General Tips and Tricks

4.  Just because a store is more expensive most of the time doesn’t mean their sale prices aren’t going to be better every now and then. For example, Safeway in Vancouver is, 90% of the time, more expensive than No Frills or Superstore. Every now and then their sale prices do go lower, so be sure to check all the flyers you can.

5.  Bigger doesn’t always mean cheaper. I’ve seen a few stores now putting the price per 100g or 100ml on the price sticker at the supermarket, which rocks my world entirely.  This saves my rusty math skills and also spending hours doing this math myself in the store with a calculator. For instance, today we bought sausages. There was a “family pack” which had a huge sticker saying “Buy MORE, Save MORE!“. When we examined the exact same brand’s exact same sausages in a smaller pack the per 100g price was the same. It doesn’t always pay [save?] to buy more.

As starving culinary students, and now bottom-of-the-food-chain cooks, my boyfriend and I are used to penny pinching while trying to eat reasonably well.  With the growing recession, this way of cooking and shopping seems to be coming back into style — I was recently informed that the latest buzz-word was ‘frugal’.  Maybe, just maybe I had some information to share with other people, who are seeing their economic situation begin to resemble my own.  Maybe, thanks to my techno-savvy boyfriend, I could place some of this knowledge online, in an easy to read tips format.  So here goes.  It’s highly possible that you’re doing most of this stuff already, if so, more power to you, because it’s not easy. But if there’s one trick that you can glean from this, then I will feel ridiculously satisfied.

Tip 1. Make and stock a pantry.

This is vital. It is also fairly easy to do. The key here is to know what staples you like to cook with. For us, our pantry usually has: 2 cans crushed tomatoes (for soups, chillis, and pasta sauces); 2 cans diced tomatoes (also for soups, chillis and pasta sauces), 2 cans black beans (for chillis, soups, burritos, quesedillas…); 2 cans chick peas (for hummus, curries…); 2 cans tomato paste (to thicken anything with tomatoes), various starches (rice, an assortment of pastas, panko, couscous, cornmeal); sugar; flour; salsa; spices and oats.

Fridge and freezer items — a bag of frozen mixed berries, a bag each of frozen corn and peas (frozen corn is cheaper, fresher tasting, and sweeter than canned, plus you don’t have to use the whole thing at once).  Various sauces as your tastes see fit: soy, ketchup, sambal olek, pesto, siracha [or another chili sauce], assorted vinegars.  Keeping these on hand is beneficial because you can choose to restock when the items are at a price that you like to pay, and having a dedicated space for these things enables you to stock up and buy more than you need when the price is good.

However, you don’t need to be like us and keep an extra bookshelf in the living room full of canned goods, making us look like some kind of crazy survivalists.

The second benefit to a well stocked pantry is that you are rarely out of items when you decide to cook something, thus taking some of the planning and panic shopping out of dinner.  When it comes time to do your shopping trip, you can just look at the pantry, see what you’ve used, and make a note to check the prices when you’re in the store.

Tip 2. Shop around and shop often.

This is not as easy as the first tip.   It requires a lot more time and effort, but it goes hand in hand. We live in the downtown core of Vancouver with grocery stores basically on every block, so it’s fairly easy for us to say “we don’t like the prices here, lets try the next place”.  But with the geography of Canada such as it is, this just isn’t feasable for everybody; however, having only lived the in the centres of large cities for my whole life, I have no experience with anything else, but you can’t win them all.
Knowing what each store has on sale (I am the flyer queen) is important to scraping everything you can from your hard earned dollar.  Dennis’ No Frills on Denman (Loblaws) had fresh chickens on sale for the last 2 weeks for $1/lb. A whole fryer chicken for $3.50! That’s crazy talk.  It made oven fried chicken, and stock — A meal for 2, and a freezer staple for $3.50. It’s hard to argue with that.  Because that sort of deal doesn’t come along often, we chose to stock up.  We also used the chicken carcass to bulk out some duck stock we made with an $9 duck (from Superstore at Metrowtown -also Loblaws).

Another part of this tip is to learn not to shop so much from a list or recipe, but to see what is fresh and cheap (often the same thing with it comes to seasonal produce), and to work your meals around what you buy.  For instance, using the cheap chicken as an example, for lets say $5, you could make an extremely tasty, hearty chicken corn chowder, enough to feed at least 4, plus have plenty of chicken meat left over.

If you can plan a shopping trip with a couple of stops at different types of stores, you might find you could save a fair bit and even get better quality produce.  We shop in an-around-the-houses way, going first to the previously mentioned Dennis’ No Frills, and then heading over to Aria grocery store on Robson and Bidwell (where we’ve found you can get excellent deals on whatever produce they have that day) before heading home.  Making that second stop enables us to get produce at half of what you can at the supermarket, and for us, it’s pretty much on the way home.
Tip 3. Learn some basic culinary procedures.

In the last tip I mentioned making chicken corn chowder from a $3 chicken.   Knowing how to proceess/debone a chicken, will enable you to buy that chicken and not cook it whole (not that there’s anything wrong with that – Jamie Oliver has some nice recipes for whole roast chicken), or cut it into quarters (again not that there’s anything wrong with that, but the more you know, the more you can do).  If you know how to take the meat off the bones yourself, you can make stock and have cuts of fresh chicken that are much cheaper than the pre-processed stuff that’s been sitting in the meat cooler at the grocery store for days.  When making stock you can roast the carcass on a rimmed sheet pan (to catch all the juices), and then simmer it plain or with mirepoix to make a dark and flavourful brown stock.
Roasting or caramelizing vegetables allows you to extract more flavour from your produce.  I like to buy a 2lb bag each of onions, carrots, and a head of celery (aprox. $3-$4) and make a stock-pot (8L) of vegetable stock.  Caramelizing the onions and sauteeing carrots and celery until dark before adding the water makes a nice stock with a rich flavour.  After 45 minutes. I’ll strain it and reduce the stock further to store it in medium zip-lock bags.  When I want to make a soup or risotto, the equivilant of 8 litres of stock is ready and waiting for me in the freezer for the same price as 1L of bought stock would cost at the store, which is usually loaded with sugar, salt, and MSG.