After tweaking your budget in Day #2 of this series, you’ve probably noticed this: food is one of your largest expenditures, if not the largest. This is especially true if you have a family or if you usually eat in restaurants or order takeout.

So to minimize your largest expense, it’s time to learn more effective and affordable cooking.

Today’s Task: Level Up Your Cooking Skills

Note the keywords “level up”. This means that whatever cooking skills you have, take this as an opportunity to improve them. I’ve listed some resources below to help some of you get started.

Note that these are only suggestions. You’re the only one who can decide what you mean by “leveling up”.

For those who are inexperienced with cooking:

• Beginner cooking techniques from ReluctantGourmet.com, and don’t forget to try their basic recipes
• Random cooking tips at Lifetips.com
• Some helpful videos:
  • Tips to crush, chop, and mince garlic cloves
  • How to chop an onion the right way
  • How to measure rice proportions with your finger (which is why it’s funny to me to see foreign cooking shows talking about cups of water and cups of rice) and How to cook rice
  • How to debone a fish from InYourKitchen
    
  • How to portion a chicken from InYourKitchen

If you’re already an advanced cook, why not try to learn the following skills?

• Batch cooking
  • Batch cooking and freezing guide from Netmums.com
  • The Five-day Freeze: Batch cooking for the rest of us from Wisebread
  • A handy freezer storage chart that tells you how long food stays good in a freezer
• Canning and preserving produce – here’s a detailed guide
• Or, simply learn to cook 3 new dishes.

Also, check out The Insider’s Guide to Frugal Food and Fitness at Squawkfox.com. Many of the mentioned ingredients are expensive here, so I’m kind of tempted to write a similar free resource for Filipinos.

Why does this lead to healthier finances? If you’re the type who often resorts to dining out, by learning how to cook more efficiently, you’ll save a lot of money without much hassle. If you’re already experienced with cooking, new skills such as batch cooking and learning how to preserve food can also decrease your expense. Who knows, if you enjoy cooking enough, you might just end up with a small side business.

Image by lusi from sxc.hu

In a previous post, Goal for the month: No Fast Food, I wrote about the benefits of cooking your own meals vs. dining or eating out. Frugal Pinoy reader Jinoe sent the following comment:

I would love to do this also for similar reasons (esp #4). But lately Im in a rush. Cooking my own food takes more than an hour plus cleaning up. So fastfood was an option.

If you still want to cook for yourself, but don’t have the time or energy to do so every day, you can cook in batches.  On weekends, days off, or whenever you have a lot of free time, cook one big batch of food that you will heat up for the rest of the week.   (An exception to this might be the rice, which you can cook once daily with no hassle using a rice cooker.) Here are some pointers:

• It requires a bit of planning.  Since you’re cooking food in big batches, you need to plan ahead.  This includes ingredients, what meals you’ll be having, and the quantity of food.
• Use your freezer.  Most of the food you’ve cooked should be stored in your freezer to prevent spoilage.  Just pop them up int he microwave or heat them up in your stove when you’re ready to eat.  It’ll take roughly 5 minutes to do this per meal for one or two people.

Click here for a very informative article on batch cooking.  It includes notes about shelf life of certain foods, a list of foods that don’t freeze well, recipes, and more tips.  It’s like Batch Cooking 101.