Some of these don't work out. A can of pasta sauce ($0.99) LARGER than a can of tomatoes (~$1.29) is cheaper in my grocery store.

I suppose if you're comparing to the top shelf pasta sauces (~$3.99) this is true, though.

Same thing with the salad dressing. Generic bottled is about $1.79, top shelf about $3.99 - $4.99. Ingredients to make it will easily top $8, and they won't make more than 3 bottles worth.

Heh, I read the end to fast, and saw "I'm heading to the farmer's markets ... so I can ... produce cage-free eggs."

Anyway, as a college student spending my first year in my own apartment, I can say the thing that has helped me the most in regard to grocery shopping is meal planning. Besides making it easy to write out a grocery list, I can plan for what I will do with left overs, so I'm not just making one big thing and eating it all week (which is incredibly boring).

Moreover, it takes out the guess-work within the week as to what I'm going to eat any particular day. After a long day of classes, coming home and searching the refrigerator is just annoying.

Additionally, I've been trying a lot of new meals and recipes I otherwise wouldn't have tried. By writing it down, I've made something of a commitment to myself to try whatever it is. As a result, I've come across quite a few delicious meals that I otherwise would not have.

Another tip not here: fresh herbs. Stores are carrying potted herbs that you can take home and repot in small ceramic pots inside or out. If you take care of them you can have fresh herbs year round for very little cost. Fresh herbs at the store are expensive and this is a huge savings.

Maybe when I find a recipe that tastes as good as Ragu Gardenstyle I'll switch. So far, nothing I've tried tastes as good. Saute some minced garlic & mushrooms in olive oil, brown some ground meat and pour the Ragu on top with some Three Cheese topping thrown in - quick spaghetti dinner.

I did sit down and measure out a 2-Alarm chili kit as a basis for my own chili recipe, so that saves money considering how much a chili kit can run. Especially when you consider that most chili spices are used in other recipes, it saves even more. Chili and lasagna are two things we don't eat away from home - we like our recipes far better.

I like honey mustard dressing. The simplest is to mix honey, mustard, and some EV olive oil in an amount to last you a few days. It's easy enough to adjust and experiment to get it to your liking.

Not many recipes get through my kitchen unchanged.

@henrygates: wow, wish I could do this. But I live in an apartment that gets little to no direct sunlight (this is great down here on the Gulf Coast for saving on A/C, but not so good for houseplants) and I have three cats that love to munch things. :(

Thanks, but I make my own...

Most of these break down to "if you have the time, you can save money by not paying for convenience". But I don't have a whole lot of free time, so I'm willing to pay for premade tomato sauce and prebagged salad. It's still way cheaper and healthier than take-out or fast food, and food is a fairly small percentage of my monthly bills anyway.

Of course, I'm also a single guy living on my own. If I had a big family to feed, the cost savings would be much larger.

If the cage-free eggs, or organic eggs are more expensive then regular eggs, you can save money by not falling for the lies of the organic movement. Cage-free chickens don't have a better life.

I haven't bought a jar of pasta sauce in 10 years.

But then when I use a can of San Marzanno tomatoes as my base, I don't think I'm saving any money. At least it tastes better, though.

@rpm773:

Same here. Read the ingredients on that jar of Ragu. Sugar is #2 after tomatoes. No thanks.

Make your own ketchup using tomato paste as the base. Store bought ketchup is 90% sugar. Use Spendra for sweetening.

@shepd: Same here. I use a big can of Hunts spaghetti sauce and it's only around 99 cents. It tastes better than anything I could make myself.

I'm a crappy cook.

@Conrad: But pastured chickens do. The eggs I buy come from pastured chickens raised outside on grass and since I've personally met the chickens, I can vouch for the comfort of their lifestyle.

@rpm773: I'm too poor to buy San Marzano tomatoes. It's literally a financial goal of mine to be making enough money that I can buy those tomatoes for regular use and not just special occasions.

I spend $80.00 a month total (just me) on food, personal care, laundry, & household cleaning products. My best advice is to have a little inventory of items you always use so that you buy only when on sale, shop EVERY grocery store with a price book (if you can't remember lowest costs), never pay over $2.00 a pound for meat, never buy pre-prepared foods unless they are cheaper (lasagna), never pay for personal care items as drug store rebates make them free. Rarely are products with coupons a best buy even when on sale alredy. Wal-Mart is NOT a discount grocery store and is not your friend when it comes to food shopping on most items. Learn to cook if you don't know how & never buy or make anything you don't like just to save money. Work as hard spending your money as you do making it! (if you have the time)

Instead buying eggs, get a chicken!!!

Lettuce seeds are much cheaper than lettuce. Buy the seeds & grow the lettuce for just pennies!!!

Instead of soy sauce, mix water with dark food coloring & salt!!!

Real savings come from saving TIME as well as MONEY.

I love home-made Mac & Cheese. It can be a time draining bandit. So make double or triple the size for a single meal and then freeze the leftovers. Now the TIME to make Mac & Cheese is effectively divided in half.

Spread out your shopping into BIG buying sessions and LITTLE buying sessions. Fresh foods are LITTLE buying sessions. Run in and get it over with. Staples, dry goods etc are the BIG buying sessions. Might only save 15 or 20 minutes by splitting the purchasing into Big and Little sessions every month but those few minutes can add up.

Always freeze scraps (bones, small chunks of meat) for use in soups and stews.

Oh, and homemade ice cream may not be cheaper (or less time consuming) but it always better.

@shepd: You live in a strange place--are you sure it isn't a fake store? @Kimaroo - 20% More Kitty Added!: Opening up a can (remember to discard the can) of tomato puree and pouring it on the pasta would taste better than Hunts.

@StanTheManDean: "homemade ice cream may not be cheaper (or less time consuming) but it always better."

Not when you forget to add the sugar. Trust me on that.

@jp: Probably corn syrup is #3 after water and tomato concentrate

It has been my experience that when you buy produce by the bag there can be some bad apples (or whatever) in there. Plus, you really should be buying that sort of stuff from the local greenmarket anyway, since the stuff is fresher and local.

@TheCoolestGuyInTown: You kid (I hope) but I use a lot of eggs, and there's actually a city ordinance where I live prohibiting people from keeping chickens in their backyard.

So that also puts a stop to the cockfights I was trying to organize.

@bombhand: Well, to be fair, I don't make my sauce more than once or twice a month (and less in the summer). At $4.99/can, I'd probably look for alternatives if I were making sauce multiple times per week.

Best tomato sauce: canned whole tomatoes, salt, pepper, fennel seeds (A MUST), and tomato sauce. Bring it to a boil and then scoop out the whole tomatoes and blend them roughly in a blender and then put them back in. Awesome. Use more whole tomatoes and less tomato sauce if you want it chunkier, and less whole tomato and more sauce if you want it thinner.

All in all, it takes about 10 minutes prep work (opening the cans of tomatoes) and about 30 minutes cooking time.

@madanthony: But really, is it that much more of an effort to cut some lettuce for a salad and rinsing it? Rather than opening the bag? You save maybe 20 seconds by buying a bag. The sauce is another thing, because yeah making sauce takes longer than getting the jar and heating it up in the microwave. But bagged salad has always been the biggest crock. A friend of mine just stopped buying it and opting for the whole heads and told me, "I can't believe how many salads you get out of one head of lettuce!" Yeah, and it lasts longer too.

@henrygates: Yep. I've got a basil plant I bought a few days ago. Unfortunately, it's raining today, so no sun.

I gave up buying potatoes in bags after having to regularly discard too many that were green from light exposure. If you have to throw away a quarter of the bag, you have lost your savings.

Fortunately I live in area with lots of competition for groceries so it keeps the regular prices more or less in line and the sales are excellent.

@Ragman: I love Ragu, and I'm going to try that dressing idea. Thanks.

I live alone and it can be hard to save by buying in bulk. Potatoes go bad before I can eat them all, and I don't have storage space for a lot of items. I do try to buy stuff on sale, or buy quantities I will actually eat. That at least keeps me from wasting it.

A lot of manufacturers make stuff in sizes for families. Unless it's nonperishable, I usually don't use all of it so stay away from that stuff.

@speedwell, avatar of snark: Have you put compact fluorescents in your fixtures? Because plants will grow pretty damn well under a compact fluorescent.

If you want to be fancy-schmancy, you need two fluorescents for a "semi-pro" set-up, one that's a warmer-spectrum and one that's a cooler-spectrum (and in adjustable-height workshop light type things), but for just growing some home herbs, a window sill with a nearby fluorescent bulb will probably get them everything they need. We've even used an old desk lamp with a fluorescent bulb on the kitchen counter.

@TheCoolestGuyInTown: I actually save a ton of money growing lettuce in my backyard garden. :)

I saved ridiculous amounts of money by the last six weeks of my pregnancy, keeping an eye out for personal care items and household goods (toilet paper, shampoo, paper towels, that kind of thing) and snagging two extra when I found them on sale. I hit P&G sale week with P&G super-saver coupons and saved like 40% on my grocery bill that week, it was crazy.

The point of this was to stock up with enough off that household stuff that we wouldn't have to buy any until September, so we wouldn't be running out of stuff when the baby was new and a grocery trip was a hassle, and to put a little buffer in our budget for the sudden added expense of diapers and so forth.

It worked so well I totally think it's my new strategy! (And I still have like 40 rolls of toilet paper left!)

The traditional rules do not always work. After years of favoring convenience over coupons I've seen the light. Last week my wife and I started a project to comparison shop local stores to make the best choice. While still working on this we have found some amazing things in the process like buying bulk is not always best. Example: Ramen at Walmart is .16 each and .165ea. in bulk packages of 12. Paper Plates at Costco are .053 each in packages of 300 while at Walmart the same plates can be had for .037 in packs of 100.

Additionally, making your own sauces, pasta, bread etc can be fun and delicious but to madanthony's point your time has a value as well. This should be factored in.

All that said... I'm printing the PDF... there is always something to learn!

@Conrad: I get all my eggs from a farmer's market, and sometimes when I'm driving by from an actual farmer who raises chickens. The eggs are fresh and deeeelicious. No comparison to grocery store eggs. Of course no eating raw so you have to skip the Rocky workout.

Bags tend to be the home of produce that aren't good enough to sell loose. They may have a few good specimens, but odds are you'll end up with a few bruised ones to go along with them.

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): I murdered all my lettuce last season. Anyway, we have bans against poultry here as well. I think it's rather silly. Chickens are useful animals kept in a relatively small caged space in the yard. And quieter than the neighbors annoying yippy dogs.

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!) wrote: "I still have like 40 rolls of toilet paper left!"

You might not want to have 40 rolls of toilet paper laying around when you get becomes a teen though.

@henrygates: you get = your kid. Sheesh.

@pecan 3.14159265:

But lots of the bagged salads are several kinds of lettuce, and maybe a few other veggies thrown in. To replicate that, I'd need to buy several different types of lettuce - and would end up throwing most of it out, because I don't really need 4 heads of lettuce.

@shepd: I have to agree some of these are just silly. I won't use a large homemade salad dressing in a week, but the store bought italian dressing will keep until the next presedential election.

Do people not know buying a head of lettuce is cheaper. Heck I even have a plastic knife made just for cutting up lettuce so to delay browning. They are three bucks at burpee.

@Kimaroo - 20% More Kitty Added!:

Hunts rhymes with what it tastes like.

Every canned sauce seems to have a chemical taste that I can't stomach. And that ingredient list has some words with too many syllables.

Not a comment to you, but to everyone: make a small effort to learn your way around the kitchen. It's one of the best skill sets you'll ever have, and nobody has a good enough excuse to not understand how food gets made. It's one of the most important activities you do in life.

@madanthony: I'm with you there. It's definitely difficult to buy "fresh" food in quantities suitable for a single person. Bagged salads are a good example of a product I *will* buy, as they're usually intended for a single meal (for 2-4 people) so I can get through it before things go bad.

I'm happy with the trade off. I'm willing to buy the pre-made pizza dough for $1.50, rather than spend several hours waiting for things to rise when the mood strikes me, but I'm not interested in paying for frozen pizza.

Then again, I'm the same person who refuses to make a left turn in traffic for cheaper gas, much to my mother's infinite chagrin.

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): Stockpiling is the secret to grocery savings. You buy bunches when it's really on special (or maybe free with coupons). It's there when you need it and you don't pay the regular price by running out to get it at the last minute.

@shepd: Always compare a home made version against an equivalent counterpart. If your home made sauce contains corn syrup and mystery low end "beef" then compare it to the 99cent one. Otherwise look for something better comparable.

I have also noticed some of the canned sauces have odd flavor enhancer or added ingredients that make them too acidic or too salty.

We make all of our own salad dressing. It really isn't hard. Now I can't stand the taste of Kraft type bottled dressings. They all taste too sour or too sweet.

@shepd: There are many salad dressings available here for .99 or .89 If you have coupons you can get salad dressing for pennies or free, I have gotten free salad dressing with coupons a few times this summer, and it was enough to last several months at least.

I make a very similar salad dressing and it certainly lasts for more than a week (I don't remember the recipe offhand since I don't have to make it often, but I know it has all that stuff plus garlic and god knows what else). Also, you don't need to make very much at a time, it's pretty strong so use it sparingly. Possibly the best thing my mum ever taught me!

I grow my own kittehs at home.

@henrygates: We got sucked into this. We started growing our fresh herbs: rosemary, thyme, basil, cilantro, sage, and some peppers for good measure. Then we realized how much of each of these we *actually* eat and how much pot space we need to truly keep ourselves sustained - it takes a LOT of basil to make a pesto! And pretty soon the pots were taking over our patio space.

@subtlefrog: Not that I'm complaining, I love our little container garden in the middle of the city. It was just eye opening, that's all.