Anonymous wrote:The difference in cost, for me, came when I threw out the cook books and stopped consulting epicurious for every day meals. I use recipes for special meals, not every day ones. What you need are techniques, not lists of ingredients. When you have techniques, you apply them to whatever ingredients you have that week, based on what was cheapest or freshest or whatever your criteria is when you shop. So shop once a week, and totally avoid the center aisles of the store (aside from frozen veggies). Buy two packages of meat (a package of chicken breasts and some ground beef, maybe) and three veggies (broccoli, kale, and cauliflower are good and inexpensive this time of year). And a box of eggs and some rice and pasta. When I do that, my week might look like:

Day 1 - stir fry chicken and broccoli
Day 2 - meatballs over rice with roasted cauliflower
Day 3 - Egg omelette or fritata with the left over stir fry inside
Day 4 - Pasta with kale and garlic
Day 5 - Rice pilaf (or risotto, if you bought that kind of rice) with left over meat from meatballs, and cauliflower and garlicky kale

With all these, the technique is the important part - you know how to stir fry, you know how to amp up a a pasta sauce based on pan brownings and pasta water, you know your "risotto" will taste fine for a weekday if you leave out the cheese. You don't buy ingredients based on what the recipe says you should do, and you don't go out for ingredients if you didn't buy something. You cook with that you have, and use basic techniques to make it really taste quite good.