The Small Victories

I don't know about you, but I personally believe that saving money is one of the greatest rushes.

When you save money and learn a lesson in the process, even better!

Today I had such an experience.

As you may know, my day job is as chef and owner of a personal chef and catering service.  If I'm being honest, I prefer to do smaller events where the food is the focus.  I can't help but feel the integrity of the food is compromised when you're trying to feed a gigantic, hungry mob.

Therefore, I kind of have an imaginary limit in my head of 75-100 guests for events that I cater.  

I'm doing a wedding this weekend for 75 and am actually really looking forward to it.  It's a tapas style menu, so I can really focus on each individual component of the meal.

I'm coming to a point, I swear.

Since I tend to serve smaller groups, I usually do most of my shopping at Meijer.  It's close to my house and convenient for me.  What could be better?

One of the items on this weekend's menu is grilled flank steak skewers.  I happened to glance at the prices while doing my grocery shopping this weekend, and realized is was going to cost me at least $250 to buy enough steak for 75 people.  I thought flank was supposed to be a cheap cut!

I decided there had to be a better price out there, so I contacted my local GFS and found out they can have 30 lbs of fresh, never frozen, vacuum packed flank delivered to the store by Thursday for about $115!  Score!

So the lesson I learned today is shop around!  It may be a little less convenient, but seriously, I think that kind of savings is worth it, right???