Start a Meal Exchange to Save Money and Enjoy More Homemade Meals

If your busy schedule stops you from making as many homemade meals as you'd like, a meal exchange makes it easy to stockpile a variety of meals with a minimum of fuss.

Photo by Russell Bernice.

Finance and frugality blog The Simple Dollar shares a guide to putting together an effective meal exchange. What exactly is a meal exchange? They elaborate:

On a certain day, everyone in the exchange meets for coffee and brings along a laundry basket full of frozen meals, one for each family, along with any needed instructions taped to the lid. The members of the club just swap the meals so that everyone takes home one of each meal that they didn't prepare.

It's a very clever idea for several reasons. First, it makes it very easy for people to prepare a variety of home-cooked meals. Second, it drastically reduces the meal preparation time, since there's only one big session of making several copies of one meal and after that one only needs to pull a meal out of the freezer and toss it in the oven. Third, it's much cheaper since you can buy the ingredients for your meal in bulk.

The method provides the benefits of bulk freezer cooking without the monotony that sometimes comes with bulk cooking and freezing all your meals. Check out the full article below for tips and tricks to ensure your meal exchange goes smoothly.

Income inequality is about to get worse, according to David Segal's article in Sunday's New York Times. Those of us not in the beneficiary column, the article suggests, had better start thinking of which "artisanal services" we can provide. In short, we need to identify what the rich need and start making those widgets tout de suite.

Paraphrasing Professor Caplin of NYU, Segal wrote:

"While it's noble to focus on how to spread wealth around, it might be wiser to think of ways the poor and middle class could cater to the economy's biggest winners."

The Republican Party has staked out a position where anything to the left of extreme selfishness is on the slippery slope to socialism. But it hasn't occurred to Democrats to counter with the more real scenario of creeping aristocracy.

And what do we hear from the White House? Talk about compromise, common ground and caution.

The administration keeps saying that the American people want a meeting of the minds -- they want the parties to work together. Do they really think that means at any cost?

Americans want Social Security to be there when they need it. They want their homes and their jobs back. They don't want their kids fighting on foreign soil so they can cater to the "biggest winners" when they get home. And, yes, they don't want more money going to fat cats in gigantic financial swindles while their own and their children's opportunities are taken away.

If we don't keep sending that message to Washington, then we will become a country of winners and losers, aristocrats and serfs.

Kathleen also blogs at comebacksatwork.com and bardscove and is on Twitter: @comebackskid.

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Wednesday, December 8, 2010

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Start a Meal Exchange to Save Money and Enjoy More Homemade Meals

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