Family meals can get pretty expensive. Especially if you are hosting an all-inclusive extended family feast for the relatives, you only see once a year.
A good family meal shouldn’t send you deep into debt because of excess spending or a blown budget.
This should be a fun meal to put together for the whole family to enjoy.
I know full well the strain a holiday meal can put on someone.
My wife’s family is large, and we’ve hosted it a couple of times.
Other times we helped cook and supplied several of the side dishes to accompany the main meal.
On time, I built a website for a guy in exchange for some good pork roasts and tenderloin which I cooked up for the Christmas feast.
I loved doing it, but had I not exchanged pork for web services, cooking that same spread would have set me back quite a bit.
So, after attending my wife’s extended family gatherings for over twenty years, I’ve managed to hack together some pretty interesting ways to save money.
And, at the same time make myself look like less of the cheap-skate I am.
Ok, buckle up, and I’ll show how I feed people like kings while I’m playing nothing more than a pauper.
Make it a potluck and have everyone bring something.
Bringing a dish to pass was the way I started out and now has become a ‘thing’ amongst the entire family.
When I started going to my wife’s family meals I wasn’t much of a cook. I pretended to be one, but I had a few good go-to dishes I always liked to bring. I hated feeling like a freeloader.
Over the years, I learned some things about cooking and now try to experiment with the family with my ‘dish to pass’.
I expanded the quantity delivered. It used to be a single dish in a loose-able plastic container.
Hey, I’m super picky about keeping my good containers in the house.
I usually bring two or three good concoctions to see how they go over.
Do you want to save some cash?
Ask everyone to bring at least one experiment. Tell your family; you’re looking for something unusual that no one has tried before.
This kind of shifts the mindset from being cheap to one of creativity and experimentation.
This year we are co-hosting with my brother-in-law and his wife.
The cheap-skate me is still getting the better end of the deal.
I’m making casseroles and salads which are super cheap to make if you create them entirely from scratch; even if I use frozen vegetables.
Another rule of thumb every year is the hosting family never supplies the deserts.
This year and every year, for every meal, and it seems like every occasion, my wife likes to make decorative objects out of candies and sweets.
Last Thanksgiving was miniature turkeys out of Oreo cookies, candy corn, and malted milk balls.
The point is to spread the expense while making it seem like you’re not just cheap.
Buy the expensive turkey or ham early when they’re on sale.
I was looking at the grocery store yesterday and found some pretty good deals on Turkey.
If you have room in your freezer, now might be a pretty good time to buy the main bird.
Saving $.25 to $.50 per pound would be a pretty good deal.
You might have to store it for a month or better, but the turkey will be fine with it.
Give yourself some time to get the main meat for the meal.
It allows you some added time to research coupons and figure out how to stack the deals to get the best price.
Have you heard of stacking the deals? This is where you use some cash back app and multiple coupons to end up with a cheap bird.
I can honestly say, I don’t deal stack.
I don’t have the time to do the research. But, if you are paying off some serious debt or have some extra time, deal stacking can be a sumptuous way to get cheap stuff.
You need to read all the fine print on the coupons to make sure you can do this.
Also, be on the lookout for your big-box wholesale types of grocery stores like Sam’s Club or Costco.
Here in Wisconsin, I prefer using a place called Woodman’s.
These guys buy in massive quantities and can usually make a decent profit while still offering extremely low prices.
Make as much as you can from scratch rather than from prepackaged goods.
Processed food typically costs more and has a ton of unhealthy additives and preservatives in it. Some of these things might even eat a hole in the driveway if they weren’t mixed in with our food.
Take stuffing for instance. You can buy the pre-made stuffing mix, or save the ends of the loaves of bread for a couple of weeks and make your croutons.
Google homemade stuffing mix, and you’ll probably find a bunch of different recipes.
I’m biased toward using recipes from the Food Channel and their celebrity chefs.
I’ve had more wins than losses when trying to cook stuff from their site.
The same goes for chicken broth. Chicken broth in the store can have a ton of sodium.
Cook a chicken for dinner this week, then boil the carcass and leftovers to make a homemade broth to use in your holiday stuffing. Just add your seasoning to it or Google a recipe off the internet.
I have mason jars and a vacuum sealer to keep it fresh and tasty for a long time.
Did I mention I love my vacuum sealer? This is one of the best purchases I’ve made to not only save me money but keep stuff I buy in bulk fresh for a long time.
Plan your entire meal well ahead of time.
Planning your meal well ahead is the most substantial money saver.
Like I mentioned above with the turkey, you can save a ton of money if you know what you’re having and what you need to shop for at least a month ahead of time.
If all you are doing toward the holiday meal is supplying one of the side dishes, it’s still good to know what you need to shop for, whether the ingredients are fresh or frozen, and how much you should make.
You also need to figure out your quantity.
We’ve had holiday meals where people brought too much, and most were taken home as leftovers.
I don’t mind leftovers, but I do know some people who won’t eat them.
To avoid the possibility of wasted food and money, get a good estimate of the number of people attending.
We like to plan the meals out about a month ahead of time.
We send invites via Facebook or phone call, and we usually can get a head count wrangled up about four weeks in advance.
I hate doing things last minute anyway. It’s not just a frugal thing; it’s also a planning thing.
Have one central meat dish and a bunch of cheaper vegetable ‘from scratch’ casseroles and salads to round out the meal.
Meat is expensive, and vegetables are cheap.
At least reasonably cheap comparing it to buying a bird.
Plus, if you factor in health, vegetables should be the most significant part of the meal. The thing with vegetables is you need them to taste good.
With a slab of turkey, all you need is for it to be moist and have a little salt and pepper.
Vegetables need some work.
You need to season them, maybe blanch them, or sauté them to a precise firmness.
There is a craft to prepare vegetables people want to eat.
So, what I do is make a wide variety in smaller quantities. Sometimes there isn’t enough to go around of each dish for everyone.
“Did you miss out on the blanched spinach with sautéed mushrooms, you should have gotten in line before your picky eater nephew, who got the last spoonful.”
“Grab a spoonful of the garlic broccoli in cheese sauce instead.”
Maybe I’m a bit biased. I’m a big vegetable eater anyway. You don’t even need to dangle the frugal carrot in front of me to sell me on vegetables.
I don’t know about you, but holiday meals look a lot sweeter if I can cut the price in half.
If you’re on a budget the easiest way to blow it is by having a bunch of people over and having to foot the entire bill.
It is especially gut-wrenching if you spent the whole year saving a ton of money to pay down debt. And then, see it fly away with a meal you might have been able to save money on.
Till next time, be safe.
Kevin