New Online Feature for Shop It! Coming Soon

I shipped my kids off to university in September with cafeteria food cards. They were excited about that. What I knew that they didn’t know …. was that cafeteria food was a far cry from what they were used to getting at home. I figured at some point, they would become desperate for some real unprocessed food. Sure enough, this past weekend my son when onto my site and made Chicken Cordon Bleu https://shopitmiseitmakeit.ca/recipe/chicken-cordon-bleu/. When he sent me a pic of the finished product, I was thrilled. Not only because he made a meal on his own, but he did it using my system. A double whammy of joy. He did have one complaint. He didn’t anticipate how expensive it was to buy the ingredients for the recipe. He also didn’t have a fully stocked pantry as I do, so he had to make some pantry investments. I did explain this to him and the next time he makes this dish, he will have the pantry items on hand. All he could think about was the amount on the grocery receipt. It was at this point that I realized that not only do students need some help with food budgets but everyone does nowadays.

I have decided to add some new features to help when deciding if you want to make a recipe or not. Some recipes truly are an indulgence and the price tag shows that. There is also the aspect that you don’t fully use some of the items you bought for one recipe. I call these Overbuys. It’s meant to get you to pick another recipe that calls for the same ingredient by doing a search on my site using just the ingredient. This is good food management and also good money sense. I will over time add new features. For this upcoming release, I will focus on the out-of-pocket expense when you are in the grocery store or online shopping.

• I will be adding a cost for each ingredient based on Canadian Dollars and sourced from www.walmart.ca
• When viewing Shop It! you will be able to check off what you already know you have and do not need to buy. This will also cross it off the list.
• At the bottom of Shop It! you will see how much money you need for the recipe for only those items you still need to buy.
• You will see how much the entire recipe costs if you had to buy everything and the cost per serving based on this amount. I really debated breaking it down to the penny on partially used ingredients, but I didn’t think that was super helpful. I am always looking for feedback.

My son would have thought twice about making the recipe if he knew how much he had to invest in it upfront. To soften the blow, I am also going to add a percentage to let you know how much of the ingredients are pantry investments. This way you will get a sense that it’s expensive this time around, but you are investing in future cooking adventures!

Come and visit in the next couple of days and I will slowly get each recipe up to date with their costs.