Cheap Recipes?

I cook a big crock pot of beans periodically and freeze it in small quantities so I can just pull out my dinner in the morning and it's thawed by dinner time. I just soak the dry beans over night, rinse in the morning and start the crock pot. I use salt plus sometimes chili powder, sometimes just pepper depending on my mood. I like to put some chopped onion in it if I have one.

Beans can be paired with corn bread, corn tortillas, rice, quinoa, or even popcorn if I happen to have it. Cornbread is easy to make in large batches and freeze cut into individual pieces in a large freezer bag. Then you just have to add a veggie and you have a complete meal.

 

I recently started buying Rice a Roni once in a while, just for nostalgia sake, but I had forgotten how much food that little box makes! I need to break out my biggest frying pan to cook it otherwise it will be overflowing out of the pan. You can easily feed a few people with one small box of it. At only $1 per box, and considering it doesn't need any additional expensive ingredients other than some butter and water, it 's a pretty good deal. But you can also add a couple pieces of diced chicken to it and some frozen veggies for not much more and make it a much more substantial meal.

You can also make your own "Rice a Roni" by picking up a small bag of Fideo (small pieces of toasted vermicelli, usually in the Mexican section of your grocery store) and browning some instant rice in a pan with some butter then adding the pasta (which is already browned), and some broth, along with veggies and meats of choice. This would be a better option if you are concerned about your sodium intake and do not want MSG in your diet.

 

Hash. Sounds unoriginal but potatoes make the difference. Think about it, American, Mexican, Italian and Mediterranean ..even Creole seasonings can bring life to a spud. Throw in some chopped onion with a little oil and add veggies, meats or a combo.

 

Sometimes sticking to staple foods can be cheap but bored when there is no variety.

However potatoes, beans, rice and eggs are among those foods that you can cook in a hundred different ways to have a different dish every time without needing to add fancy ingredients to get variants.

Taking the example provided by @Denis Hard, you can boil rice and serve it, right?

However if you stir in a pinch of salt, 1 tablespoon of sugar per cup of rice, an 1/3 cup of regular vinegar or lemon per cup of rice, rather than rice vinegar if you don't have it.

You can mold your roll with your hands when rice is done, whether putting it on spinach leaves or a plastic film to roll it. Don't forget to add the filling of your choice, which can be leftovers from a previous meal. Mold the roll, refrigerate for an hour and slice the rolls with a wet knife.

Then, next day give your rice a twist by frying it in a pan rather than boiling it, stirring often until it turns golden brown. Add 2 cups of chicken broth per cup of rice, and let it boil until broth has reduced in half, then cover the pan, turn the heat down and leave it to simmer.

You can add diced veggies during the boiling process, or serve them sauteed in butter as side-dish, and even topping this serving with sour cream.

 

Fajitas/Tacos/Burritos are generally very cheap and a great way to use up inexpensive cuts of meat from your grocer, particularly when they have them on sale.

One of our local discount grocery stores, for example, will often sell packs of frozen chicken breasts, thighs or drumsticks for a fraction of the cost per pound than the thawed refrigerated chicken. When I say frozen, I'm not talking about the frozen processed chicken you normally see in the freezer cases, I'm talking the chicken that's packaged in the foam containers. I don't know how they stock or rotate their fresh meats, but it appears they get their "fresh" chicken in frozen and thaw out batches of it before putting it in the display refrigerators. I'm guessing when they have too much chicken, they just unload the froze stuff at a steep discount rather than trying to thaw that out and sell it later.

Another store, IGA, will sell large packs of odds and ends of chicken thighs, such as ones that were too small or too large or cut wrong, for dirt cheap as well - I've bought packs with like 15 chicken thighs in them for about $3. Similarly, they often put pork loins on sale at steep discounts, usually around $3.50 for two pork loins.

Any of this stuff can be easily slow cooked, slow roasted in bulk, etc... then chopped up to have on hand for tacos or burritos.

 

For me spices and herbs are an essential part of every meal. I don't regard them as expensive. Besides, I grow a lot of herbs on my balcony and kitchen window sill. To make a really easy, no fuss meal, just use some basic grains or legumes, stir-fry two or three different vegetables and add a handful of herbs. You don't need much to enjoy a cheap, carefree meal.

 

I am always looking for healthy, nutritious and delicious recipes that you can make inexpensively. I find you can make many tasty inexpensive meals using ground beef as your main ingredient. I always wait until ground beef is on sale and stock up my freezer. Add an inexpensive tomato sauce and you have a great spaghetti dinner. I like to make tacos and pasta dishes with ground beef. Also a taco salad with ground beef is inexpensive and healthy. Casseroles with rice and ground beef and mushroom soup is a quick and hearty meal. In the winter I like to make a ground beef and barley soup.

 

Pasta is always great for cheap recipes, since there you can buy it in bulk (which means it saves you money) and it's really versatile, and you can make loads of different sauces to go with it as well. Even if you have pasta leftovers, it's really easy to re-use them in a quick pasta salad. Rice is great too, since you can re-heat it, and similar to pasta, it's very versatile and there are many different sauce options. Pasta is generally cheaper though.

 

Rice and pasta are probably the cheapest dishes you can make. I find pasta even better than rice, because you can only have pasta with sauce and that's the full meal, and with rice you usually need to have something else, like a protein. As for proteins, I think eggs and chicken are the way to go if you want to save money. I'm always looking for best deals in the supermarket, sometimes yogurt can be really cheap as well. And that's a good snack, healthy.

 

Well, although you do have to buy some meat like hamburger, it is hard to beat a big pot of goulash for cheap. I mean a pot of it lasts forever. It is one of the go t00's. The same with a big bag of chicken legs you can customize those anyway you like and a store near here sells a 10 lb bag for 2.88.!

 

Rice a Roni is awesome and I always make sure I have some in stock at home. It is a quick fix meal and all you need to do is add a few meat pieces to it. My favorite variety is Spanish Rice. I add a can of tomatoes to it and it makes a great vegetarian lunch

 

Healthy recipes for meals that can be made on a tight budget without sacrificing taste or nutrition - are something that I've never been short of and although I could easily get carried away on this subject - as I literally have thousands and thousands of them.

I would just say that - although anything from simple home-made pizza, to jacket potatoes, risottos, potato and veg tortillas, many variations of minestrone, casseroles, along with every kind of pasta or rice dish imaginable are all extremely budget friendly - if on a super tight budget - you can't go too far wrong - by making sure that you always have beans, lentils, chickpeas, rice or pasta along with a few herbs and spices in the store cupboard.

Particularly as with a bit of creativity - you can easily turn those basic ingredients into tasty, very substantial, healthy meals at very little cost - just by combining all those ingredients together and adding a little bit of almost anything you fancy - for example - a few seasonal vegetables, a can of tomatoes or tuna, olive oil, grated cheese or even an egg - and better still they can be eaten anyway you want - hot, cold, stuffed into pitta pockets, piled on top of jacket potatoes, as salads or even served as soups etc, etc.

 

I don't have a particular dish that is especially cheap but I do employ some tactics to extend my purchases like I go for recipes with cut up meat and lots of sauce so more people can get fed with the same amount of ingredients. I also like to cook vegetables and I try to stay away from pre processed food if I'm trying to save and instead I just do the work myself such as butchering chicken or buying raw carrots and peeling them myself instead of buying them pre peeled which is a bit more expensive.