I’m munching on leftover pizza for lunch as I write this blog post. But the pizza didn’t come from my local pizzeria. Well, not really. However, it was on last night’s dinner menu, which, like many of the dinners I’ve planned for and cooked this summer, it was a real money saver. How? Let me count the ways.

1. We had pizza for dinner but we made it at home. I’ll admit that I purchased the pizza dough from the local pizzeria ($9 for three gigantic balls of dough) but the rest of the magic came from our own house. We used sauce and mozzarella cheese we’d purchased when grocery shopping. However, one day I’m going to learn to make my own dough, especially since my dad got us a bread maker for the holidays. (I’m hoping it has a pizza dough setting.)
2. We shredded our own mozzarella. As I wrote in a long-ago blog posting on my cheese grater, buying whole blocks of cheese (versus the shredded kind in a bag) can be a huge cost savings for your budget. The shredded stuff, while convenient, is often twice the price as a whole block of cheese.
3. Any vegetables we served came from our garden for free. Well, it’s not exactly the garden at my house but the garden I started with three friends when we decided we didn’t want to rejoin our CSA. Except for our seed money–literally and figuratively–to get the garden going, the only thing we’ve spent so far has been our time to keep the plants watered, the rows weed-free and the tomatoes standing upright (they fell over after some torrential rains). Even the stakes we used with the tomatoes were free–bamboos spikes that my husband cut down from the bamboo patch in our yard.
4. We continue to cook at home every night. I’ll admit that meal planning and cooking at home gets old, but I continue to insist that we do this in order to save money. It helps that my daughters are now interested in cooking dinners and can contribute on that front. In addition, on days like today–when I don’t feel like cooking but I know I have to–I turn to my trusty slow cooker to get dinner on the table. (I’m cooking cubed chicken breasts in barbecue sauce, which I’ll serve with rice and fresh vegetables from the garden.)

What about you? Do you find any special challenges of continue to cook at home each night during the summer? Or is it easier than the rest of the year?