Altomari-Rathjen - The $7 A Meal Mediterranean Cookbook: 301 Delicious, Nutritious Recipes the Whole Family Will Love

We used to joke that every time we turned around, prices went up.

Now we know it's true!Food prices in particular are affected by many factors, including the price of oil, commodities speculation on the stock market, conversion of food to fuel, the growth in world population, and changes in the climate and weather. Studies and surveys show that most of us are abandoning restaurants and fast-food places and are trying to cook and eat at home. It's true: You can control your budget and still eat very well, for very little as long as you learn some new habits and follow a few simple rules.

Everything should start with a plan, whether you're making a household budget, searching for a job, or trying to feed your family on less money. If you write lists, plan menus, and cut coupons, you will save a significant amount of money, and you will be able to serve your family tastier and more nutritious food. Here's the most important rule: You will save money if you cook at home.

The more work you do, and the simpler, more basic foods you buy, the more money you will save. This may sound daunting, but once you get into the habit of cooking it will take you less and less time and the skill will become second nature. Choose to make your own meals and you will control what's in the food you feed your family. Eating lower on the food chain doesn't just mean avoiding beef, pork, and chicken. It also means eating foods that are as close to harvest condition as possible. A ripe peach will be less expensive than ice cream made with peaches, or a bottled peach salsa.

Manufactured foods will almost always cost more than the raw ingredients assembled by you.

A lot of your grocery savings will depend on what you buy. It's important to know that buying whole chicken breasts and deboning them yourself will not only cost less but give you more for your money. The bones and skin can be saved to make chicken stock. In fact, for all of the chicken recipes in this book I recommend buying bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts and removing the large breast muscle yourself. If you do this, a boneless, skinless chicken breast will cost you about a dollar.

Buying them already boned and skinned will cost almost $2 apiece. Surprisingly, butter costs about 10 cents a tablespoon, while the least expensive form of olive oil is 20 cents per tablespoon. When you're frying sesame cheese puffs, stuffed onions, or other Mediterranean foods and want the best taste, butter and olive oil are the best choices. Use butter for the best flavor, and add a bit of the more expensive olive oil to raise the smoke point and keep the butter from burning. Frozen and canned vegetables will usually be cheaper than fresh. And don't worry about the nutrition of these products.

Processed produce has just as many vitamins as fresh; in many cases, even more because it's processed within a few hours of harvest. Fresh vegetables and fruits, especially when out of season, take days to get to the market, and every day they lose vitamin content. Buying a cheaper top round steak and marinating it overnight in the fridge will result in a tender and flavorful cut of beef that just takes a bit more work than plopping a tenderloin or rib eye on the grill. And buying that same steak and pounding it with flour makes Swiss steaks cheaper than you'll find in a frozen dinner. Make your own hamburgers rather than buying preformed patties. You get the idea! Unit pricing is one of the best tools for budget shopping.

Look at the price per ounce to see if that huge box of pasta is a better buy than the smaller one. Most grocery stores have unit pricing tags on the shelves right under the product. You can also bring a calculator to the store to figure it out for yourself. Just divide the price by the number of ounces in the product and compare. Look at the price of a head of lettuce versus the bagged, prewashed assembled salads.