My son’s first job was in a neighborhood grocery store when he was 15. After making a less than successful attempt at bicycle repair, he is back to work in another store with a deli. Having worked in commercial delis and restaurants has had an effect on him, of course. Being a vegetarian who must be dispassionate enough to serve meat seems impossible, but he has learned to do it. He grew up with a single mother who worked very hard to make sure the family food dollar stretched to herculean proportions. During food shopping trips he and his siblings were taught the importance of figuring unit price and cost per portion in their heads. Many of his friends don’t have the same knowledge that he learned while growing up.

I had a great conversation with him this weekend. Because both of us have a great passion for food, our focus became how some of his friends don’t know how to manage their money. They don’t know how to shop for food in a supermarket to maximize their cash. We went on to discuss how some people are given food stamps or coupons and are not given the knowledge and skills to use them to their greatest advantage. We talked about some of the Common Sense strategies he thought everyone knew.

Eating is an activity — along with not sitting in a dark room in the cold because you didn’t pay the electric bill — that benefits greatly from thinking ahead or as I like to put it, from having Common Sense. It is convenient to go to the store and buy all the entrees you want, quick-frozen and ready to nuke, individually packaged. Maybe everything you’d want would be in roll form: Swiss Cake Rolls™, Pizza rolls, fruit rolls, beef jerky rolls. And with your “dinner rolls” you could have single-serving beverages like soda and beer and imported, roasted-in-a-gold-pan coffee beans at dozens of dollars a pound. But is this Common Sense? As appealing as the individually-packaged meal plan sounds, in times of decreasing income and increasing energy costs, it will break your budget.

Common Sense requires a little forethought, and with this, your money can go a whole lot further. Make a meal budget as well as a household budget. Plan menus for a week’s worth of meals at a time. Think ahead. Write down the meals that you like. Do you like fried chicken? Write it down. Do you like chili? Write it down. Do you like lentil soup? Write it down. Under each meal idea, write down the ingredients needed to make it. If you need recipes, use a cookbook. Don’t have a cookbook? There are lots of great recipes on the Internet, there are cookbooks available at your local public library at no charge, or you can pick up used editions cheaply.

Now, look at the lists of ingredients for each of your recipes and combine them into another list. The goal here is to merge what you’ll need to purchase for your planned menus.  If your chili recipe calls for 28 ounces of canned tomatoes and your spaghetti sauce also calls for 28 ounces of canned tomatoes, you will write down “2 28-ounce cans of tomatoes”. If your beef stew recipe calls for beef, write it down and note how much you will need. Perhaps you’ve decided to have biscuits with your stew and pancakes for breakfast on Saturday. Both of those recipes call for flour and baking powder. If you purchase a five-pound bag of flour for $2.79 instead of a two-pound bag for $1.69, it’s like getting three pound of flour for $1.10. And the five-pound bag is a huge bargain compared to the 13.5 ounce can of flour for $1.99. Before you know it, you’ve got the beginning of your shopping list. Making all these lists may make you groan, and you may find it tedious at first, but it’s the key to making good, wholesome food less expensive.

By purchasing items, like chicken, that are on sale in large bulk packages, your meals will be cheaper and more convenient too. You can bake an entire “family pack” of chicken breasts in the same amount of time and with the same amount of fuel that it takes to bake a single one. For example, whole chicken breasts are on sale at your local Giganto-Mart for 77 cents per pound if you buy five pounds or more. Your weekly menu shows that you’re planning on baked, herbed chicken breast for dinner on Sunday, chicken salad for Tuesday’s lunch and hot chicken sandwiches for Wednesday’s dinner. Prepare all of the chicken you’ve purchased, serve what you want for dinner and package up the rest of the pieces. They can be frozen separately, sealed well in reusable containers, and/or stored in the fridge to reappear as chicken salad and hot chicken sandwiches later in the week.

Once you get into the habit of planning your meals and making that all-important shopping list, you will see that with a little extra foresight you can save both money and time. It’ll seem like magic to be able to make great dishes with ease because you have all the ingredients at hand. There will be no more expensive emergency pizza or Chinese take-out calls because you’ll know what’s for dinner and you’ll have its preparation well in hand.

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For more ideas on cheap eats, check these out:

Coyote’s Old-Style, Low-Stress, Homemade Veggie Soup

Coyote’s Howling New Year’s Day Chili

Coyote’s Fruity Fun Bread

Yankee Doodle Soup for Inauguration Day

Super Bowl ’Snow Worries Pulled Pork Sammiches

Coyote’s Not-too-Tricky Macaroni & Cheese

Cornbread CoyoteStyle