Slash your grocery bill by making your own homemade family favorite food items with a few simple and inexpensive ingredients.
One of the problems with only shopping for loss leaders at the grocery store is that sometimes you run out of some of your standard family favorite items before the next sale, or those items never go on sale in the first place. Sometimes the solution to this can be to purchase the store brand or version of the product to save money, but other times this just won’t work. Either the store brand isn’t the same quality or it is still too expensive. You can really get both the quality you want and save a good amount of money when you create your family favorites from scratch.
Have you heard of Jonni McCoy? She runs the website called MiserlyMoms and is famous for making her own homemade family favorites, such as chocolate syrup. Since my kids love chocolate milk, I thought I would give this a try. Another frugal mom, Amy Dacyczyn’s who wrote The Complete Tightwad Gazette has a really good recipe for homemade chocolate syrup. You can pick up her book at the library. A whole months supply of chocolate syrup will cost you about $1.
I’ve known people who make homemade yogurt, homemade butter, homemade baking mix, homemade pickles, homemade cereal, homemade soda, homemade pop tarts, and even homemade peanut butter. Just figure out what items you normally buy that are a regular expense in your food budget and find a good recipe to replicate it at home.
Although it sounds strange, for us it has got to be mashed potatoes. Our family loves them so much that if I didn’t keep a stock of frozen individual servings on hand, we would be buying those expensive ready made tubs of the stuff.