Friday, December 24, 2010

Bulk Shopping

If you have it in your budget to bulk shop, there are several instances where it can really come in handy. I make it a point to search the grocery ads for family pack meat deals, where the price can be significantly lower than if you were to buy individual meal sizes. Take hamburger. It is usually much cheaper to buy the five or ten pound family pack than the one pound meal packs but my family of three (well two and half since my little one is only 18 months!) certainly can't eat all that at one sitting! What I do is buy the large pack and divide it up at home. Buy yourself some cheap or on sale Ziplock style quart size freezer bags. A kitchen scale could come in handy for this but isn't required. If I buy a five pound package of burger meat, I open up five of the bags (much easier to open then in the begining than trying to do so with meaty hands, plus helps to keep the bacteria under controll) and then divide up the meat into five as close as possible even portions. Place one portion of meat into each bag and then wash your hands. Now try to flatten the meat inside the bags as much as possible and push out as much air as you can and seal up the bags. These little packages can then be stored flat in your freezer and take up hardly any space at all! For a meal, I just defrost one package in the fridge and I'm good to go. I do the same thing with chicken breasts, chicken thighs, pork chops, and steaks. I just put as many portions as my family needs, usually two-three breasts chops or steaks, in a bag and stack em in the freezer. This does take some time on shopping day but can save a bundle on the grocery bill. Is there anything special you do concerning bulk shopping?

2 comments:

  1. Hey there!!! I know exactly where you are coming from on this blog...its hard to even eat let alone save money on incomes these days, with a lot of people living on unemployment benefits. This post is great! One thing that I do, since the freezer bags are a bit expensive, is use the liners from cereal boxes to store meat in the freezer...for some reason these work really well for freezing meat.

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  2. Thanks for the comment! I had never considered using cereal bags, but that is very clever!

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