When I have posted lots of mad crazy grocery deals, often for junk food, I like to stop and remember the other side of frugal eating: The simple, inexpensive and wholesome meals I incorporate into our family's menu.
When I say we spend $80 a week to feed four people, a lot of folks wonder what on earth we're eating. Is it all junk food? Well, we will be incorporating Crescent rolls and Grands and other things I've gotten free or very cheap into the menu, but even without freebies there are lots of inexpensive and good meals you can feed your family. Here are 22 cheap-ass entrees and side dishes in regular rotation at our house:
Bread machine whole wheat bread. I've read that bread machines don't quickly pay for themselves -- if you buy them
new. However, bread machines are one of those things that thrift shops are just full of. People get them for gifts, find that they never use them, and want to free up the kitchen space, so off to Salvation Army they go. I got mine at Goodwill for $4 and I use it regularly.
If you consider homemade bread as merely a replacement for buying a loaf of bread, the savings are not that impressive. I pay $2 or less a loaf for whole wheat bread on sale at the store. This analysis says a loaf of white bread costs 50 cents to make; for whole wheat I'd (rough estimates here) double the flour cost and say it costs me 80 cents a loaf.
However, I find that my family likes a warm loaf of fresh bread a lot more than a few slices from a store bought loaf. In fact we often go through the whole loaf in one meal, and since it is healthy (better than store-bought; for one thing there is no high-fructose corn syrup in my bread) and my toddler often doesn't touch her food I think that's great. So in my view a loaf of fresh bread is worth more than a loaf of store-bought.
Dried bean dishes. I usually pay about 89 cents for a pound of dried beans on sale and that small bag makes a huge pot that I can then freeze some of. There are blog posts out there with a whole week's worth of rice and beans recipes. I know what you're thinking! No, we don't eat beans more than once or twice in a week.
Some of our favorite cheap-ass bean dishes are
Jane Brody's Curried Lentils and her
Company Rice and Beans (pictured above). We serve both over rice, possibly paired with a loaf of hot bread, and probably a salad. And of course you can't go wrong with chili, maybe with cornbread if I have time. Oh, and now that it's fall I'm so making
split pea and sweet potato stew/soup.
Pasta dishes.
Since I got so much
whole wheat pasta for 20 cents a box this month, and since my kids love it and it's easy, I'll be making a LOT of pasta this winter. One recipe we like is
Nutty Noodles (shown above), an Asian-ish dish using peanut butter and lots of cheap veggies like cabbage and carrots (I also throw in celery and whatever else we have around). Spaghetti and meatballs, made with ground beef from our cow and vegetables (
The Sneaky Chef's Magic Meatballs recipe went over well) is going to be a frequent cheap and easy dinner. I haven't made this yet because of Toth's aversion to dairy in my diet, but the
Pioneer Woman's homemade macaroni & cheese recipe looks like a delish winter pasta dish too.
Vegetable dishes.
My favorite vegetable dish this fall has been
kale from my dad's garden cooked with broth and an egg. My family was reluctant at first but they found it was really delicious. Now that the zucchinis are used up, it's time to turn to other squashes for those veggie dinners: pumpkin soup of course and pumpkin bread (I make a regular yeast bread with pumpkin, can't find the recipe right now but it's great. To make this stuff I split a pumpkin,
bake it, and mash up the pulp, shown above.) are two favorites. I have never tried spaghetti squash served like spaghetti -- have you? Thumbs up or down? Sometimes brocolli with cheese sauce over rice is a main course for us too. And I love this
Eat Your Veggies stew which is pretty much a catch-all.
Egg and cheese dishes. Every once in awhile I will make a quiche, or simply serve scrambled eggs with cheese or omelettes for dinner. I'd really like to incorporate a few more egg recipes into my repertoire.
Potato dishes. I didn't really realize how nutritious potatoes are until I read Michael Pollan's "The Botany of Desire." I have made Jane Brody's potato souffle and would like to make it again, but because it takes awhile to bake I have put it off. Stuffed baked potatoes are always a good bet and something I should really serve more often. And nobody's going to say no to a big serving of whipped potatoes instead of rice underneath a main course.
Meat dishes. Not that we don't eat meat -- we eat it about every other night. The reason I saved it for last is that these are the more expensive dishes in our rotation -- especially since I prefer to buy meat that is produced without hormones, excessive antibiotics and cruel factory farm conditions.
Of course the idea with cooking meat is to stretch it out as flavoring more than as the meal's main source of calories. We had beef stew last week and it was sooo good -- I used half the beef the recipe called for but just as many potatoes and carrots. Meatloaf is a good stretcher. You can make just half a pound of Italian sausage feed the whole family when you spread it over a pizza. Oh, and of course I like to incorporate some ham or bacon bits into my bean dishes when I have it -- usually I'll buy a big ham when they go on sale around the holidays and chop a good portion of it to add to many bean dishes. For chicken, I've been either chopping chicken breasts into a casserole with plenty of other stuff in it, or roasting two chickens at once in the oven, then using every last bit of them down to boiling the bones for stock. (This week, though, we had FREE grilled chicken from KFC and will probably also have $1 chicken meals from Boston Market, so who needs to stretch it?)
More ideas for cheap, wholesome meals can be found at $5 Dinners. In fact Erin, the author of that blog, has a new feature where readers from all over the country submit cheap dinner ideas based on their local store sales. I love that idea!
Now it's time for you to share: What are your go-to staples for inexpensive, healthy meals? Do you find that your choice of foods is just as important or more so than your use of coupons and sales when it comes to feeding a family inexpensively?
1 Comment
tommy b said:
One of my favorite go-to's and cheap is chicken bisquits. If I have chicken left over from something else I always save and freeze until I have 4 or 5 decent chunks.
I use the free crescent rolls I've got plenty of now thanks to jewel. Unroll them and leave two together. Pinch the seam together so it forms one large square instead of two triangles. Next roll it out with a rolling pin to make 50-75% larger than what you started with.(need to put flour down so it doesnt stick to board)
Then place one chunck of no bone chicken ( about 2" square) in the middle. Top with some stuffing (already cooked and ready to serve) Next fold over the dough and completely cover chicken and stuffing.(pinch toghether if need to) Then bake in oven according to package directions. You will have 4 biscuits filled with chiken and stuffing per tube of rolls. Serve with some veggies and good to go.
I also save left over steak and use mashed potatoes to make steak bisquits, leftover ham and scalloped potatoes to make ham bisquits.
Some nights if I am running low on time and need something but dont have enough of one meat to make all the same we have mystery bisquits, which is where I'll make one or two chicken, one steak, two ham, 1 porkchop, just to use up what i've got in the freezer. Then every one gets to grab their own bisquit and dont know what they have till they cut into it.
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