How we eat for only $200 a month

Groceries, coming in at around $200, are usually our third biggest monthly expense after our mortgage and utilities.

Given that the USDA’s Thrifty Food Plan for a two-person household with a male and a female in the 20 to 50 range would have us spending $512.42, it seems that we’re doing pretty good!

In this post, I’ll cover how we manage to keep our grocery expenses low. I’ll go into what we eat, how we grocery shop, and what our typical grocery list looks like, as well as some tips that have helped us.

Our cooking, eating, and grocery shopping habits

Grocery expenses only make sense when you consider how you cook and eat, as well as what food you buy and where.

For starters, we eat all of our meals at home and prepare most things from scratch.

We very rarely eat out and when we do, it’s a cheap fast food treat or an inexpensive outing like the Ikea restaurant.¹ We likely spend under $100 a year on eating out.

By “prepare most things from scratch”, I mean that we make our own flour tortillas and hummus, buy dry beans instead of canned and whole fruits and veggies instead of pre-cut, and so on.

We don’t grow any of our own food, however, and there are a few items, like bread, tofu, peanut butter, pasta, and almond milk, that we buy ready-made.

As far as getting the food, we do grocery runs every other week. Aldi, Costco, and Walmart are a fixture on our rotation, and we stock up on peanut butter and nutritional yeast at Trader Joe’s every three or four months.

Every weekend we meal prep for the week and store each meal component in a mason jar.

For example, if we’re prepping three dinners of tofu with oven-roasted veggies and quinoa, we’ll have three jars of tofu for three night’s servings as well as three jars of veggies and three of quinoa.

This makes serving dinner a breeze and prevents both overeating and having to deal with leftovers, which reduces waste.

We eat a vegetarian diet and only have lunch and dinner, skipping breakfast, as we do intermittent fasting.²

On the whole, we avoid sugar and processed foods and drink only coffee, tea, and water, along with some almond milk here and there.

We buy fresh vegetables for the most part, but also buy frozen or canned veggies—mainly broccoli, sweet peas, and green beans—for use in dishes where freshness matters slightly less, such as a chickpea curry, or as a quick side if we’re in a pinch.

We don’t go out of our way to buy organic (or kosher or gluten-free or non-GMO) nor do we clip coupons or alter our meals too much from week to week.

We’re conscious about spoilage and plate waste and it’s highly rare that edible food ends up in the garbage.

Finally, the $200 monthly grocery expense doesn’t include food we buy for special occasions as I put that in the Fun, rather than the Grocery, bucket.

For example, last weekend we had a few friends over for dinner. We bought a pound of ground beef plus two cans of diced tomatoes to make pasta sauce and a box of brownie mix for dessert. The $8 we spent on these items aren’t included in the Grocery bucket.³

If you’re curious about what exactly goes into the Grocery and Fun spending categories, you can check out our monthly updates.

What do we typically eat?

For lunch, we eat oatmeal with roasted nuts, peanut butter, and fruit—usually apple—three times a week.

On the two remaining weekdays, we might do a vegetable soup or a salad or carrots and celery with hummus. These lunches are usually accompanied by a side of beans or nuts or eggs or Greek yogurt or a combination of these.

On the weekends, we do brunch which consists of avocado toast with egg, when avocados are in season, or toast with scrambled eggs and shredded cheese.

Sometimes we’ll switch it up and do oat pancakes instead or replace the toast with tortillas or English muffins (both of these homemade).

For dinner, we’ll have tofu with oven-roasted veggies and quinoa three times a week and a bean-based dish, such as chili, lentils with veggies, or chickpea curry with rice, on the remaining nights.

On Saturday night, we might do pasta or a vegetarian hash instead.

Our grocery list

Here’s what our biweekly grocery list might look like:⁴

This “haul” would feed us for two weeks.

We generally do this shopping on a Saturday morning and then meal prep either on Saturday or Sunday.

On that Saturday, we’d have avocado toast with egg for brunch and pasta for dinner. And on Sunday, we’d have avocado toast with egg for brunch and chickpea curry with rice for dinner.

For lunch on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we’d have oatmeal, and on Tuesday and Thursday, we’d have celery and carrots with hummus.

For dinner on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we’d have tofu with oven-roasted veggies and quinoa, and on Tuesday and Thursday, we’d have chickpea curry with rice.

We’d then repeat this for the second week, replacing the chickpea curry with rice with a lentil and veggie bowl.

Our list on the following grocery trip, two weeks later, would be similar except we wouldn’t need almonds, walnuts, cinnamon, nutritional yeast, broccoli, pinto beans, brown rice, quinoa, bread, spaghetti, extra virgin olive oil, coffee, or turmeric.

And we would only need one tofu instead of two.

Given this, here’s what the list might look like:

The $159.15 from the first grocery shopping trip plus these $47.38 is a total of $206.53 for the month.

If we were to repeat the same meals the next month, our lists would be very similar except we wouldn’t need cinnamon, broccoli, pinto beans, quinoa, extra virgin olive oil, or coffee.

We’ll leave the turmeric in the list to represent spending on another spice, such as salt or curry powder.

This would bring down our cost for this second month to $141.46, for an average of $174 per month.⁵

We can round up to $200 for any infrequent purchases I might have missed, such as soy sauce, almond milk, frozen fruit, minced garlic, bouillon, or lemon juice.⁶

The “extra” $26⁷ a month should be more than enough to cover these items, especially when we factor in occasional sales at Aldi or Costco.

Our meals

Oatmeal

Two cups of oats cooked on the stovetop with roasted nuts, peanut butter, apple, and cinnamon added on as toppings.

My wife chops the nuts using the food processor, puts a cup of chopped nuts on a pan, then roasts them for around 10 minutes at 350 °F, flipping them after five minutes.

We use around six tablespoons of peanut butter for the two cups of oats and an apple or two, depending on their size.

Finally, add salt and cinnamon to your taste. We’re currently trying to reduce our salt consumption—we’re salt fiends—and are down to half a teaspoon per cup of oats.

Carrots and celery with hummus

We cook the chickpeas when we meal prep (having soaked them overnight the night before⁸), store them in mason jars, and freeze them until the night before we use them.

My wife will then use the food processor to make hummus. She uses lemon, garlic, crushed red pepper, paprika, a no-salt seasoning, and olive oil to make different flavors.

Finally, she cuts the carrots (half a pound) and celery (a quarter pound), and, voilà, lunch is served.

Tofu with oven-roasted veggies and quinoa

We cook the tofu, veggies, and quinoa for the week when we meal prep.

Each dinner consists of one block of tofu, a veggie mix (roughly one bell pepper, a third of a pound of carrots, and an onion), and one and one-third cups of quinoa.

We cut the tofu in thirds, heightwise, and cut these three shorter slabs into cubes, typically a six-by-six grid.

We put the tofu cubes into a large mixing bowl and add two tablespoons of nutritional yeast and one of soy sauce per block of tofu. Then we mix it all up and cook them for around eighty minutes, flipping them halfway through.

Then we cut the veggies (four bell peppers, one pound of carrots, and a couple of onions), put them all in a large mixing bowl, add some olive oil and no-salt seasoning, and cook them for around eighty minutes.

We cook the quinoa (four cups) using 1.5 cups of water per cup of quinoa. The quinoa is done within twenty minutes and we like to add a bit of turmeric when it is halfway done.

Chickpea curry

We start by chopping a couple of onions and cooking them on a large pot with some garlic until they’re almost translucent.

Then we add a can of coconut milk (13.5 fl oz), three cups of vegetable broth (vegetable bouillon paste mixed into hot water), frozen broccoli (1 lb), frozen peas (~15 oz⁹), green split peas (1 lb, dry), and spices (curry powder, cumin, and nutmeg).

We cook this over medium heat until the split peas are almost ready, then add in the chickpeas (1 lb, cooked) and let it all simmer for ten minutes.

Meanwhile, we cook four cups of brown rice using two cups of water per cup of rice. The rice is done within forty-five minutes.

We then put the curry and rice into mason jars—four large jars (32 oz) of curry, three of rice—and let them cool before putting them in the fridge or freezer.

Curry freezes well and is a good meal to make in bulk.

Lentils with veggies

We cut up the veggies (two bell peppers, one pound of carrots, and a couple of onions), put them in a pot, add some no-salt seasoning and olive oil, and cook them until tender, roughly twenty minutes.

Meanwhile, we cook the lentils (two pounds) in their own pot using around seven cups of water per pound. We cook them on medium heat and they’re done within twenty-five minutes.

Finally, we divide the lentils into three mason jars for the three dinners and do the same with the veggies.

Lentils freeze well and are also a good meal to make in bulk.

Pasta

We cook the pasta (one pound) al dente, as indicated on the box, then strain it—saving a bit of the pasta water—and put it back into the pot.

In go the green beans or sweet peas along with olive oil, butter, or tomato sauce.

And dinner is served.

Avocado toast with egg

We cut the avocados in half lengthwise, take out the seed, and use a spoon to remove the “flesh”. We then mash the flesh with a fork and add some olive oil.

The bread from Costco comes as whole loaves so my wife will cut it into slices when we get it and freeze it in the same bag it comes in.

From the freezer it goes straight into the oven for around three to five minutes at 350 °F—plus the few minutes while the oven preheats—until it’s nice and toasty.

While the bread toasts, we’ll make some fried eggs. Then we’ll spread the avocado onto the toast and place the fried egg on top. Yum.

Summary

Two meals per person per day, over a 30-day month, is 60 meals per person and 120 meals in total. At $200, that’s a total of $1.67 per person per meal.¹⁰

This might seem Spartan, but with a bit of planning and practice, I believe that this is totally doable for most people. Google for five minutes and you’ll find hundreds of delicious, healthy recipes that cost under $2 per serving.

True, our budget is no-frills. There’s no alcohol, chocolate, or fancy coffee. And we make most things at home.

As a quick thought experiment:

• Add in $8 of wine per week and replace the instant coffee with a $0.30 Costco K-Cup pod and the budget goes up by around $50.¹¹
• Add in a dark chocolate bar per week as an after-dinner treat along with a bag of pita chips per weekend and the budget increases by another $25 or so.
• Buy the hummus pre-made instead of making it at home and replace dry beans with canned beans and the budget increases by another $75.¹²

Very quickly the budget goes from $200 to $350 and it’s not like we’re buying anything ridiculous.

Adding an extra 5% to account for food waste takes this budget to $367.50 and using meat, instead of beans, eggs, and tofu, as the main source of protein would easily bring it over $400.

So, yes, I understand that we’re likely fairly unique when it comes to our grocery budget.

But the point of this post isn’t to judge anyone’s choices, only to show how you can eat well for less, if you’re so inclined.

The only “bad” reaction to money is, “Where did it all go?!”

If you’re conscious about where your money is going and are happy with your exchanges of time, aka money, for goods, then you’re winning.

I hope this was helpful. Stay healthy, stay happy.