1. Gluten-free bread isn’t worth the price until they figure out how to make it taste and feel like regular bread. Cut it out of your diet and use corn tortillas instead. What can you do with corn tortillas? Um, try everything. Classic Mexican favorites like quesadillas and tacos, mini-pizzas with a crunchy crust, crispy baked bowls for salad or ice cream, ground back into masa and added to tortilla soup, wrapped around hot dogs and fried or baked instead of a bun or corn dog batter, you have so many options! And it costs about $3 for a package of 30. You could get the gluten-free wraps that are popping up next to the tortillas recently, but those are a specialty item, and they have a specialty price.
2. The easiest way to go gluten-free is to pretty much cut processed carbs and stick with meat, produce, and dairy. The time investment in cooking a steak and steaming some broccoli is basically nothing, and if you buy your meat on sale and get your veggies in season when they’re cheapest, it isn’t much of a financial investment, either. Can’t get seasonal veggies because of where you live or what your store carries? Buy frozen. Most frozen vegetable producers pick during season and freeze for year-long freshness. Be sure to check for clumps in your bags, though. That means they’ve partially thawed during shipping and re-froze, possibly several times over the course of the journey from production line to grocery aisle.
3. Use your crockpot more. Ovens and stovetops use massive amounts of energy to heat food during cooking, most of which may be used to heat the air inside the oven or the pot/pan you’re cooking in rather than the food itself. Slow cookers use very little energy, and probably use less electricity in 8 hours than your oven does just preheating to 350° one time. If you’re going to bake and aren’t cooking for a crowd, it may also benefit you to get a countertop convection toaster. You can use it to make everything from toast to pizza bagels to salmon filets without heating up half the house like your oven will. I know for me right now, it sucks using the oven or stove, because the house can’t cool down again until about 7pm. Oh, the joys of living in Florida.
4. If you must bake, don’t waste your time pre-blending a “bread mix” or “cookie mix” or whatever homemade blends other gluten-free blogs teach you. Making blends means you probably have to buy all of the flours/starches for the recipe all at once, and that can get expensive quickly. Then you have to measure and store the mix in an air-tight container, and use it quickly enough that it won’t go rancid or get stale or settle (which will put your measurements off unless you measure by weight). And measuring by weight is time-consuming and boring, and it’s really easy to lose track of which step you’re on in the recipe when you’re adding corn starch by the quarter teaspoon to bump the scale from 87g to 88g. Then you’ve got leftovers of all those flours and starches you had to buy to make your mix, which you’ll have to store, and the leftover amount is never enough to make a complete second batch of the mix when you run out, so you still have to go buy all the ingredients again the next time. Really, unless you’re a fellow blogger or the bake sale queen (or king), there is no reason you should ever have to make a blend rather than just measuring out a recipe at the time of actually making it. And then you can replace each item as necessary when you run out of your favorite AP flour or corn starch or rice flour or whatever. Besides, you can’t use a bread mix to make cookies, so you’d still need extra ingredients to make anything that the mix doesn’t make.
5. Invest in spices and condiments, and keep aromatics on hand. Cheap food is usually bland food, so make that rice and beans taste gourmet with red wine vinegar, salt, freshly ground pepper, ground chili or cayenne pepper, cumin, onion, and garlic. And there’s no way there isn’t a store within ten miles of you that doesn’t have pork loin on sale. Check out my recipe for sweet & spicy Asian pork tenderloin, and stock up on marinade ingredients so you can make it or something similar any time pork goes on sale. Boom, you’ve got a super-easy weeknight meal just waiting for you to throw it all into a gallon-sized bag for a few hours, then pop it in the oven to satisfy the whole family. Cooking for one? Take leftovers to work the next few days for lunch. I’m betting that marinade would go really well on chicken, too, if that goes on sale.
6. Unfortunately, specialty gluten-free food items don’t usually go on sale. There also aren’t typically coupons. This means you’re probably going to have to shop around. I can get Bob’s Red Mill GF AP flour at Walmart. Walmart also has a number of Great Value brand GF items now, including knockoff Oreos. I get most of my other flours and starches at Publix. It’s only as a last resort that I’ll go to any health food store for an item, except that health food stores are usually the only ones that have sales on gluten-free products, or they may be the only place that sells an item I need. Oh, and Target has a few options as well, and there are some things I can get there that I can’t find at Walmart, so I’ll hit Target after Walmart but before Publix, since Publix’s prices are still higher. Also, Aldi has recently moved into my area (it’s still a bit of a drive), and they’ve begun carrying a gluten-free line, but I haven’t tried much of it yet. Still, it’s less than $3 for a half-gallon of organic milk there, so it’s worth it for me to make the trip when I need to restock on fridge and pantry staples like milk, breakfast meats, and European chocolate. Also, Aldi may occasionally put their gluten-free items on sale, since it’s a larger percentage of their overall inventory. If you don’t mind buying in bulk, stores like BJ’s and Costco are also offering a growing gluten-free selection. I’m not sure about other national chains since those are the stores in my area. But you’ll probably find that it’s worth it to engage in a similar shop-around pattern, and figure out which items you need and where to get them cheap, and what you can substitute, reduce, or omit purchasing.
Other basic shopping tenets will keep you from having to break open that piggy bank, like making a list before you leave the house and sticking to it, never shopping hungry, buying most of your grocery items from the perimeter of the store rather than the center aisles, and that the family member who does most of the cooking and menu-planning should be the one to do the shopping. Please leave your thoughts or suggestions in a comment below, or get in touch with me directly by filling out the form on the contact page.
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