What makes you so smart?

Who am I and what makes me such an expert on cooking and grocery savings.

My name is Tim Seelbach and I’m just an average guy trying to save a buck. How did I come up with my strategy and put this web site together? Well that goes back a long way.

My life as a cook began as a child. My mother would occasionally supply me with a pound of burger, a kitchen, anything I could find in the cabinets and set me loose. The results were some pretty interesting dishes. Some not so good, others pretty darn tasty. Fast forward several years and I’m an active-duty Marine with a working wife and a couple of kids. I hated cleaning the kitchen, so my loving and dutiful wife would do the cooking and cleaning for the kids and I – yes, you got it, I was a bad man. But, when my wife came to me for help, I readily stepped up. We soon realized that I don’t work and play well with others in the kitchen and I hated doing the cleaning, so a pact was formed. I cook, she cleans.

My wife has often accused me of suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder. Well, while I can say I have never been diagnosed and I refused to admit to being a sufferer, I can say when I set out to do something, I go whole hog. I parlayed my new duties into a new passion. I tried new techniques and new dishes. Soon I was wowing not only my family, but my friends and neighbors as well. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am no professional chef. I describe myself as an enthusiastic hack, but few turn up their noses at my concoctions.

Now you know how I came to be the main cook in my family, but what about the grocery savings part?

As I said before, I tend to get a little carried away with things. Well the result of getting carried away with cooking was a sky-rocketing grocery bill. I also mentioned that I was an active-duty Marine when I undertook this new passion. Let me tell ya, the phrases sky-rocketing grocery bill and active-duty Marine should never be used in the same sentence because as any Marine will tell you, you don’t join the Corps to get rich.

I had to figure out ways to streamline my new passion and make it fit within my budget. Frequently I had to throw food out from the pantry, freezer or fridge because it had gone bad or gotten freezer burned. I had to come up with a way to make feeding my family more efficient and economical and I wasn’t willing to resort to prepackaged, processed foods that were so full of chemicals they would survive a nuclear holocaust.

Fast forward nearly twenty years and I still love cooking, am still learning all the time and rarely ever throw bad food away. I don’t clip coupons. I just don’t have the patience for it and it doesn’t really work well with my strategy. I cook from scratch nearly all the time. There are exceptions and I’ll discuss that in certain sections of this site.

I appreciate you coming here. Hopefully you can adopt all of my strategy or perhaps pick up a few tips here and there. Regardless how much you adopt, I hope your cooking improves and your grocery bill drops.

Happy browsing,

Tim