When you think about the kitchen, of course one of the first things that come to mind is food! We often talk about saving money with groceries, and how you can use circulars, coupons, and going to multiple stores to get the best prices on your food, so we won’t get too much into that here. If you are interested, you can read our post on ways to save on your grocery bill for more tips.

While I won’t go into how to get your groceries here, this might be a good place to say that you can usually use your food for more then you realize. Unfortunately, food often goes bad before we get to use it, or get to finish using it. We try not to buy more then we can eat, but sometimes it just happens. You can try to think of other ways to use it though.

For example, is your bread going stale? As long as there is no mold on it, you can still use the bread to make homemade croutons or breadcrumbs. If your banana is too brown for your liking, you can use it to cook with. You can make some banana bread. This works for scraps as well. If you are making something with vegetables and have a little left, but not enough for another serving, consider making a soup with the scraps, or even freeze them so that when you have enough you can make a nice soup or stew out of it.

Speaking of wasting food, another great way to save money is to make sure no food goes to waste. If you make too much dinner, instead of just throwing out the leftovers, keep them for lunch the next day. If you don’t have many nice containers, I suggest the Ziploc disposable ones. When on sale (especially with a coupon!) they can be very cheap, or even free. They are pretty good quality, and clean very well in the dishwasher so you can use them over and over again. Then you can very easily just put your leftovers into one of those, and have it again the next day for lunch.

Another way to save money is to use your kitchen more often! Many people will find that a lot of their monthly budget goes towards restaurants. Don’t get me wrong; we used to be really bad about that too. It isn’t only that it’s so much easier to go out, but sometimes you get set into making only the same certain items, and you want something different, so you go to a restaurant.

Why not try some copycat recipes. You can make some of your favorite restaurant items in your own home. Here are a few links to get you started: Recipe Source and Robbie’s Recipes. Besides these, there are many online websites that have copycat recipes, or even original recipes if you’d like to try something different. When you find a bunch more foods you really like, you’ll find that you don’t want to go out to eat as often. We used to go out a lot…but after trying new recipes and copycat recipes, we now go out a lot less, and our bank account is happier for it.

Another way to save money in the kitchen is to use as few paper products as you can. If you use paper plates, napkins, paper towels, etc… for everything, you will end up going through a lot and spending a lot of money to keep replenishing it. Don’t get me wrong, we use some paper plates, napkins, and paper towels too, but we try to keep it to a minimum.

If you can, use a regular plate. Sure, it’s one more plate to wash, but you have to do the dishes anyway, so what’s one extra plate in the dishwasher. If you get a few rags (or even nicer towels) you can use those to clean your counters, or any spills that happen. This means you will go through less paper towels and napkins, and you can just throw the towel into the laundry.

When looking for those pretty platters or cake plates or even regular plates, glasses, etc. keep your eye open for sales. For the cake plates and pretty platters, you can often find a place like Mikasa or Lenox (either online, in store, or even in outlets) where you’ll find them really cheap. Also, places like Linens ‘N Things and Bed Bath & Beyond where not only do they have good prices, but both almost always have coupons (both online and in store) where you can save either $5.00 or 20% off making these prices even better. If you just keep looking for things like this, you’ll be able to get any kitchen or dining room item for a lot less.

Again, to show how you can save money with furniture, our entire dining room is furnished from old furniture from our parents.  We didn’t have to buy any of it, and we really like it and enjoy using it.

You can save money on your appliances too, if you use them in a smart way. Only run your dishwasher when it’s completely full. It will use the same amount of water regardless, so you might as well wash the most dishes you can out of it. Try to keep your freezer as full as possible. You can always put bottles filled with water in it to help keep the freezer full. This will help the freezer have to work less.

I think that about wraps it up for the Kitchen and Dining Room. Tomorrow we will go over how to save money in the Office.

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Tags: save money, save money in the kitchen, save money on food

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 11:06 am and is filed under Save Around the House, Saving, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can trackback from your own site.