Rachel, of the wonderful Coconut & Lime blog, has a new entry on cost-saving tips on her Food Maven blog, which is dedicated entirely to food tips. We've written about how to save on the food bill before here at Slashfood, but there are a few entries on Rachel's list we hadnt thought of. Here are two of my favorite tips:

I pay attention to cycles in sales, baking stuff goes on sale in December, yogurt about once a month, roasting chickens in the winter etc and stock up the best I can.

I plan meals around what is on sale rather than rushing out and buying (full price) ingredients for a specific dish.

Check out the blog for the full list of ten tips.

What are your favorite grocery cost-saving tips?

For the past couple of years, there has been a growing interest in getting local foods whenever possible, largely because it is perceived as helping the local economy, being better for the environment and better for your health (assuming the local food is organic, etc., not factory-farmed). There is one food - a drink, actually, that has strongly resisted this trend, where "'distance and exoticism are marketed as advantages": bottled water. Fiji, one of the more expensive store brands, is now the number 2 selling premium bottled water in the US.

At $1.50 and up per bottle, Fuji is not cheap. Some will say that a thing is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it, but others wonder how much the water is really worth. A reader asked Triple Pundit what the true cost of a bottle of Fuji water was. Sustainability Engineer Pablo Päster responded, calculating the (approximate) production and materials costs of a 1L bottle, travel/shipping expenses for shipping both full and empty bottles and, of course, the water itself. In the end, it comes down to a cost of approximately $.22 per bottle, leaving a $1.28 (or more) profit for the manufacturer and retailer.

It seems that more and more restaurants are offering prix fixe menus these days, a fact that the Wall Street Journal picked up on in their weekend edition. Restaurateurs and chefs like fixed prices because they can much more easily plan the labor and cost of what will be used for a meal, since everything will be timed and the menu options are limited. Diners who might have only had a main course and a dessert are now having salad, as well. For multi-course menus where the portions are small, a nice piece of duck that might have been one main course ordered à la carte, is now several smaller courses for multiple diners.

How can you, as a diner, tell if a fixed price menu is really a good deal? The WSJ suggests that a good place to start is by looking for "wide margin items," such as chicken, salads, pastas and salmon on the menu. They are foods that typically have a significant mark-up, which could be even higher behind the set price. Another thing to look for is tricky wording. For example, "tomato carpaccio" is really just thinly sliced tomatoes, though on the name alone some restaurants might up the price.

And what are signs that you're getting a good deal? Tasting menus that "bear no resemblance to à la carte offerings" often indicate that special time or care has gone into their preparation. And if the chef is well-known and you just want to "put yourself in his hands" the memories of the meal might be worth the price, no matter what it is.

Forbes.com recently released a list of some of the most expensive champagnes widely available this year. At the top of their list is the 1995 Krug Clos du Mesnil, which sells for $750 per bottle. Others included the Bollinger Blanc de Noirs Vieilles Vignes Francaises 1997 at $400 and the Dom Pérignon Rosé 1995 at $350. Sure, the sticker shock effect of Forbes' list is fun, but the majority of the article focuses on why these bottles cost what they do.

Nick Passmore, the magazine's resident wine guy discusses how, when it comes to high-end bubbly, pricing has as much to do with raw materials and production as with creating an image and a buzz. Passmore uses rosé as an example, pointing out how certain houses purposely create a scarcity of the pink drink in order to maintain its desirability.

Just something to remember when you try to make that connection between price and quality...