The old fresh v frozen debate. Fresh isn’t blanched so has more nutrients. Frozen doesn’t sit around all year in storage so has more nutrients. Fresh vegetables have more ‘life force’ so are better for your chakras… yep, the debate continues to rage and it’s heated.

But for many of us, the question of fresh v frozen is kind of irrelevant anyway. Most of us don’t eat nearly enough plant food to start with, let alone worry about whether it is fresh or frozen.

I want to take a moment to compare fresh and frozen vegetables from a cost point of view. You see, I’ve had broccoli on my mind a lot over the last few weeks. We eat a lot of broccoli. It’s high in nutrients (fresh or frozen) and it’s one of the few greens I don’t have to force feed DH.

But what to do with the stems? I’ve thrown them in the stock pot, cut them up and to put in the stir fry, I’ve even made broccoli stem soup, but mostly the stem gets wasted. This got me thinking about the true cost of fresh broccoli and whether it is better value (from a purely cost perspective) to purchase frozen.

So I did a little weighing and a little calculating.

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If DH comes home to find me flat out on the lounge in front a Simpsons rerun (or these days on the floor in front of the baby bouncer), then he knows there’s a good chance I’m not going to be cooking dinner any time soon. And $25 later, we usually end up with KFC.

I’m all about cooking from scratch. It’s cheaper and healthier than convenience food. But sometimes it pays to have a little bit of that convenience food in the cupboard or the freezer for days where you just don’t feel like cooking. Because a microwave meal, a frozen pie or a jar of simmer sauce is going to be a lot cheaper than takeaway and often healthier.

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Brown bagging seems to be one of the symbols of frugality, often touted as a way to save money in these hard economic times. And it’s true, buying lunch every day can really add up. Why pay up to $10 for a sandwich when you can make it for $2? So why do we need to be told to save money by taking our lunch to work and why is it so unappealing?

I think that the problem is that we see homemade lunch as boring, or we’re just not organised enough to get lunch ready in the morning before work. Also, I don’t think that twelve years of warm, soggy schoolbag sandwiches encourages sandwich taking to work.

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These are the weird little things I think about because I have way too much time on my hands.

If you want to cut down on the grocery bill, the first thing to do is to reduce how much food gets wasted. But what does this mean in practical terms? The other day I was thinking specifically about wasting bread.

I was eating the crust end of bread so it doesn’t get thrown out (DH tells me he leaves them specially for me), and I was thinking that throwing the thin crust out doesn’t at first seem like much waste. But then I did a little maths:

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Photo by teejayhanton

I generally think that we’re pretty frugal, but sometimes I wonder. So I thought I would share how much we spend on food and groceries, and some of the rationale behind the choices that are appropriate for us. ‘We’ are currently a household of two adults and a cat.

I keep a detailed cash flow budget in excel – basically we track every cent we earn and spend. This year, I did something a little different: I track our groceries in a separate sheet, linking the totals into our overall expenditure. What does this mean? It means that not only can I see at a glance how much we’ve spent on groceries for the month, I can click over a sheet and tell you exactly how much we’ve spent on milk v meat v toothpaste etc for each month and for the year. This also reveals how often we buy things like toothpaste.

Before I give a weekly total I want to tell you exactly what our ‘grocery’ amount includes and how I calculate it.

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