Cook with Friends
Posted by Gail | Filed under Good ideas
Canadians spend a lot of money on food. We know we should eat at home more; it’s not only healthier, it’s way cheaper. But we just can’t seem to find the time to make those meals from scratch. Between hockey and dance classes, piano and Scouts, over-time and that night-course we’ve jammed into our already packed schedules, we feel like we’re constantly on the run. So we grab our food where we can, dropping hundreds of dollars a month in fast-food joints and kicking ourselves for not feeding ourselves and our families better. Want another way to meal prep? Interested in saving money and having fun with some friends?
Start a Cooking Club. Get two or three (or four or five, depending on how big your kitchen is) friends together on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon and cook up a storm. The idea is for each of you to bring the ingredients to make a meal that will feed all of your families.
Let’s say there are four of you in all. Each meal you cook would have to serve four families (or you could bulk up the recipes to double up the output if you like). At the end of the afternoon, you each have four different meals to take home and put in the freezer for those nights when there’s just no time to cook.
There are all kinds of recipes that lend themselves to this approach from spaghetti and lasagna to chili and stew. (My Bootie recipe is a perfect freezer option.) You can pre-cook chicken with peppers and onions in a taco seasoning and then add the taco shells, salsa and cheese on the day. Make a batch of mushroom chicken and then you need only add the freshly cooked pasta and a salad to feed your family a fabulous meal in very little time.
The key is to have fun while cooking up a variety of dishes. A glass of wine and lots of laughter will turn batch cooking into a social event you’ll want to repeat. And it’ll keep you guessing about what you’ll be enjoying for dinner. If you don’t want to end up with food that’s too spicy or too “weird” for your family’s tastes, invite friends with similar tastes to yours. Want to experiment with food you’ve never cooked at home, mix up the cultures of the cooks and watch magic happen.
Shopping in bulk, cooking in large portions and using fresh ingredients to create your own frozen meals means a higher level of quality and big savings over the fast-food you would have ended up resorting to because you didn’t have a better plan.
July 25, 2012 at 8:12 am
with 4 sons (now launched) and a full time job, batch cooking and my freezer saved not only some $$$ but my sanity.
July 25, 2012 at 9:07 am
A cooking club is not a bad idea, I wouldn’t have to cook so much in the week. I must say the minute I am in a position to hire someone to cook for me, it’s a done deal. I don’t mind cooking easy dishes, but it does take up a lot of time and I would rather be doing something else.
July 25, 2012 at 9:09 am
I love cooking from scratch! I grew up on a island so fast food was a real treat because you only got it when you went to the mainland for supplies. I know growing up I wasn’t always thrilled with dinner, but now that I’m a mother, and training for a marathon I know how important the proper food is for myself and my two daughters (1 and 3). I know it’s hard to find time to cook but I always make a point to batch cook or pre-prep things on the weekends when my husband is with the girls! I’ve gotten to the point that I can throw all my soup ingredients into 1 container and my husband knows what to open when and how long to cook it, so we’re getting better at sharing the load and getting delicious, healthy food in our family!
I had to laugh at the idea of wasting hundreds of dollars on fast food because we spend about $500 a month on food and toiletries and I feel like that is a FORTUNE but since we buy so much milk, and locally grown veggies through a community shared agriculture it gets a bit inflated!
July 25, 2012 at 10:41 am
I would be interested to know what the average Canadian family of 4 spends on groceries monthly. Sometimes I feel I’m spending too much. I live on the West Coast. We eat mostly at home.
July 25, 2012 at 11:02 am
Don’t forget the single or people without children/empty nesters. I know when I was single, I barely cooked decent meals for myself. I could have lived off of eggs & toast. A cooking club preparing individual meals is also a great idea! You can buy freezer containers designed for individual meals – then you have your own homemade quality freezer dinners to heat up.
Pinterest has a ton of links to freezer meals. Check it out!
We do not eat out often – maybe once per month, I spend an average of $500-600/mth on groceries including dog food, cleaning supplies & toileries for a family of 3 in Nova Scotia.
July 25, 2012 at 11:37 am
I have been thinking about doing that for a little while. Being single, it is not only a matter of time, but a matter of diversity. I do not like to throw away food, nor spend big time on preping meals, so I end up cooking in batch and eat the same thing all week. It gets boring, fast.
I was thinking to join a community kitchen in my city. I feel kinda bad, because I am not really in need financialy…
July 25, 2012 at 11:39 am
Another option for the single people or the families of two is to cook “family sized” meals (serving 4 – 6) but put the leftovers into single size serving containers and freeze them. You then have dinner options (5 minutes in the microwave) for those rushed nights. I have been doing this for years and my freezer is usually full of a mix of supper options on nights I don’t want to or don’t have the time to cook. Because of this I rarely eat out and I have very little food waste.
July 25, 2012 at 11:41 am
Sandy, to be honest I spend about $1,000+ on groceries for the month for the 4 of us. I know it’s a lot, but we buy really good ingredients (organic, etc.) and my kids eat like pigs. I’d love to know what other people spend as well. I’ve never managed to cut down on my grocery bill and we eat out sometimes too. I really don’t like buying hormone-injected/mutant food and we love expensive things like delicious cheeses, fish (really expensive), etc. We always cook from scratch and almost never throw anything away.
July 25, 2012 at 11:48 am
Great idea Gail! I am just doing a spending analysis and realizing that we have spent WAY too much on eating out lately – especially in June when it gets crazy at work. Time for a change!
However, does anyone have other ideas for foods? I find there are limited choices for what freezes well and I don’t want to keep eating chili, lasagna and stew (especially in the summer – those are fall and winter foods to me). THoughts?
As for spending, I agree with Rachael. We spend 800+ a month but a lot of the choices are more expensive due to dietary restrictions and we are picky about the meat and eggs we buy. Also, I go to 1 of 2 big name stores that I love. They are more expensive but I can get everything I need (including cleaning items) in one store – my time and gas are worth something too!
I was shopping for a while at Freshco – they will beat any price. You just have to show them the flyer of the competitor. Only suggestion with this is that you need to have it all organized so you are not scrambling at the checkout! And again, there are a couple items I can’t purchase there.
July 25, 2012 at 12:18 pm
I drop in and out of freezing meals. I have some great recipes that take around or under 30 min. Thank you company’s coming. As to how much we spend on food. Around $500/mth for 2 adults, a kindergartener and a 2 yr old. I do take cat food and litter out of a cat jar and eating out, if by yourself, has to come out of your entertainment jar. I watch flyers but we buy a lot of fruit and veg, though I don’t find it too pricey. I buy a lot in the larger bags to cut down on cost. I buy the odd organic thing. I can’t stand the “season” frozen chicken so I do buy that fresh.
July 25, 2012 at 12:22 pm
We did this in June and had so much fun and so many meals. My mother in law, sister in law and myself each picked two recipes from a cookbook series called “The Big Cook”. They have the recipes divided into single meal all the way to 8 meals (each meal feeds 4 to 6 people) . So we went home with a ton of food. We each chose onechicken and one ground beef meal so costs were similar (although I havedone onebig cook where one personbuys all ingredients and then cost is divided). Since my mother in law is single, her ’single’ meal got packagedinto 4, and then she gave some of those for my Dad who is also single. Well worth a few hours to prep for so many meals. The Big Cook has a website and Facebook page, go check it out!
July 25, 2012 at 2:58 pm
We are a family of 4 and on average we spend about $900 a month (including toiletries etc) for groceries. I have 2 teens that need to eat A lot and often!
One of my Fav meals is Pulled Pork.
All you need is a Pork shoulder (really cheap cut) a can of Dr Pepper or Coke (not diet) and a bottle of your favourite bbq sauce (or like me home made).
Do not trim the pork, put it into a slow cooker, pour the pop over and cook on low for 12 hours (just leave it overnight)
Once it’s cooked, pull the meat apart with 2 forks (hence the name pulled pork) and mix about a 1/2 cup BBQ sauce( more or less, its up to you)
Serve on toasted buns with a salad , over a bed of rice or on a baked potatoe, with cheese and you’re done.
You can add: onions, carrots, garlic, cumin or any number of other ingredients to the slow cooker but you do not Have to. (strain them out before you add the bbq sauce)
IF there are leftovers (never in my house) it freezes really well.
July 25, 2012 at 3:10 pm
Mees-in summer I make sure there a lot of quick thaw proteins in the freezer (e.g., chicken breasts frozen flat in a single layer, pork chops, fish) and grill these and make a quick salad on super busy nights. It’s also cooler to not use the oven hot days.
Other go-to quick meas:l frozen stir fry veggies with shrimp (thaws and cooks quickly) with a simple Asian sauce served on rice (I buy the quick cook brown rice) or rice noodles (cook in 5 minutes in boiling water), homemade pizza (batch cook the sauce, freeze in individual containers, or use jarred tomato sauce in a pinch, make the dough in the breadmaker with the timer set so it’s done when we get home, or buy a ready-made crust, quickly chop some veggies and shred some cheese, and bake in about 12 min-cheaper, healthier and quicker than delivery!), the cashew chicken from Rachael Ray’s originial 30 minute meals cook book is also a favourite I can make in my sleep now (it really is less than 30 min, unlike some others in her books in my experience).
I have to get back into batch cooking. Since returning from mat leave, I’ve resorted to the super fast (but healthy) meals as listed above, because we don’t want to eat out much, due to budget (daycare is a killer!) and because I don’t want to feed the junk to my 1 year old. I used to spend Sunday afternoons making pots of soup or baked pastas so we’d have something to grab on nights we didn’t want to cook, but now a busy walking 1 year old makes this endeavour a bit more challenging. I hope one day he’ll be interested in helping cook and then it can be a family activity that will also teach him a frugal life skill!
July 25, 2012 at 5:07 pm
Me again. I spent $1200 on food this month, that includes toiletries. Half our meals are vegetarian, half are meat based. Most of our produce is organic, exept bananas, oranges, things with a thick skin. I shop at Superstore, Planet Organic and a local butcher shop. I only buy what I have to at Planet Organic, cause they are usually more expensive. We eat pretty healthy, very little junk. We miight eat out once a month if that. My goal is to get it back down to $1000, kinda blew it this month.
July 25, 2012 at 5:11 pm
Planning was my secret to cooking success when I had kids at home and was a busy working mom. I developed a 4 week menu plan of nutritious family faves and rotated in seasonal and new dishes. Sunday would find me cooking a two meal dinner and protein for the week which would then go in the freezer for a quick toss with noodles, pasta, rice or potatoes. For example, one half a batch of cooked ground beef could be tacos one night and then the rest was used for pasta sauce the next. There were always good, tasty meals ready in a short time.
It was a lot of work initially, but it really worked for me as I knew what I needed and shopped for the sales with my master list. This may help you too.
July 25, 2012 at 9:28 pm
i’ve done this a few times with friends and it’s fun and helps me out a ton. it’s the prep work that’s killer and if you can have all that done, then all you have to do is pull it out the night before and cook it when you get home. I’m trying to be proactive to do a few freezer meals myself this summer, or at the very least just cook 2 portions of something and freeze the second one, it does help.
July 26, 2012 at 1:59 am
We are a family of 6 and spend $1200 a month on food (Vancouver), personal care items and household cleaning supplies. It is spot on for Gail’s budget of $50 per person per week. The cooking club sounds like a great idea but our family is larger than most of my friends families so I don’t think it would work for us
July 28, 2012 at 1:48 pm
@Pyschsarah – thanks for the tips! I do the quick protein with salads in the summer too as well as the homemade pizza. I like the stir fry freeze idea!
July 29, 2012 at 1:16 am
I am feeding myself and my brother, I only shop when items are on sale. I spend average $300/month on food. Occasionally, I will call my girlfriends and have a cooking party in my little kitchen and we always have a blast. Also plenty of left-over to take home.
When we were living with our family of 6 adults and 1 baby, we spend over average $1500/month. We had 2 large fridge at home and a large walk-in pantry stocked from top to bottom.
July 30, 2012 at 11:27 am
We plan on $180/wk ($720/mth) for a family of four located in Ottawa. Our oldest is a teenaged boy who is an eating machine who also attempts to eat extremely healthy (no filling him with pizza pops and KD for between meal snacks). My husband is alergic to the sprays used on some tree fruits so if the skin is eaten it has to be organic (apples, cherries, peaches etc). According to my spreadsheet we’re actually averaging $178.33/wk for 2012 so far.
When I started tracking our grocery budget about 8yrs ago we were spending about $250 a week and our kids were very young. Over the years we’ve made both small and larger changes and managed to reduce the budget by about $10 every year from the previous year’s amount. Initially we did the obvious stuff, no more jugs of fancy orange juice, instead mix up a can of frozen concentrate. Then no more premade items (pizzas, lasagnas, stuffed chicken breasts, etc). Eventually we moved on to meal planning around the weekly sales. This is the first year in the past 8 that I haven’t reduced the planned budget from the prior year. Given that prices have gone up and our kids eat more each year, we’ve finally reached our comfortable minimum without sacrificing quality. We eat out only 5-6 times a year and take all our lunches 99% of the time.
Personally I’ve never found freezing complete meals works for me. A frozen meal would take most of an hour to defrost/heat. If I have that kind of time, I’ll make something fresh. What does save a ton of time is freezing meal components. When ground beef goes on sale I buy 15-20 pounds and fry it all up and freeze it in 15-20 packages. Then any night I can defrost the meat in the microwave in under 5 minutes and have dinner on the table in under 30 minutes (tacos, sloppy joes, spaghetti, etc). Think how many recipes you have that start off with “brown a pound of ground beef”. With that already done, dinner is a breeze. After Christmas I buy a couple of small turkeys on sale, cook them and package up all the meat in 2cup amounts for our favourite recipies (enchiladas and tetrazini). I also buy peppers in bulk, chop them and freeze on spread out on cookie sheets covered in waxed paper. Then dump the pieces into a freezer bag. With prechopped peppers it’s easy to grab a handfull for stirfrys, pasta sauce, omlets, and casseroles. Most nights we cook extra of some part of the meal to purposely create leftovers as the basis of the next meal. When baking a chicken, do two. The extra meat can become the next night’s enchiladas, stirfry, nachos/quesadillas, or casserole. Cook extra pasta or rice one night and save yourself repeating that step the next night. Fried rice is best made with day old rice. Leftover pasta + chicken easily becomes a casserole. It’s a rare night when everything was cooked fresh that night. We rarely eat leftovers in the original form – we take those as lunches. In the heat of summer I try to avoid boiling water for noodles/rice/potatoes repeatedly when doing extras one night eliminates the job for the next night.
July 30, 2012 at 2:32 pm
For two adults and a two year old, we’re spending around $500/month on food. This includes:
$66/ a month for two huge agriculture baskets of seasonal, organic fruit and veg, which I can pick up at work and lug home.
$30/month for pull ups (a relief to stop buying diapers, but still an expense).
At least $20/month for butter, as I bake from scratch several times a week.
I buy on sale, with an eye to stocking the pantry and freezer (most prepared foods go on sale every 4-6 weeks, with amazing regularity, as do most meats). This is true for conventional meats but not ethically raised meats, I have found. Our freezer cost less than $100 and has saved so much time and effort, it’s well worth it (and the cost of running it).
We also bought a giant crockpot, so we can roast 2 chickens in it, or make a double batch of chili or stew or soup to freeze – it’s been a great help.
We eat vegetarian dinners at least twice per week, I make all of our treats and snacks from scratch, as well as all meals from scratch, and I often make double or triple sized meals and freeze the duplicates for another day. There is always pasta sauce in the freezer, for example, and on days when I haven’t planned dinner and there is no time, I can whip up a German pancake or an egg frittata in about 20 minutes. Time is the hardest thing to come by, as a working mom, so anytime I can maximize that, I go for it – I never roast less than 2 chickens at a time, for example (freeze the extra’s meat or use for sandwiches next day). When I’m really organized, I either cook or prep ingredients for the week’s dinners on the weekend, and then dinner can be on the table very quickly – otherwise, I still plan meals, shop to the plan, and use pantry items first.
I also freeze lunch-sized leftovers to take to work, or to feed the baby on those nights when we adults can’t hack dinner. Though now that she’s 2 1/2, it’s a lot harder to invoke the ‘do as I say not as I do’ for dinner.
Our biggest grocery expenditures are meat and cheese – haven’t found a way to cut costs on those items yet, as we’re unwilling to buy really poor quality. We live in the most expensive part of Canada, on an Island, so everything is super expensive compared to the mainland.
I, too, don’t like really heavy meals in summertime. Some summer meals that can be frozen – quiche, meatballs of all types to serve with rice or on a roll (we like chicken with ginger, garlic, and cilantro or lamb with mint), marinade-in-the-bag raw frozen meats to throw on the grill, taco fillings, fish and shredded veggies folded in parchment bags with a splash of wine or citrus to bake in the oven… the only things you can’t really freeze are eggs, potatoes, and flour thickened sauces.
July 31, 2012 at 4:24 pm
We spend $1000 per month on groceries/toiletries for three adults and a 20 month old who eats like a teenage boy. I don’t buy anything processed but we consume more meat ($$$) than I’d like and buy organic, hormone & antibiotic free, which also adds up. My husband and I are huge eaters and refuse to skimp on quality but I do make lots of cheap dried beans, legumes and grains to bulk our meals up. We do eat out once per week but it comes out of the “Entertainment” part of our budget. We also use cloth diapers, so that saves a lot of money.
August 5, 2012 at 4:28 pm
I have been trying to cook from scratch more – much healthier for us. My primary source of new ideas is allrecipes.com and pinterest. I have found so many great recipes there!