Call Your Butcher!!

If you do it like me and plan your meats based on the ads, then this is a good tip for you.

Safeway advertised having pork shoulder roast on sale for $1.49/lb. Sweet. I gave myself $7 to get a nice roast. Now, I have a habit of calling the butchers at every store I shop at. I never used to do this, but I have learned that it's worth the few minutes it takes. Often times the meats that they advertise are prepackaged. So what I do is call and find out about how big the cuts of meat are and then figure about how much it'll cost. This actually makes it so that I can be precise on how much I am going to spend.

Well, I called Safeway b/c there was some small print on their ad. EXTREME VALUE PACK. That means it's a BIG chunk of meat. When I spoke to the butcher I asked how big the packs were she informed me that in order to get the extreme value pack pricing, I needed to have a roast that was 3.5lbs or more. Um, 3.5lbs is not that big of a roast. Hmmm. This little tidbit of information was not printed anywhere. So I get to the store and went over to the meat case. The roasts that were in there were no 3.5lbs. They were massive...I'm talking $25-$35 a pop. So I buzzed the bell at the butcher...armed with my secret information. I asked them to cut me approx $6 worth of a roast (they always end up giving you a bit more for some reason). 5 minutes later I had a nice 4.5lb roast & didn't go over my budget on it.

It pays to know what the deal actually is with meat. And it never hurts to ask the butcher. So do it because it can save you in the long run.

:)