An easy way to save money on food is by cooking cheap meals. I've been trying to find some recipes that can enable me to make cheap, healthy meals but most of the sites I visited only made false promises and after looking at the list of ingredients I could tell that most of those meals wouldn't be all that cheap. Question: where can one find some cheap recipes online? A Google search didn't find me what I was looking for.
Some meals may not be cheap to make but you save money because they last a long time or you make a lot of it which will average out the cost of making the meal to a more reasonable price. That is how I look at the cost of a meal, how many people will I be feeding and for how long. Also if you cut the amount of meat in half and add something like mushrooms or vegetables in place of the meat that will also cut the cost.
Look at Living on A Dime the recipe section, they have many. Also, making a soup or stew is usually quite economical. Anything with eggs as well. Simply do a recipe search online for cheap recipes and I am sure you will find several. Also, pastas as everyone knows, are really economical. It is one of the things that you can find when you are getting cheap recipes for people.
The best way is to look up old ration recipes during the war (WW II is the best) as they really do have money saving recipes like Homity pie, which is an English open pie with cheese and potatoes, which can be adapted. Another way is look at student meals, as often they will have frugal ways of cooking. I often take a recipe and substitute ingredients or skip one or two, and they still work.
I have to admit I'm bit surprised that you are having so much difficulty in finding cheap recipes - as after having just this minute had a quick look online - I literally found thousands and thousands of cheap and healthy recipes to suit every taste and budget. That said - even though I can't actually recommend any one site - simply because I've never used any as I don't use online recipe sites - having always cooked and prepared everything I eat from scratch with only totally natural foods and all my meals could easily be described as inexpensive, filling and extremely healthy - I really don't think you'd go too far wrong looking for Mediterranean style dishes - all of which are not only very healthy and versatile - in that they are easily adapted to almost any taste - but also really inexpensive too. In fact as beans, lentils, chickpeas, rice and pasta are staples of any healthy diet and those basic ingredients are easily transformed into tasty, very substantial, healthy meals at very little cost - just by combining one or all them with little bit of almost anything you fancy - which could be anything from meat, fish to seasonal vegetables - I feel more than sure if you were to search for recipes that contained any of those - you'd be more than overwhelmed with the abundance of tasty. inexpensive, nutritious recipes you would be wanting to try out.
This is not exactly a recipe site, but it lists "100 delicious dirt cheap meals for the starving student" so you might want to give it a try. Here is the link:Log In
Something different you may want to check out are the new food delivery web sites such as Blue Apron. They list all the ingredients and recipes for the stuff they sell. Granted, it's not really cost effective to use them in general ($9 a meal is pricey), but if you think about it, they need to make a profit, so the true cost of those recipes is well below that if you were to simply buy the ingredients yourself. So in that regard, their web site is inadvertently a decent source of cheap recipes. The website Budget Bytes is also a personal favorite of mine. The author there itemizes all the ingredients and shows you the full cost of each recipe she posts thee. Generally speaking though, it helps to stick with discount grocery stores instead of your larger chain stores - not only because their prices are cheaper, but also because they carry a much more limited selection, which can help prevent you from blowing money on specialty ingredients you'll never use up or making impulse buys on stuff you don't really need.
I follow some on Facebook. Here isLog In that sounds o.k. price wise, once you factor in how much you'll end up with. The excess can be kept for leftovers or portioned up and frozen for later. I do that a lot. I never cook for one or two people, I just make a regular recipe that usually accommodates 4-5, and then eat it for several days or freeze for when I don't feel like cooking or don't have a lot of food in the house. I tend to look for words like 'frugal' "money saving' and 'budget' when searching for deals, recipes, etc.
I find that many soups are cheap to make, especially if you make all of your own stocks and broths like I do. I save my meat and vegetable scraps from other meals and then boil them up in water and save the stock in the freezer. Potatoes and vegetable based dishes are also usually cheap as well as bean based meals.
Well anything with eggs is a good place to start, as well as dish with herbs and vegetables. I'm still in the process of learning how to cook and I'm currently trying to find recipes that will enable me to learn the fundamentals of cooking, as well as cheap with their ingredients. I think I'm going to give Living on A Dime a try and see what's on the site.
I've already forgotten the titles but I used to watch a cooking show on tv where the specific goal was to make meals using affordable ingredients. I've also come across a few youtube channels that specialize in this topic specifically but I've already forgotten about those too. For the most part all the cheap recipes I've retained over the years have mostly just been ones I've learned through trial and error because even on those shows I often come across ingredients that are hard to find in my area, cheap as they may be.
Pinterest has a ton of inexpensive meal recipes, for all types of food. I particularly enjoy the cheap crockpot freezer meal ideas on Pinterest, because the idea of bulk cooking and using the slow cooker saves a lot of time for me throughout the week. However, the possibilities for recipe ideas are endless on Pinterest, and go very far beyond cheap, freezer crockpot meals. The local library might be another place to find inexpensive meal ideas. My local library system has tons of cookbooks, and many offer inexpensive or 'cheap' meal recipes. I get a lot of recipes from library cook books, as well.
Sites like Hillbilly Housewife have cheap recipes and menu plans. I also use the keywords "frugal recipes" to find cheap meal ideas on Pinterest. I can't believe that no one has mentioned YouTube. There are quite a few YouTube videos that demonstrate how to make cheap meals and how to do once a month freezer cooking if you're frugal and pressed for time. Some sites even have a breakdown of how much each serving of a meal costs, you just have to do a little research. Since this is a frugal site, I'm not going to promote other frugal sites, but there's a lot of sources for cheap recipes if you take the time to look.
