Hey guys from GEMS!
As our first post, we are giving out some tips and real-life experience about running a house together. Today I’d like to talk about groceries and how we managed to save money with minimum waste.
First rule of the house is: we don’t trash anything. ANYTHING. We don’t like to waste our money and we really want to go as ecologic as possible, so the key words here are **planning **and recycle. Let’s talk about planning first. We found that the best option is to make a weekly menu in order to buy only what is really needed.
The menu has to be written according to what we intend to buy. For example, let’s say we want to make a tomato sauce pasta, this means we will buy a full bottle of tomato sauce and that we will only use half of it, so it goes without saying that we will have another meal featuring tomato sauce during the week, that way nothing goes wasted.
Also, having a planned grocery list limits the “impulsive buying”, so no million bags of chips or six pack mozzarellas (So Italians, aren’t we?). We just stick to what we agreed while planning. It may sound a lot of trouble but it really takes just five minutes once a week. To make it even easier we started to write down ideas whenever they come. Today I really felt like mushrooms and I’m so sure I won’t remember to include them in the menu (nothing comes to your mind when you actually have to write it) so I simply made a note.
**Amounts **are also something to pay attention to. When buying something with short expiration date (the example of the tomato sauce is perfect) always be sure to buy exactly the amount you’ll eat or to have to use it more than once during the week. Instead of buying a huge can of yogurt for breakfast, buy 10 little cans, so that you just eat it when you open it and nothing goes bad.
Now let’s talk about **recycling **and eco-shopping. You don’t necessarily have to buy exclusively biological stuff, you just have to be careful about packages. We’ve noticed that usually the biggest plastic packages come with meat and fish. Instead of taking them directly from the fridge (with their plastic) we always buy them at the counter. It’s almost impossible to completely get rid of plastic but this way it reduces greatly. Also be sure to prefer glass jars over plastic ones, not only it’s better for the environment but you can clean and keep those jars for any need: we use them to store spices and seeds but also to keep small objects safe in the house.
In addition, food scraps. We usually make a lot of vegetable waste, peels and cores from various vegetables, as well as bones and skin mostly from chicken. We don’t trash them. We keep them stored in the fridge until there is enough to make broth: we just put all the scraps in a pot of water, add some salt, boil them and stir them for 10/15 minutes. We then store the broth in our empty and washed-out glass bottles (coming from juices or sauces) and put it in the fridge. It lasts more or less a week and tastes greatly. Just one tip: don’t use too many carrot peels or they will cover every other flavor. Almost forgot: chicken waste goes in the pot too, it makes the broth a whole lot better.
Another thing we learnt the hard way: how to properly store goods in the fridge. First of all if you think something will go wasted put it in the freezer (this goes for vegetables too! Just make sure you chop them and put them a couple of minutes in a pan with some oil). Anyway, be sure to be smarter than we were: don’t just throw the whole lot in the freezer, in fact usually you’ll eat it gradually and not all in one day, yet if you stored it whole you won’t be able to break it down without defrosting it (this goes for vegetables and meat, be it ground or sliced).
Make little packages! We usually use empty cans, ice cream boxes or whatever package we could save, but in the case of meet you can simply wrap it in tinfoil.
Hopefully this will come to use to someone!