Eating cheap: recipe roundup

I’ve been looking for ways to cut down on my food expenses without compromising quality and nutrition. Looks like I’m not the only one concerned about this, because there have been some great recipes posted recently for inexpensive dinners:

1. Mama May has a recipe for Vegetables Au Gratin, which is ideal for using up vegetables and other foods you already have. It’s also pretty affordable even if you have to buy all the ingredients.
2. Lentils are one of the best frugal, healthy food finds. Here’s a great, simple cheap lentils recipe. With that recipe as your basis, you can change the seasonings to whatever you like. Lentils work well with most any seasoning or spice.
3. Pink of Perfection offers a $5 pizza dinner recipe. Or rather, she gives you a recipe for making cheap but relatively healthy whole wheat dough and suggests toppings like tomato and arrugala. Of course, the topics are your choice, and this is where the overall cost of the pizza might go up or down.
4. Good Housekeeping has several frugal dinner recipes, complete with their nutritional breakdown. See the shopping list to get an idea of what you’ll actually be buying for these recipes – the up front investment isn’t actually cheap. But one 14 pound turkey is the basis of 4 different meals – that’s the sort of thing that makes this a money saver.
5. Not Martha links to several Chicken Pot Pie recipes. These are pretty affordable as is, but the beauty of any chicken pot pie recipe is that you can make substitutions to save money, and still get a delicious result.
6. Edited to add: LifeHacker just posted a link to The Simple Dollar’s Breakfast Burrito recipe, which is perfect for this post.

Bonus Recipes & Tips:

• TipNut has a post with 20 Pita Recipes. Not all of them are necessarily cheap, and which ones are affordable for you may depend on what’s affordable in your region this season. But there are a lot of things you can do with pita bread, and by making your own you will save money. After that, it’s just a matter of choosing ingredients you like that meet your health requirements and your budget.
• This Yahoo! Answers thread has several suggestions for cheap meal options.
• Remember: adding a salad to a meal is a great way to stretch your entree. Salads can be anything – chopped veggies with a little homemade salad dressing, an assortment of lettuces, iceberg lettuce with boiled eggs and bacon bits. So while lettuce can get insanely expensive at times, there’s almost always a cheap alternative salad you can come up with. Look at what you have that you’re not using: whatever goes together, just chop it all up, and voila – salad!

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Posted in Easy Food, Frugal on February 23, 2009