If you're looking for a way to save money at the grocery store, shopping for a Thanksgiving meal is a good way to find deals that you normally won't find the rest of the year.

Turkeys are historically less expensive in November and December than in other months, so now is the time to clean out your freezer to make room for as many turkeys as you can. And as a high-protein, low-fat food, it's a healthy meal.

And some Thanksgiving side dishes, such as cranberries, are cheaper now than they are the rest of the year.

The grocery industry has been set on its ear by the recent economic crisis, as shoppers seeking to wring more from their food budget abandon the upscale markets such as Fresh Market in favor of price-first merchants like Wal-Mart. Playing to the shifting buying habits is upscale grocer Wegmans, which has announced it will lower prices on hundreds of items.

Wegmans, with 72 stores in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia, and Maryland, states that it will eat the cost of lowering prices on items on which is has locked-in contracts with its suppliers, the culprit in the delay between commodity price drops and the price on the shelf. The price cuts will be seen first in its house brands, over which it exercises more control.

Wegmans finishes near the top of Fortune Magazine's annual list of the 100 best companies to work for, and claims a "nearly telepathic level of customer service," a claim that brings many amusing possible scenarios to my mind, none of which I can share here. The company pledges that "Every Day You Get Our Best." It might want to add the word "Price" to that pledge, if it intends to lure back the WalMart shoppers.

Thanks, The Consumerist

Cooking from scratch, which can also be called homemade cooking, is making a comeback these days. People are realizing that scratch cooking provides multiple benefits. Food cooked using real ingredients is more digestable than prepackaged meals. Food cooked from scratch contains fewer of the chemicals foreign to our bodies. Scratch cooking lowers grocery bills. Lastly, and most importantly, food prepared from scratch just plain tastes better than those plastic- encapsulated, reconstituted, freezer-to-microwave meals. At least it tastes better in my house.

Just to be clear here --for easy daily cooking, I do believe in such things as premixed spice blends, frozen vegetables, and prepared sauces. I also believe that homemade cooking strategies are wide- open for adaptation.

Don't miss the rest of our series on Underrated In America!

Not everything has to be produced on our own stove tops. Scratch cooking can be as easy as placing a nice little chuck roast into a slow cooker with some carrots, peas, and diced potatoes. Adding a tablespoon of Cajun seasoning to the blend will provide exceptional flavor. Leave the mixture on low heat all day and you'll come home to an aroma reminiscent of grandma's loving kitchen.

Last week Northwest Ohio Credit Union invited more than 700 local high schoolers to learn more about money in Finances 101. The event was a crash course in personal finances and credit scores for the teens and also provided them with quite a few surprises about bills. The event reminded me of the popular board game LIFE, only with more consequences!

As students arrived they were handed a checkbook which contained their salary and current debts. From there they traveled to different tables picking out cars, insurance and dealing with other expenses that come with living on your own. There was even a table dedicated to unexpected expenses such as a car breakdown, which forced students to adapt as well as emphasized the need to plan ahead.

Students quickly learned the importance of budgeting and the consequences of not sticking to a budget. After working her way through the "month" one student had to write a bad check just to get her groceries; ending up $300 in the hole. The best news from the event was that many of these teens realized that it is important to spend money not on the things they wanted, but on the things they actually needed!

I think this is a great opportunity to show teenagers what it means to be in charge of your own finances, if only for a few hours. A program like this will go well with the mandatory personal finance classes for Ohio high schoolers set to graduate in 2010. Overall I think compact, hands-on programs like this have real a chance at impacting the future of teenagers everywhere. My personal thanks goes out to Northwest Ohio Credit Union and to the schools who allowed their students to participate. Keep up the good work!

Earlier this month a combination of factors kept us from our regular weekend trip to the grocery store. Rather than cramming it in after work when we were already hungry, we skipped buying groceries for the week, saving close to $100 bucks. Normally skipping on groceries leads to bad habits such as frequent fast food stops but this week we were able to avoid the temptation. Instead we chose to feed ourselves using the cupboard plan.

The cupboard plan is surprisingly simple and pretty much anyone can use it to save money on groceries several times a year. The only two requirements are that your cupboards aren't bare and that you have enough willpower to avoid eating out. I think you'll be surprised by just how many meals are hidden behind your cupboard doors!

After exploring the recesses of our cupboard, we found plenty of pasta, peanut butter, soups and even Jell-O. When we looked in the freezer, we discovered garlic bread, fries, pierogies and more, all waiting to be eaten before freezer burn set in. While we didn't eat fancy during the week, we still had lots of delicious meals.

This experiment reminded me that while our cash emergency fund isn't as big as I would like it to be, our emergency food fund is well stocked. This is a reminder that even if you are a meal-planning pro, you're sure to stumble every now and then, leading to a surplus of food that ends up in the freezer. This plan isn't for everyone, but if you are looking for a quick way to save $100 bucks and have a little willpower then this is an easy way to do it!

We've all noticed rising prices at the grocery store, and most of us can reconcile these prices with higher fuel costs. If it costs more for producers to get their goods to the store shelves, it's going to cost consumers more. It's nothing to be happy about, but at least we can point to the reason our grocery bills are so much higher.

But several lawsuits against the egg industry argue that it's not just expensive gas driving prices up. In 2006, the average retail price for a dozen eggs was $1.30. That price jumped all the way to $2.20 earlier this year, before receding slightly to $1.85. While this may add a few bucks to a shopper's grocery bill, the price jump is really squeezing restaurant owners, who buy eggs by the truckload. There are currently six major lawsuits against the egg industry, alleging schemes to drive up the price of eggs.

The egg producers argue that costs are higher for them, from feed to fuel, and that's the reason prices are higher. But the plaintiffs say producers are intentionally limiting egg supply, which is down to 7.5 billion dozen this year from 7.6 billion dozen in 2006, to drive up the price. They point to the Animal Care Certified Program, enacted in 2000 by the United Egg Producers cooperative, to which the defendants all belong. The UEP says the program was put in place at great expense to the farmers for the benefit of the hens -- requiring more space in their cages for the birds and regular inspections. The plaintiffs say that the UEP enacted this plan under the guise of hen welfare and better food safety, when really the only reason it exists is to limit hen numbers and thus limit egg production. According to a Humane Society spokesperson, if they really gave a cluck about the hens, they'd do a lot more than just give them bigger cages. Hens are still being raised in deplorable conditions at most of the big farms.

The success of the lawsuit hinges on whether or not the UEP is a cooperative or a trade organization. As a trade organization, the UEP would be subject to antitrust laws, which they seem to have already admitted violating. But the UEP and its lawyers say they are a cooperative and therefore are exempt from antitrust legislation. If the lawsuit is successful, we might just see a drop in egg prices -- but then again, if the producers are ordered to pay millions in damages, wouldn't that make them charge more for their eggs to protect the bottom line anyway? Here's hoping the law is clear that they can't do that...

Choosy mothers should probably choose Jif if they want to scrape more peanut butter out of a standard-size jar. According to CNN, competing sandwich spread Skippy is among numerous brand names that have quietly shrunk the size of their packaging as a means of passing on food inflation to consumers.

While the Skippy jar remains the same height and diameter as it did when it contained a full 18 ounces of peanut butter, a deeper indentation on the bottom accounts for the loss of 1.7 ounces. Meanwhile, the most significant change Jif has made to its packaging is on the label, where large type alerts consumers to the fact that this jar is still 18 ounces strong.

Meijer has a cool new site they recently launched called Meijer Mealbox, which wraps recipes, meal planning and coupons into one slick easy to use package. Mealbox is currently in beta but anyone can use it to get a better handle on meal preparation and grocery shopping. The service revolves around a widget which lets you browse recipes, complete with nutritional info, and add them to a weekly planner under breakfast, lunch dinner and other to plan the week ahead.

As soon as you add an item to the meal planner the ingredients are automatically added to the shopping list for the week. This is where Mealbox really starts to shine -- the grocery list is grouped by ingredient type so that you only need to look at one section of the list as you go through the store. No more realizing you needed shredded cheese at the last minute because you wrote it next to deodorant on your list. It gets better -- anything you add to your list that is on sale that week is marked on the list with the sale price. Finally, if there are any coupons available from Meijer or the manufacturer for the items on your list, the coupon is embedded right below the list so it prints out at the same time.

As a regular Meijer shopper, I can't wait to add this tool to my weekly routine of grocery shopping. I love the fact that I can sort the recipes by meal type, ingredients or by special diet requirements to find what I am looking for. I wish I could sort by recipes with sale items this week so that I could get the best bang for my buck. My only other complaint is that I can't change the serving size of the recipe to reflect the fact that we are cooking for two. Still, the service is in beta and I can easily adjust the quantities on the shopping list for the time being. This is an excellent tool and is a prime example of a company that "gets" its customers. Now if only they would implement a tool attached to my cart that would push all those annoying "aisle talkers" out of my way!

Browse any grocery aisle, endcap display, dairy case and frozen food section and you'll find them: Store brands and generics are more sought after than ever.

Even if there was no recession and gas prices hadn't gone north of $4/gallon, perhaps fans of store brands know something you don't --- foodstuffs taste just as good, if not better, and non-foodstuffs are also less expensive and their quality is on-par with name-brand items. A piece in USA Today notes that smart shoppers aggressively seek out store brands and grocery chains like Kroger, Supervalu and Safeway are experiencing a surge in sales of items ranging from canned goods to paper towels and toilet paper.

Price is one thing, but what about taste? As a discriminating, yet dedicated store brand shopper, I've been on the side of the store brand for some time now. What's good? Well, it's a matter of individual taste and preference, to be sure. For my part, I enjoy store brand plain, non-fat yogurt. You can add blueberries, peaces, granola and other stuff to it and it's a great breakfast, as well as a base for dressings. A 32-ounce container of Axelrod's Plain, Non-Fat, Easy Dieter yogurt is $2.89 at my local Fine Fair and Pathmark. Stonyfield Farm, Dannon and other name brands can be as high as $4.89. Ouch.

How much does ground beef cost in your supermarket? In my local Safeway, it's $3.49 a pound, but at the specialty market where I shop to get beef that was raised by local farmers and grass-fed, it's $3.99 a pound; a fair price, I think, though my grocery budget is seriously straining my family's finances. In Little Rock, Arkansas, where a few of my blogging mama friends shop, ground beef is only $3.10 per pound, and the sample grocery basket of 20 items we created at WalletPop costs only $39.72; it's $63.85 in Portland, Oregon, where I live.

But what about my friends in Adelaide, Australia? London, England? Brussels, Belgium? In Adelaide, Jessica shopped at Coles and found that "4 Star Choice" (lean but not extra lean) was AUD6.54 per 500g -- or $5.75 per pound. In London, Catherine shopped at Waitrose and found ground beef priced at £4.99 per 500g -- a whopping $9.03 per pound, the second most expensive of all the cities where we shopped (the priciest was Paris, where ground beef is $11.03 per pound). In Brussels, Gaby reported ground beef to be €2.25 per pound ("carbonnade" cut at cheap butcher's shop) or €4.45 per pound ("steak tatare cut" at normal or quality butcher's shop) -- $3.54 per pound, nearly the same as here in Portland.

I grew up in a "traditional" family with the sort of mom who got up early to make us a big breakfast. I remember eggs, pancakes, biscuits, sausages, toast, and always a pitcher of freshly-mixed juice. We were also firmly on the underside of the poverty line (so it was margarine on our toast and generic brand 'pancake syrup' on our flapjacks).

When I got to be a parent, I stuck to my grown-up spendthrift ways for quite a while, buying cold cereal, scones, bagels and the like, rarely making a big delicious breakfast of biscuits or pancakes or muffins but far more often just picking it up from the coffee shop.

And then one day -- maybe it was the fact that I stopped eating processed foods and cut out white sugar, or maybe it was just that our grocery budget was through the roof -- I made a commitment to start making breakfast, just like my mama before me.

In a comment made in response to my post lamenting New York City's insane grocery prices, one WalletPop reader explained how he cuts down on his grocery bills (edited for clarity):

I get my son to shop for me... It helps me avoid me from impulse buying. Thefirst thing I do is visit online grocery stores, prepare a grocery list & if I think the delivery fee doesn't make sense then I get Neil to pick up the stuff for me. I really think getting a person who doesn't like to grocery shop works because it doesn't put a hole in your pocket.

It makes perfect sense to me -- if you have a son who's willing to do your shopping for you at no charge. Most people know that making a grocery list and sticking to it is a good way to avoid overspending on impulse items. But I also wonder whether having someone else to your shopping is a good personal finance strategy: maybe if you and a friend swap lists and do each other's shopping, you'll both spend less? It seems a little complicated and most orders would probably get messed up in some way: "I wanted the light blue cheese dressing!" But if are looking to lose weight -- and can't help stocking up on unhealthy foods -- sending someone else to do your food shopping might be just the trick. It's sort of the idea behind programs like Nutrisystem.

I'm curious if anyone reading this has experimented with having someone else do their shopping, and what the results have been. Please leave a comment and I'll do a follow-up!

The USA Today reports on something that savvy grocery shoppers may have already noticed. In an effort to avoid raising per package prices in the face of soaring commodity prices, many food makers are shrinking the size of the packages.

Ice cream packages have gone from 1.75 quarts to 1.5 quarts. 10 ounces of chips instead of 12. A roll of Bounty paper towels has gone from 60 sheets to 52. Oh the humanity! A Nielsen executive who tracks these things says that up to 30% of packaged goods have shrunk in size over the past year.

In a boom economy, they'd just raise the prices. But with consumers sensitive about high gas prices, shrinking the packages is more attractive, at least for now.

Some consumer advocates are crying foul, but I'm not so sure. Go to the grocery store and take a look around: how many people are really going to suffer by eating 1.5 quarts of cookie dough ice cream instead of 1.75? At least in terms of numbers, over-nutrition in the United States is a much more serious problem than people not getting enough food.

Maybe shrinking packages will lead to shrinking waistlines, in which case we should all thank our friends in corporate America.

This post is part of a series about real-life signs we're in a recession.

I was pregnant with my first son, Everett, when my family bought a membership to the Oregon Zoo. Here in Portland, obstetricians actually suggest eager moms-to-be walk up and down the hills at the zoo when they're trying to stimulate contractions.

It didn't work much, but it started a family connection to the zoo (and hilariously, a baby mountain goat was born the same day as Everett), and now that we have three children, we've upgraded to the most serious membership of all. My husband's favorite thing to do with the children is to get on the bus (we've given up our family car) and take the boys to see animals. With the $100 annual membership, all our visits are free but for snacks.

Ahem. But for snacks. Visits have been few and far between lately, because the snacks at the zoo now seem so expensive. Even though the baby doesn't ask for elephant ears, buying even one treat for every family member with a full set of teeth can set us back $20 -- more than our typical family grocery budget for a day (and we haven't had a zip of nutrition, in all likelihood). I don't mind packing snacks for the boys to go on an afternoon excursion (especially if that leaves me home alone in peace), but have you ever taken a five-year-old and three-year-old to the zoo and refused to buy them the treats offered at every turn? Umm-hmmm. Avoiding the "gimmes" when we truly can't afford to satisfy them is the reason we now spend a lot more of our entertainment time enjoying the wildlife in our own backyard.