Want to know how to save on food? Cook it yourself

Newsday (MCT) - Many families are wondering how they can spend less money on food.

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One word: cook.

I can offer no specific advice (buy store-brand cereal, buy vegetables in season) that will take you as far as the general exhortation to cook your own food.

When you eat in a restaurant or buy prepared meals, you are paying for both labor and materials. When you cook, you pay only for materials. The price of your meal is determined not by what the market will bear but by what the ingredients cost. When you cook, you can vary your menu based on what looks best and costs least.

Now, you may not know how to cook, or you may not enjoy cooking. But cooking is not rocket science, and to feed yourself and your family, you don't need to master more than a dozen recipes and/or techniques. And you can learn to cook from a book.

I do not come from cooking people, and I never took a cooking class. When I graduated from college, I started working my way through Marcella Hazan's "Classic Italian Cooking" (which was expanded and republished by Knopf as "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking"), and that's how I began to learn. Other good places to start: Ina Garten's "The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook," James Peterson's "Cooking," Jamie Oliver's "Cook With Jamie."

I don't like cost-saving measures that compromise on quality. If you drink organic, grass-fed milk because you want to avoid synthetic hormones in your diet or to try, in some small way, to retard the industrialization of our food supply, I'm assuming you aren't going to abandon those principles to save $10 a week.

If you are patronizing a local, independent butcher whose meat you trust and whose advice you treasure, I am assuming you don't want to forsake him for a warehouse wholesaler. Instead, have him sell you a chuck roast instead of a rib roast (a savings of about $6 a pound), a pork butt instead of a loin ($4 a pound cheaper) and braise instead of roast.

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(Contact the writer: erica.marcus@newsday.com, or write to Erica Marcus, Newsday, 235 Pinelawn Rd., Melville, NY 11747-4250)

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