Eat Healthy and Stay on a Budget? Part I

Recently I had the privilege of being connected with another blogger who is having to cut out many processed food options due to health reasons. Although I can currently eat many things, I went through a period of time where my diet was very limited. I wanted to continue to stick with our budget, so I spent a lot of time researching ideas and options for eating well on less. I learned how to do it fairly well, and would love to share what I learned.

I was going to share some of the thoughts with this fellow blogger, and then realized that perhaps there are others of you who would also appreciate this information. Feel free to comment, too, with your own ideas!

One big hurdle for me was time. I had to start planning more time into my days for meal prep. If you want to know all the ingredients going into a dish, you have to put them there. You can't trust a frozen entree. Therefore, you have to invest time. For us, it's worth it. I still prefer to cook almost everything from scratch. Unless I'm making brownies, I'm rarely known to use a mix or pre-packaged food for our meals. Now, we digress when it comes to snacks, but that's because we don't HAVE to eat so carefully anymore, and snacks are a treat around our house. The occasional bag of chips or box of granola bars will be tolerated here. :)

The second thing I had to work out for myself was whether it was important to eat all natural and organic, or just important to eat non-processed foods. For example - can I bake my own bread without preservatives and still use regular flour, or do I need to invest in organic flour, organic sugar, etc.? This is a key question to answer up front. If you must use organic products for everything, you will have to find a way to increase your grocery budget. There are plenty of organic coupons available, but you are buying a specialized product with a small market, and the prices will be higher.
If, however, you can eat non-organic food as long as you avoid processed and preserved foods, it's quite possible to stay in your pre-health-food budget.

I felt very overwhelmed with planning meals that were "safe" and free of all preservatives, so I learned how to break down the meal and think of it in small parts. We have shifted towards eating very simple meals, but they nourish us, we enjoy them, and we can stay in our budget. I usually choose my meat or protein first. Most often we eat meat for a meal, but sometimes we will replace that with beans. Once the meat is chosen and cooking method is determine (grilled, baked, etc.) I choose the accompanying carb - usually rice or potatoes, or sometimes pasta or bread. Once that is decided, all that is left is to choose a fruit and/or vegetable, and then either some type of dairy side or provide milk to drink. Of course, the trick to sticking with the "safe" diet comes in learning how to prepare the meats, pastas, etc. in ways that don't use forbidden ingredients. There are a few homemade recipes that can be used for popular purchased ingredients that can help greatly with this process.

Check back next week for some of these, including homemade chicken broth, homemade condensed cream soups, and taco seasoning. These will go a long way in preparing casseroles!