So. Much. Food.

The Marine Corps Marathon is about a month away, so I’m closing in on the peak of my training cycle. That means 60+ miles of running each week, plus squeezing in time in the weight room and forcing myself to stretch (occasionally). And all that exercise means I’m downing a pretty ridiculous amount of food. 

You can’t open a news site these days without seeing that it’s impossible for normal people to afford groceries without resorting to buy now/pay later plans. Our family continues to thrive on a food budget well below the $800ish norm that I’ve heard about anecdotally from our friends. This is especially helpful during this season in our lives, where I’m not earning an income but I’m burning through around 3,000 calories a day. 

For most of our marriage, Mr. Sense did all the cooking. These days, I’m the head chef, at least for main family meals. I haven’t mastered many of my husband’s fancier baking tricks, but I’m continuing with his frugal-ish grocery budget. 

Perhaps the key to our ($400/month) budget is avoiding food waste like the plague. Eating or freezing leftovers is part of that, but making sure that whatever the oldest piece of produce in the fridge makes it into dinner somehow is the cornerstone of my cooking. Lately, I’ve been using up forgotten items from the recesses of our cabinets. Last week I found some dried lentils in a plastic box that I probably bought years ago when I first discovered FIRE and read somewhere that lentils are the ambrosia of early retired people. I don’t know if we ever even tried them, because it turns out you have to cook dried lentils forever before you can eat them. 

So, I cooked all of the lentils one morning (note: lentils expand A LOT when cooked!). Later, I tossed them in with some ground turkey and spices, which I served over leftover rice from a special Indian takeout meal. I did briefly look online for recipes that included both ground turkey and lentils, but I didn’t really follow any particular one closely (though this was the main inspiration). I like to glance over recipes to get ideas and a general idea of cook times and temperatures, but I find that constantly checking a recipe makes cooking less fun for me. Plus, most recipes don’t suggest throwing in the softest tomato on the counter and the wet-looking-but-not-yet-slimy spinach in the produce drawer. (I sometimes use the website supercook.com for this purpose– you can enter the ingredients you have on hand and select ones you want included and then it spits out potential ideas. This is nice if you have a weird assortment of plain ingredients.)

Another cooking skill for people with young kids and/or long distance runners in the house is making junk-adjacent food at home. My goal is to consume a lot of very tasty calories, but preferably from ingredients I can identify and pronounce. Last night, I made some turkey/beef combo sliders, which I served alongside roasted potatoes, butternut squash, and carrots. All three diners approved, probably because even healthy foods feel like a treat when they sort of look like McDonald’s (and also, vegetables taste better roasted with a little duck fat and corn starch). PreSense was especially excited that I presented small homemade mint chocolate chip milkshakes alongside this meal, furthering the illusion that we were eating fast food. 

Before I was involved in the financial independence world, my biggest area for food overspending was definitely in the organic/fancy snack area of the grocery store. Probiotic Icelandic yogurt, ginger cayenne kombucha, chips made of vegetables other than potatoes or corn, and of course, dark chocolate covered dried fruits and coffee beans. When I was a freshman in college, the small convenience store near my dorm sold chocolate covered gummy bears out of a giant plastic tub, and they continue to have a hold on me though I don’t see them on many store shelves. But these days a tiny bag of chocolate covered raisins might cost $5, or even more if you shop somewhere besides Aldi and Sharp Shopper. (I don’t actually know this definitively– I couldn’t tell you the last time I stepped inside of Martin’s or Kroger, and that’s even though KidSense worked at Martin’s this past summer. For more information, see my article on how shopping at Aldi could save your family $100,000 when compared to “normal” shopping.) 

Back to chocolate covered delicacies: did you know you can make these at home for a fraction of the cost? We buy easily meltable chocolate pieces that we can microwave briefly and then make all sorts of chocolate treats. Some of them don’t turn out quite as uniform as the store bought version, but I think some actually look better. You can dip the bigger items, like dried apricots and graham crackers into a mug of gooey chocolate, and then dump in and mix around raisins or coffee beans. Arrange the treats on a wax paper covered baking sheet and leave it in the fridge for a while while you eat the rest of the melted chocolate off a spoon. 

Whether you prefer your food to be gourmet-feeling, macronutrient balanced, or restaurant-mimicking, you can find ways to create it to your tastes frugally. Cooking at home is obviously less expensive than going out to restaurants, and it can also help you have a more varied diet, avoid weird ingredients that aren’t really food, and practice creativity and problem solving skills. As I hone my cooking skills during this mini retirement, I’ll let you know new tips and pitfalls I learn along the journey.