Feeding yourself on $100 a month

You’re hungry for ways to trim the portion of your income that goes to groceries. Some of you are close to starving for tips on how to spend less at the check stand as many prices climb.

For most of you who e-mailed or stopped me somewhere in Huntington Beach to chat about last week’s column about my attempt at the Food Stamp Challenge, the spiritual benefits of eating less and spending less on food is gravy.

You want to know how to cut your food bill and still preserve the nutritional value of the meals you feed your family. So the religion you find in this column will be minimal, aside from that of religiously sticking to a shopping list based on a monthly lost-cost meal plan.

If you haven’t been following this story, check the archives for last week’s column, “Sage advice on budgeting food,” and for “An extra food challenge for Lent,” from March 5, for the beginning of it.

When I first wrote about my decision to take on the Food Stamp Challenge, a number of you e-mailed me your own tips on thrifty grocery shopping. Not one of you thought I could eat — much less eat well — on $100 a month.

Lou Murray, who with Vic Leipzig writes “Natural Perspectives” for this newspaper, wrote to say she couldn’t imagine it. She explained how last fall she had on average spent $80 a week on their groceries.

That amount, however, also purchased paper and cleaning products as well as some of their wine. But since non-food items and liquor and tobacco cannot be purchased with food stamps, they are not included in the Food Stamp Challenge.

By March, despite gas prices coming down, Lou discovered she was spending as much as $144 a week at the grocery store.

As many of you did, she suggested I monitor newspaper ads for foods on sale, planning my meals around them. I gave it a shot but wasn’t good at that.

Weekly supermarket fliers make my eyes glaze over and my mind lock. When I discovered www.mygrocerydeals.com, it helped but didn’t easily break old habits.

With this website’s free membership I can search weekly grocery store fliers by store and by food item. This aids my “find a recipe, buy the ingredients” method of shopping.

Lou was the only reader who mentioned supermarket day-old racks. I had shopped them before, but they’re now an essential in my collection of cost-saving strategies.

Like Lou, I shop them early in the morning before they’re well picked over. During my Food Stamp Challenge, they supplied me not only with bread for sandwiches and dinners, but also with desserts.

Generally tucked away near the restrooms at the back of the store, these racks treated me to a quarter-sheet cake for $5 and, for $1.59, 20 scrumptious bakery cookies. At the end of the month, I had leftover cake and cookies in the freezer.

Some of Lou’s other tips included something many of our mothers and probably all of our grandmothers knew: forgo convenience products like Hamburger Helper, boxed cake mixes and even canned beans.

A 15-ounce can of beans holds three and a half, half-cup servings. A bag of dried beans rendered between 12 and 15.

A 59-cent can of red beans from Grocery Outlet made the per-serving price 17 cents. A bag of dried red beans bought for $1.34 cooked up to the equivalent of four cans, cutting the per-serving price in half.

Most of you advised me to shop what Lou called “the non-mainstream stores.” These included Smart & Final, Grocery Outlet, Fresh & Easy and Jons Marketplace.

Some of you liked shopping at Costco and Walmart. But, if for no other reason, I didn’t shop at these mammoth retailers because they don’t take food stamps.

Along with portion control, key to the success of my Food Stamp Challenge was a car. Unlike many who actually shop with food stamps, I had the luxury of driving to any market I found advantageous.

I purchased groceries for my monthlong meal plan by shopping primarily at Grocery Outlet, the 99-cent Only Store and Ralphs. I purchased a handful of things at Trader Joe’s: frozen Vegetable Foursome, Meatless Meatballs, eggplant cutlets, heat-and-serve polenta, Latin-style Black Bean Soup.

My morning and 3 p.m. coffee was made possible by brewing fair trade coffee from 12-ounce bags purchased for $4.98 at Fresh & Easy. Otherwise, I found Fresh & Easy to be neither.

Its emphasis on pre-prepped meals (most including meat) was not a good match for my food stamp allotment budget or my vegetarian diet.

And on several visits, I found far too many packages of its so-so-priced produce already oozing decay.

Nearly all of my produce came from the 99-cent Only Store. Granted, it’s important to avoid the produce that’s rotting, but the newly delivered vegetables and fruits can’t be beat, even by Jons Marketplace, of which I am very fond.

I bought a package of seven bananas, a sack of 13 oranges, a cantaloupe, a gourmet-style seedless watermelon, a three-pound sack of potatoes, a carton of grape tomatoes and three zucchinis — each for 99 cents.

All were fresh, ripe and tasty; none of it spoiled before I ate it.

Grocery Outlet was a godsend. Its prices are impossible to beat and it stocks Southern-girl staples such as grits, collards, lima beans and butter beans that most markets deem oddities.

I consider it a marvel. If it’s not Lent and your budget allows it, Grocery Outlet has a selection of cheeses straight from heaven.

Had I discovered its website sooner I could have saved myself a lot of the bother of meal planning, too.

I thought I was brilliant, honestly, when I fed myself for a month on $97.11.

Then I Googled “Grocery Outlet” and on its website found two brochures detailing plans to feed a family of four on $3 a day.

Each includes shopping lists for delicious, nutritious recipes that are easy and quick to make. Many are meatless or easily adapted for a vegetarian like me.

The shopping lists allow for a gallon of milk, which I think might be hard for a family of four to stretch over a month.

And, alas, no coffee.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected] .