The thing nobody told me about meal prepping on a budget
Two years of meal preps and the thing that changed my grocery spend the most wasn't a better shopping list or buying in bulk. It was just stopping the waste.
For the first year I was throwing away carrot peels, onion ends, herb stems, parmesan rinds every single week without thinking about it. All of it straight in the bin.
That's basically throwing away a free pot of stock every two weeks.
Now during prep, scraps go into a little pouch on the side of my mat as I chop. End of the session they go straight into a freezer bag in the door of the freezer. Every couple of weeks I dump the bag into a pot, cover with water, and get a full batch of stock out of it
the key for me was having somewhere for the scraps to actually land mid-chop, otherwise they just get swept into the trash without thinking
Haven't bought a carton in four months. Probably $15-20 a month in savings, which tbh isn't massive, but it came from zero extra effort so I'll take it
What do you collect? Corn cobs keep coming up and I haven't tried it yet