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    How To Control Food Bills: The Diet for the Dollar Food Plan
    How To Control Food Bills: The Diet for the Dollar Food Plan
    How To Control Food Bills: The Diet for the Dollar Food Plan
    Ebook176 pages1 hour

    How To Control Food Bills: The Diet for the Dollar Food Plan

    By Joy Wielland

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    About this ebook

    Ever look at your food bills and wonder where the money went? This book outlines a solution to that. As owner of a personal chef service, who bought retail, the author learned that to be able to quote a price to a client, maintain top quality and meet her bottom line, she had to be an informed shopper and organize her menus. She devised a plan and when she applied it to her personal grocery shopping, she found she had a total overview of her kitchen inventory, control of her expenses, and actually saved money and time. Friends who tried her method had the same results, whether they wanted just to keep track of expenses, control excess buying or to follow a budget. This plan has is truly one-size-fits-all because it’s based on behavior modification rather than specific choices. By highlighting what was actually needed, it helped a woman adjust to being a widow and newlyweds to set and maintain a budget. The book contains step-by-step instructions, learning aids and tips to make the process easy, and a complete analysis of food markets from warehouse stores to dollar ones, even farm markets.
    It also contains over 100 pages of charts and diagrams of meats, poultry, seafood cheeses, oils, grains and herbs and spices giving descriptions and suggested uses. There are lists temperature conversions, pan measurement, ingredient substitutions and calorie charts. These alone constitute a valuable kitchen tool

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJoy Wielland
    Release dateJul 24, 2014
    ISBN9781310408700
    How To Control Food Bills: The Diet for the Dollar Food Plan
    Author

    Joy Wielland

    Joy WiellandBorn into a family that loved traveling and tasting different cuisines, Joy Wielland grew up with an appreciation of food. Years in Italy doing graduate work gave her the chance to explore the different regional dishes of that country as well as those of other countries in Europe, and transformed a pleasant pastime into a lifelong hobby by inspiring her to cook. The hobby became a business in 1999, when frustrated by an “empty nest” she trained, joined the United States Personal Chef Association and opened Suddenly Supper Personal Chef Service. Joy admires people, especially parents, who are focused on careers, while trying to maintain a traditional home environment.She wrote her menu cookbook Dinners With Joy hoping to help them by making all aspects of the evening meal preparation stress free. Her blog Kitchen $centse at dinnerwithjoy.com also addresses the problem of coping with rising food prices, its motto is ”Creating Wonderful Scents, While Saving Cents by Using Sense.” She advocates controlling food costs through organized planning and informed shopping and has written a book on this subject as well as others on different aspects of food preparation.

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      Book preview

      How To Control Food Bills - Joy Wielland

      Introduction to The Plan

      Welcome to Diet for the Food Dollar. I’m confident the plan will be as helpful to you as it has been for me, both professionally and personally. If you have questions or comments, you can contact me at joy@dinnerwithjoy.com. I’d enjoy hearing from you.

      As I grabbed my keys to drive to the supermarket recently, I had a Reagan-era flashback A voice in my head said; Just say NO! Only it wasn’t talking about drugs, it was warning about groceries!

      The media is full of advice, these days, on how to cut food costs, as if the escalating prices were new. The truth is food prices, usually with milk leading the way, rose dramatically, several times just in the past 8 or so years. What is different, now, is our perception of how to cope with them. Just as with a weight loss diet, there is no magic wand, and no advice, no tips, no tools are going to help, without changes in one’s approach to the problem.

      Nobody knows this better then I. Before I trained and started my personal chef service, the closest I had come to bulk buying or mass cooking was to prepare for a party I was giving at home, or do a stint on the refreshment committee of a club or organization. With Suddenly Supper a client’s normal order is for five entrees, four servings each, individually wrapped for freezing. Frequent shopping for large orders is normal, and price shifts are quickly noted, especially since I buy retail.

      The biggest challenge I faced was learning how to estimate a price quote for a client knowing it would contractually bind me, which fit the client’s expectations, covered my costs and expenses, including gas, and allowed me to meet my bottom line. I needed to be current on market prices, anticipate cost trends, seasonal and climatic, familiarize myself with area stores as ingredient sources and carefully read each one’s fliers for featured items. I also needed to revise my over all perspective of the job and streamline my methods to become more cost efficient. It took awhile, but I worked out a functional routine by developing the steps outlined in The Plan.

      Several months ago, when I realized my own grocery costs had grown too big for their allotted britches, because I tend to be impulsive, I knew something had to be done. It wasn’t the first time I’ve faced this problem, but it was the first time I decided to apply my professional approach to my personal routine and document my steps to finding a solution. I jokingly named my plan Diet for the Food Dollar and soon realized that in the big Dof diet there are three descriptive little Ds, which we’ll discuss in detail later. This plan worked so well for me that I want to share it, especially now, when there is so much concern about rising expenses.

      I’m so confident of the The Plan’s success, that I wrote my menu cookbook, Dinners With Joy using a personal chef’s approach to filling orders as a guide. The book contains information on sauces and shopping for meat, poultry, and seafood as well as three months of daily menus, separated into weeks, each with its own complete shopping list and cooking tips. It’s a good example of how The Plan can organize your approach to feeding your family while saving time and money. The recipes are economically feasible since they are cost adjustable using the information in the collection of charts included here. The book is available on Kindle and through Amazon. For a preview go to the web site dinnerswithjoy.com

      Now let’s take an introductory look at those three Ds that are the all important components of The Plan and make it work. They are:

      Be Decisive: Don’t hesitate, press Go As with any diet, the first step is to set a realistic, obtainable, initial goal. Once there, you may want to continue, but start by calculating how much your food budget can be slimmed down and still remain nutritious. Whether you do this by percentage, fraction or dollars and cents doesn’t matter, just get a firm concept. I prefer to figure by month because it provides an overview. A week may represent specialized buying, whereas a month probably represents purchases from every department in the supermarket, all of which usually fall into the Grocery Shopping category.

      Then, do as you would with any diet; decide which areas are the target ones. The quick answer is snacks and desserts, and though they may contribute, and cutting down on them could help the food budget and have great side effects; they are not the whole answer. Take a look in your pantry, cabinets and refrigerator. Examine expiration dates. What sits on the shelf? What do you most frequently have to throw out? What was bought and never used? What is duplicated? What name brands can automatically be replaced by generics? The answers will show you the initial steps to changing your shopping habits. I had a neighbor who always complained about her food bills. It turned out she couldn’t resist sales on cleaning products. She could have sterilized a huge hotel with what she’d stockpiled! For me, it was a weakness for flavored seltzer water. The point is, as soon as I began to buy just what was needed, and switched to the generic brand, my register total was less, and I felt a sense of accomplishment. It encouraged me.

      Be Determined: Once you have a goal in mind, and an idea of how to carve the path to get there, it’s going to take resolve to turn that path into a paved highway. There will be pitfalls along the way and to help you stay on the road, some tools may come in handy. One is reminding yourself of the above mentioned sense of satisfaction from realizing you got everything you need and spent less than you contemplated. Another is cultivating a warning voice (my Just say no!) that stops you before you buy impulsively, and becomes as habitual as telling you to look both ways before crossing the street. Behaviorists say that a habit is formed in three weeks, and becomes ingrained in six months .So it isn’t that hard to do! Also, I find when I am tempted to buy something not on my list; it helps to continue my shopping. If that item is still on my mind when I’m ready to leave, I go back and look again. If I can fit it into my meal planning before its expiration date, or in the next two weeks, and its cost won’t make me feel guilty when I get home, I may buy it. If it’s a non-perishable, I make a note to find a use for it soon, and buy then. All this pondering alone is often enough to discourage the purchase. Which brings me to the best tool of all:

      The List. I always compile meticulous, detailed lists when planning and shopping for others, but my own approach to meal planning was whimsical. I headed for the market with the most alluring ads that week and let my senses take over. I operated on impulse, drawn to attractive produce, a special piece of meat, a new product, an ingredient I’d wanted to try. I outlined the week’s menus as I went and filled in the details with visits to other markets the following days. I over bought, under used and by the week’s end was suffering severe register shock. So I began to apply my professional approach to shopping to my personal life

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