Frugal Breakfast Ideas

I am always trying to cut down my grocery bill and breakfast can be one of the most expensive meals of the day depending on what you serve. Here you will find some inexpensive breakfast ideas that are good and healthy for your family.

Oatmeal

1. Cut out all prepared, cold breakfast cereals. Instead use Oatmeal, grits or other hot cereals. These are better for us and are really easy to fix. Your family can “decorate” them to their tastes and your family’s budget. My family loves oatmeal with butter and jelly or grits with butter and a bit of grated cheese.

Frozen Juice

2. We don’t use expensive juices. We use frozen juice concentrates. This saves a lot of money for us every month. I also only allow juices to be drunk at breakfast and 1 serving per person. This way the juice will last 2-3 days for my family of four.

Menu Plan

3. Plan a menu with the same few breakfasts repeated through out the week. You can then stock up on ingredients when they are on sale or buy in bulk.

Eggs

4. If you can buy some chickens and have some homegrown eggs! We have an abundance of eggs most of the time so we eat a lot of egg based meals. Eggs are high in protein and most kids love them. We mostly eat them for breakfast scrambled or hard-boiled.

Day Old Bread

5. We buy our bread at the day old bread store. We get 3 loaves for $1.00 that way. We use the bread to make toast for breakfast, topped with butter, jelly or peanut butter and sometimes cheese.

Garden

6. Grow a garden, plant fruit trees, or gather what you can from your property. Pretty much anyone can grow a garden. I have a friend who lives in an apartment, and she grows container gardens on her balcony. We have wild mustang grapes that can be made into raisins and jelly, prickly pear cactus (we make jelly out of the cactus pears), mesquite beans (we make a jelly out of them), 2 peach trees (for fresh peaches in season and jelly), and wild pecans. I’m sure there are more items around our property that can be used, but this is what we’ve found so far. We’re also continually adding fruits, berries and nuts to our place. Use fresh when you can or freeze and can for when you can’t use fresh.

Leftover Rice

7. We make breakfast from left over rice. Whenever I fix rice for dinner, I make enough for breakfast the next morning and put in the refrigerator or freezer. I warm up the rice and add butter, sugar and cinnamon. This is one of my husband’s favorites. Rice is really inexpensive. I don’t use instant rice, but I use long grain brown rice. It has to cook for around 20 minutes.

Powdered Milk

8. I make milk from powdered milk. My family hasn’t noticed the difference since I did it gradually. I did it like this…I at first made 1/2 whole milk, 1/2 prepared powdered milk, and then kept watering down the whole milk with prepared powdered milk. By doing this, my family has gradually gotten use to powdered milk and now will drink it without any problems. We’re planning on getting a milk cow some day soon, so then we’ll be drinking raw cow milk and also using it to make butter and cheese.

Well, I hope you have found these tips helpful! These have been things that I have done to help trim my grocery bill down and I hope you can use them to help lower your grocery bill too!

The Author:

Susan Godfrey is a Christian wife, mom and homemaker. She is also the owner of Homekeeper’s Heart, http://www.freewebtown.com/homekeepersheart, a Titus 2 Ministry to encourage Christian women to be the wives, mothers and homemakers that God wants them to be!