This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at U Penn chapter.
There are a ton of ways to get easy, cheap meals. The trouble is, many of those meals are high in sugar or sodium and low in nutritional value. Grocery prices are high, and buying exactly what you want isn’t always economically feasible. Here are a three ideas to keep you eating healthily and within your budget.
1. One trick of saving money on groceries is preparing food that can be eaten many different ways and stretch across several meals. A large part of healthy affordable eating is practicality. Fill up your cart with foods that can become staples: foods like eggs, rice, and tuna. Tuna can be eaten with crackers, or made into a sandwich, salad or casserole. Eggs can be scrambled or used for an omelet for breakfast or boiled and eaten with lunch. Rice can be paired with any kind of poultry, or mixed with veggies, added to soups, even eaten with beans.
2. Be sure to find the sales and browse the coupons. Cheap doesn’t necessarily mean unhealthy. For example, when buying meat for the week, don’t overlook the items on sale. It might be chicken, or Italian sausage, or even steak — all of which go equally well with whole-wheat pasta, rice and beans, or can be paired with broth, rice, and beans and made into a soup. Sauces are a great item to stock up on while on sale. They have a long shelf life, and are a great way to spice up meals that easily become mundane.
3. Be as versatile as possible. The bottom line is, some foods are worth the expense. Vegetables, for example, are necessary to healthy diets, but the fact that they are both costly and spoil quickly can be a drain on expenses. This doesn’t mean you can’t buy them, just be smart about it. Plan out your meals for the week before going to the grocery store. Once you decide what you are going to make and which vegetables go best with those meals, you are well on the road to making cost effective purchases. Vegetables that you can stretch across a large number of meals are worth purchasing. Most of the aforementioned meals– omelets, rice and beans, pastas, soups– are great with vegetables mixed in.
Image courtesy of: Slimband.