We’ve covered a variety of topics in this Feeding Our Family for $40 a Week series—from menu-planning to using coupons to  buying ahead. Today we’re going to talk about one final key ingredient to keeping our grocery budget low: cooking from scratch.

While shopping the sales and using coupons allows us to get many products for pennies on the dollar, we save hundreds of dollars each year by baking and cooking from scratch.

Many people assume that from-scratch cooking has to equal dozens of hours each week slaving in the kitchen. On the contrary, it actually can be done with minimal effort.

1) Use a bread machine.

We love homemade bread and cinnamon rolls, but I don’t have hours to devote to this each week. Instead, my bread machine has become one of best kitchen friends!

I rarely use the bread machine to bake the bread, but I constantly am using the dough cycle on it. In less than five minutes, I can have a loaf of bread started. The bread machine does the rest of the work. All I have to do is pull the dough out and stick it in a pan to bake

See our favorite Bread Machine Bread recipe here. We also love this recipe for Bread Machine Buttery Rolls and this fabulous Bread Machine Cinnamon Rolls recipe.

2) Cook in bulk.

While once-a-month cooking might intimidate you, cooking ahead really doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Start small: triple a casserole recipe, eat one for dinner, and stick two in the freezer. Or, mix up a double batch of your favorite cookie dough and freeze half of it in cookie dough balls.

Set aside one day a week to prepare food ahead of time and you’ll save a lot of time and a lot of money. Plus, homemade food trumps boxed and processed food every time!

You can see some of my freezer cooking recipes and successes and failures here.

3) Keep it simple.

Cooking from scratch doesn’t mean you have to have six course dinners every night. I recommend keeping it simple. Find some quick and easy recipes with only a few ingredients and stick to those most of the time.

We’ll often have some Italian Chicken (a bottle of your favorite Italian Dressing poured over chicken breasts and baked in the oven or crockpot), steamed veggies, fruit, and homemade bread (made in the bread machine) for dinner. This whole meal can be put together in less than 20 minutes. It’s nothing elaborate, but it’s filling, healthful, and delicious.

Who says homemade has to take hours?

As a few of you may know (and all of you who follow us on Twitter!), Monday marked the day where we had four power bloggers come out to the ShopAtHome.com offices for an official “Day with ShopAtHome.com”, filled with lots of chatter, new friendships, way too much candy, fun presentations, and many great ideas that we can’t wait to start working on!

The day was packed full with different activities: everything from presentations by our employees to give them a sneak peek on what goes on at ShopAtHome.com, sessions on social media and website usability, to even a fun shopping experience on the site! Much time was spent picking their brains (and they ours) to figure out ways to make ShopAtHome an even better destination for shoppers to find the best deals on the web. From testing out brand new technology to trying (and loving!) the toolbar, we tried to make sure they learned everything they could about what we do here at ShopAtHome.com.

At the same time, we learned so much about the blogging community overall and, more specifically, about how these amazing women have managed to make blogging a career and still succeed at  finding a balance between family, kids, household chores, their career as a blogger, and a million other things. They were sharp, witty, funny, and extremely informed. It quickly became clear to us that blogging is not really a hobby for these women – it is both a passion and a job that actually helps pay the bills!

I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce the bloggers to you and to provide a little background on what they do. If you aren’t already reading their blogs, I highly recommend that you start today! I have already learned so many new tips on saving money, finding the best deals, shopping efficiently and being smart about my spending from their daily posts.

Crystal runs MoneySavingMom.com, the biggest personal home finance site on the Internet, where she strives to make each reader a better home economist. We are convinced she succeeds hugely at what she does! She has three little ones (we met the youngest, her son Silas, and he was one of the most adorable, well-behaved babies I’ve ever seen!) whom she provides homeschooling for, a busy blog and a gift for bargain shopping.

Kate of TheShoppingMama.com is a fab, fashionable mother of two. She started her blog after the experiences she had while living in Germany (since they don’t have any Babies ‘R’ Us out there!) as a way to share her shopping savings. Plus, she looks like a model and features some of the coolest giveaways on her site.

Karen of FrugalRIMama.com is a feisty New England mother of two adorable girls with a gift for finding the absolute best Drugstore Deals! She has amazing insight on how to be an intelligent couponer, and even explains to you the ten (yes, TEN!!!) different kinds of coupons out there and how to get the biggest bang for your buck.

Carrie, who writes MoneySavingMethods.com, is a fun and fabulous woman who really knows how to save you money. She graduated with an Accounting degree in college, and totally puts that to use on her blog (and in her home, where she’s raising three kids!) Her shopping and saving smarts have saved her over $41,000 just this year!

These are four strong, assertive and intelligent women, and all of us here were honored to have them come (and I’m honored to have them be a part of this blog, too!) and visit us. You’ll see a lot more about them (and from them) in the future!

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