I've recently run across a fab website called http://www.supercook.com.  In a nutshell, you set up a FREE account and then you load in all the food stuffs and ingredients you have in your cupboards, fridges and freezers.  The website will tell you what recipes you can make with just the ingredients you have in your kitchen right now.

As my cupboards were in dire need of a 'spring clean' I tried this website on Tuesday.  It told me I had the fixings to prepare 32 main courses with the ingredients I had on hand  I decided on mac and cheese with tomatoes as it would only take about 20 minutes (more or less) to prepare.  That got rid of the odd bits of pasta laying around in three different packages, the tomatoes that were nearing the end of their days and the wedge of cheddar cheese that 'seemed like a good idea at the time' but just never got around to doing anything with.  I saved money as no food was wasted and there was no need to buy any extras.  My cupboards are now organized and I found stuff I forgot I had.  Best of all, as everyone enjoyed their dinner there were no leftovers to be put in the fridge and forgotten about and left to turn into a science project.

Tonight I'll be preparing beef koftas and mashed potatoes.  All I needed to get was some more ground beef to top up what I already had.  My shop had put out bags of potatoes on reduction as they were coming up to their sell-date.  This meal for a family of five only cost me roughly $6.45.

I think supercook.com is a great way to plan my meals as I can utilize what's already in my kitchen.  I can save money by shopping for what I really need instead of buy more of the same stuff because I couldn't remember if I had it or not.

We have several cookbooks that were from various churches around here (yard sales are a treasure trove of such cookbooks) which invariably have recipes that are cheap to make since most of them had large families to feed with little money. So we make out a menu plan from those cookbooks, then we plan our grocery shopping around the menu and grocery ads. If a particular recipe meat is not on sale but could easily be substituted for one that is, we'll make the substitution instead.

We also try to buy the generic or store brands of things, although my roommate L's mom is adamant that only one brand of milk will do.

Another thing we do is go to the dollar stores. We have a dollar tree, which is a true dollar store where everything is $1. We often buy our juices, pastas, hamburger helpers, pasta salads, and various canned goods (usually 2-3 for $1) as we can generally get 2 weeks worth of stuff for about $10.

Other than that, I have learned to pay attention to “bulk” packaging for things. A 3-4 pack of something is not necessarily less than buying 3-4 individual items. Sometimes the bulk packs are more than the individual items are.

One of the ways I keep our food costs down is to engage in once-a-week cooking.  I was i nspired by the book Once a Month Cooking, but lack the space (or energy) to even attempt to accomplish such a feat.

By making sure that my fridge is filled with food each week I minimize not only my weekly food budget, but I avoid the trap of ordering in because “there's nothing to eat.”  Furthermore, it enables me to come home from work and only have to “heat & eat” rather than start from scratch at 5:30PM after a crappy day of telemarketing.

Each week I alternate my dishes around 1) what's on sale at the supermarket and 2) what's lying around in my pantry

Generally I make 3 double-sized batches of main dishes (last week it was chicken cordon bleu, an Italian meat sauce, and macaroni and cheese “Mexican” style).  As a family of 5 (3 adults, 1 teen, and a tween) this enables us to eat well for 6 nights and have a leftover night once.

One trick I've developed is that I have designated the bottom shelf of my fridge for “dinner food.”  If something is on that shelf it is off bounds, but once I serve a dish and find there's not enough left over to feed us again I move it up to the middle shelf which means its up for grabs for lunches.

A side benefit of this is also that it is easy for me to make “just a little bit more” of whatever dish I'm working on so that I can share it.

What do you to to keep your weekly food bills as low as possible?