Butter is one of those budget busters but it doesn't have to be. Around the holidays butter is often priced at its lowest. So how can you take advantage of this?
Ever since I was a kid, my mother would buy butter and freeze it. If you know how much butter you or your family uses each month, you can plan to buy it only when it is on sale and freeze the rest. I have saved anywhere from $30-40 every six months just by doing this.
So what is a good price for butter? In the Southeast, a good price is about 2$ to 2.50$ a pound. Regions can vary but the sale times are always similar. Look for your local sales to occur around Christmas/Thanksgiving and then again around Easter in the spring. Buy and freeze about 6 months worth and soon you will be saving on butter too!
Many cooks can substitute cooking oil in recipes that call for butter with little change to the original recipe. This is a page about substituting oil for butter in recipes.
This is a page about stretching butter with oil. There are butter spreads on the market that combine butter with various types of oil, such as olive oil.
