What’s the one thing you can do easily to start eating better and saving money?

[travisgier]

Are you among the few who can cook gourmet meals on a budget? Cooking techniques, frugal recipes and food cost will get you where you want to be – eating better and saving money!
If we break down what it takes to save a lot of money, cooking may be the most practical skill of all and the corner stone of thrift and frugal living – cooking your own food will save you a lot of money. As food prices continue to rise, along with gasoline and other commodities, those who have mastered the cooking techniques, frugal recipes and food cost, may see their wealth grow faster then they expect. “How’s cooking going to help me get rich?” you say?
Quite simply, if you shop in the middle aisles of the grocery store (the processed food aisles), you may be paying twice as much for your calories as you would if you bought fresh food and prepared it yourself. This pre-packaged, toxic junk ain’t cheap! Some frozen “chicken nuggets” packed with message will cost you four times more for calories as a fresh whole chicken would. If you know how to butcher that chicken yourself, you save even more – it’s really quite easy and smart to do.
Food independence starts with being able to cook. So, you need to master cooking techniques like, basic knife skills, butchery, blanching, braising, sautéing, roasting, frying, and many more. Once you’ve picked up these practical skills, you begin producing your own frugal recipes without the aid of a cook book (just your own imagination), and this is when you start to save serious money! That’s the name of the game, right? Saving money!
But, “where will I learn?” you’re probably asking yourself, right? Learning to cook doesn’t cost money at all. There is so much high quality information online, free online cooking classes are there for you to enjoy.

[Frugal]

I personally think the easiest thing to do would be not to try to learn cooking online, but rather to start out being realistic, and not expecting to have caviar and champagne on a beef and burger budget...

I have never heard of online cooking classes, but I have used coupons, shopped sales, and stocked up, esp. on produce, with inflation in produce prices (tomatoes, apples, etc.) seeming to rise in the wake of the recent deep frost in Mexico in January/February. I stretch different meals and dishes, and try to do a lot of cooking in one day.

And oh, yes, getting free samples helps cook food on a budget, if you can find things that are useful to sign up for! This week I got some free Vitamin C that tastes quite good, and some other free samples that I have already used.

Hope that helps...keep on saving!

[LuckyRobin]

My mom taught me to cook when I was little (including cutting up a chicken), but she had a very limited repertoire of dishes, so I ended up having to learn how to make more complicated things myself. You can get cooking DVD's from the library. They are great for showing you technique. I did that for Chinese food cooking so I could watch the way they did things. Also good cook books with lots of pictures that show the steps help for learning how to cook more complicated recipes. Over the years, besides Chinese, I've taught myself how to cook good Mexican, Italian, Spanish, and Indian foods. The next things I want to master are Japanese and Korean dishes. We save a lot by preparing and eating these types of foods at home as opposed to going out for them.

[mom-from-missouri]

Stop buying foods with no food value, such as chips, candy, soda pop. Instead, eat fruits, veggies and dip, with water or juice or green teas. Then, follow through a step further and start doing all your cooking from scratch as much as possible, using produce instead of dehydrated and salted prepared foods.