I am currently making a very concerted effort to reduce our food spending, the one department in our family's budget I probably have the most control over of all, since I do the vast majority of our food shopping, meal planning and preparation. One of the ways I hope to accomplish this, is to finally put together a price book (a la The Tightwad Gazette), which I have intended to do for years but never quite got around to it. I know it will help me considerably in keeping track of prices from store to store....

As for stores, we do have a number of options for shopping in my community. In addition to several supermarket and drug store chains, we also have a few health food stores, several asian and european-style food markets (it's a university town), bakeries, a recently opened Save-a-Lot, a Deals ("Nothing Under a Dollar" --a marketing gimmick that sometimes translates into savings, and sometimes not), an Aldi's, and a Big Lots (happily a bunch of these stores are clustered together very near my children's dance studio that I must get them to several times a week-- so I need not go out of my way to shop them). I have also been a natural foods buying club/co-op member for many years. In summer I take advantage of a fabulous local farmer's market -- in addition to the fresh vegetable surplus given to me by my father from his abundant garden (as long as he is continues to keep it up, it's unnecessary for me to - he plants enough for all of us). I do prepare, freeze and can any free or nearly free fruit and vegetable produce that comes my way -- and will continue cooking nearly all our meals from scratch. Between the combined effort of keeping track of loss-leader store sales, comparison shopping, bulk purchasing, free garden produce, scratch cooking/avoidance of convenience foods, and wasting as little as possible, I'm hoping to significantly whittle our family food budget, all while maintaining my personal standards for nutrition (we happen to be a vegetarian family, plus I lean towards a preference for natural and whole foods cookery.....).

So, all this brings me finally to .....ketchup. My kids adore ketchup. They LOVE it -- you would think it's the elixer of life. They put it on everything. I don't discourage it (even though most of it is probably sweetened with the evil 'high fructose corn syrup'), since its said to be a good source of lycopene, an important anti-oxidant. But at the rate they go through the stuff, it can be quite expensive supporting their habit. I do make and can my own from garden tomatoes -- although we plowed through my stash long ago, and last year was not a good tomato year for our area so I never got the surplus to build up another winter supply. Consequently, after we went through the last quart of my home canned, I gritted my teeth and began buying it again, a few bottles at a time, trying to hit the sales. Until yesterday that is when I stumbled across the mother load of ketchup, in Big Lots. There they were -- huge industrial-sized cans of Hunts ketchup, 7 POUNDS per can. At a $1.99 per can!!?? I bought 3 cans. ( How exactly I am to serve these, I haven't quite figured out yet, heh....)