Remember the Boy Scout motto? “Be prepared.”

The advice should be followed by the general public, yet when you are new to an area, you may not even know for what you should prepare, let alone how to do it.

From a practical standpoint, when you live in the country, you need to have food on hand. It saves trips to town. You can discover new food combinations when you have food in your cupboards and freezer and are snowed in for a week.

I know of city people who go to the store several times a week to buy whatever strikes their fancy for a given meal. Country people know to keep enough on hand to alleviate those trips. Buy a stand-alone freezer and use it. The freezer inside a refrigerator doesn’t hold much. When you have a freezer, you can readily take advantage of sales on items you buy.

Learn how to make substitutions in a recipe; the information is all online as well as in many cookbooks. An example is if a cake recipe calls for buttermilk and you haven’t any, there is no need to run to town. Measure your regular milk then add a bit of lemon juice. You can find the amount to use with a quick online search. Using substitutions is a good thing to know. If a recipe calls for a specific brand of butter, realize that is only because that butter company is using this recipe as advertising; butter is butter and the brand doesn’t matter. To test this, the next time you’re in the grocery store, read the label on two different brands of butter. The ingredients are the same; the butter I have on hand lists these ingredients: pasteurized cream and salt. That’s it. Unsalted butter is available in the case next to the salted butter.

There are times when a substitution isn’t workable. Instead of driving to the store for it, put it on your grocery list for the next time you go. Be flexible with your meal plans. If a recipe calls for pinto beans, can you use the kidney beans you have on hand instead?

Living in the country, you learn to look ahead and make grocery lists whether on paper or in your cell phone. Read the grocery ads that come with your local newspaper. Check your grocery stock and see what you need to purchase.

Impulse purchases, usually the “Oh, that looks good!” type, increase your monthly food expenses. Those are expensive impulses and rarely necessities. When you shop several times a week, the unplanned purchases lead to major increases in expended funds. The list is a guide, not set in stone. When you see an item that is not on your list, but you remember you just ran out of it, pick it up. It will save you an extra trip.

If you moved from a town or city you may have to break some old habits, and you will be glad you did so in the long run.

Sanders is a national-award winning columnist who writes from the farm in southwest South Dakota. Her internet latchstring is always out at peggy@peggysanders.com. She can be reached through her website at http://www.peggysanders.com.