze some, throw some in the fridge, and look now you’ve got dinners you just have to microwave all week, no problem. No need to pay for dinner for basically the whole rest of the week.  

Buy a crock pot

Step in to any thrift store that sells home goods and you’re probably going to see a crock pot. This means you’ll be able to find a crock pot for under ten bucks, but if not seriously just go to Target and get a new one for about $40. Now, what the heck is a crock pot.

Well. It’s a pot. And you plug a warming base in to the wall, put the pot in it, and let food cook for a really long time without needing to leave your stove on. And by really long time, I mean you can cook food for like, twelve hours. Why would you want to cook food for twelve hours? Because it tastes really, really good.

 Make some great chili with a can of beans, some briefly cooked cheap ground beef, and a bunch of diced vegetables that produces eight servings for under twelve bucks for the whole meal (that is $1.50 for about a cup and a half of food per serving that will last you for five-to-eight days - think about how much more expensive the cafeteria is here and decide if the hour you’ll spend chopping vegetables and briefly cooking some beef and the three hours you’ll spend not paying attention to the crock pot as it gently bubbles your food into deliciousness while you do homework or play Fallout 4 or binge watch Peep Show are worth it) You can do the same thing with chicken noodle soup (throw whole boneless chunks of chicken in there, if it cooks for long enough it’ll shred itself) and basically also any other kind of soup. It’s a great way to multitask because you don’t have to stir, or really even watch it. You can do literally anything else while days’ worth of meals are being created. It’s the ultimate in both multitasking, time efficiency, and being super lazy. How often do you get to do all three.

Buy in bulk, and pay more up front

Buy in bulk. Buy quick-oats in bulk, buy spices in bulk, buy peanut butter in bulk. I don't mean Costco bulk, I mean bulk as in from the bulk section. If you walk into a store, and there’s a bulk section, I promise you that 99.999999% of the time the stuff in the bulk section is going to be way cheaper than the stuff that’s prepackaged. It scares you off with big up-front prices, like spices being $20 per pound. Do you know how much your standard jar of spices weighs? Not that much. This weekend I bought about eight ounces of Aleppo pepper for $5, which is a ton of Aleppo pepper figuratively speaking. This will last me for at least a year. Meanwhile, a two ounce prepackaged jar of Aleppo costs about $10. So basically if it’s available in the bulk section, get it from the bulk section.

Sometimes things will cost you more up front and you’ll want to avoid them because of it. Don’t do this. Save your money for one big grocery shopping trip and buy everything you need right then and there. Using that chili I mentioned as an example – sure, the beef is going to look expensive (tip, get it as lean as possible and get the stuff that’s marked for sell-by-end-of-day, as long as you plan to cook it that day – that’ll all make it cheaper) and you’ll need to get multiple cans of beans and the vegetables will all say terrifying things like “$4.00 per pound”, but it’s not that bad. Plus tax you can make that aforementioned meal for $15, maybe closer to $21 if you’re buying spices for the first time. But then you never need to buy spices again, and spending $15 to make several meals is way, way more cost-effective than spending $4+tax every time you want to get a cheap, quick fix from the café. Another fun shopping tip, in Washington your premade food is taxed - your fresh food products are not.

Pay attention to the price per ounces

Sometimes things seem cheap when they’re really not. My insanely thrifty roommate during Junior and Senior year taught me this trick – look at the price per ounce on the sales tag. Right by where the price label and bar code are, in every store, in the lower left or right hand corner is a little note that tells you how much that thing costs per ounce. It makes, way, way more sense to spend more money on an item that has better value than one that is cheaper up front but has less of the actual product in it.

Produce isn’t that expensive

It might say apples are $2 a pound, but weigh your apples. If you pick the right ones that’s like, three apples – it’s really not that expensive. It’s less expensive than candy or coffee or any of the things we buy throughout the day without thinking about it. So either find a new excuse not to buy produce, or rejoice and actually start weighing your produce at the store so you can buy things and stay within your budget!

Those are your intro tips to cooking when you’re not making much, or any, money. To help you guys out with this crucial life skill, we’ll be posting totally affordable easy to make recipes occasionally!