What to Buy Frozen, What to Buy Fresh

The most common way people waste money on groceries is not buying the wrong brand. It is buying fresh vegetables with good intentions, letting them rot in a drawer, and ordering food instead. A bag of frozen broccoli that sits in your freezer for two months and then gets eaten beats fresh broccoli that gets thrown out in nine days.

Buy frozen, always

Broccoli, green beans, peas, corn, spinach, edamame, mixed vegetables. These are picked and frozen within hours. They are nutritionally equal to fresh and often better than the fresh ones at a discount store that have been in transit for a week. For anything you are going to cook, frozen wins.

Berries. Fresh berries are expensive and turn to fuzz in four days. Frozen berries cost a third as much and are the correct choice for oatmeal, smoothies, and baking.

Diced hash brown potatoes. Already peeled, already cut, already blanched. Two dollars for what would take you fifteen minutes.

Onions and peppers, pre-diced. Slightly more expensive than whole, and worth it on a Tuesday.

Buy fresh

Onions, garlic, potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, cabbage. These keep for weeks or months in a cool dark place and cost almost nothing. Cabbage in particular is the most underrated vegetable in the store: a head is about two dollars, keeps a month in the fridge, and works raw or cooked.

Lettuce and salad greens, only if you will eat them in four days. Be honest with yourself about this one.

Lemons and limes. Both keep two weeks and both fix a flat dish. Bottled juice works and is not as good.

Anything you are eating raw. Frozen tomatoes and frozen cucumbers do not exist for a reason.

The frozen vegetables that are not worth it

Frozen zucchini, frozen eggplant, and frozen mushrooms all come out watery because their cell walls collapse. Buy those fresh or skip them.

Canned is fine, actually

Beans. A can of beans costs about a dollar, is fully cooked, and has the same protein as beans you soaked overnight. Rinse them and you remove most of the sodium.

Tomatoes. Canned tomatoes are picked ripe and processed immediately. In winter they are better than the pale fresh ones. Use them for anything cooked.

Coconut milk, tomato paste, chickpeas, corn. All fine.

Canned vegetables that are not worth it: green beans, peas, carrots, and potatoes come out soft and gray. Frozen versions of all four are better and cost the same.

A rule for the produce aisle

Buy fresh produce for the next three days, not for the week you hope to have. Fill the rest of the week from the freezer. You will spend less and throw out less, and the freezer version is waiting whenever your plan falls apart.

Storing what you buy

• Onions, garlic, and potatoes: cool, dark, dry, and never in the fridge. Not together, either, since onions make potatoes sprout.
• Herbs: stand them in a cup of water in the fridge like flowers. They last two weeks instead of four days.
• Bread: freeze half the loaf the day you buy it. Toast straight from frozen.
• Anything about to go bad: chop it and freeze it. It will be fine in soup.