Ideas for Healthy Cheap Meals When Money is Tight

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

Unemployed? Frustrated by rising food prices? Don’t worry! You and your family can still eat well. Here are some cheap meals menu ideas that will reduce the food budget. However, the most important thing isn’t the food you make, it’s the menu planning you do before you even spend a dime.

Please do not neglect menu planning if money is tight. Our Menu Planning 101 post is a good place to start.

1. Eggs are cheap and delicious.  About $2.50 for 18 eggs is not too bad. Add in a $2.50 bag of potatoes for hashbrowns, some cheese (save more money by shredding it yourself) and you have the fixings of a delicious, filling breakfast for the week. (Tip: Bake the potatoes, refrigerate, and then fry ‘em up as you need them all week long.)

When you’re sick of eggs, combine them with flour and sugar to make muffins.

2.Soup is also a good way to stretch the food budget. Buy a small whole chicken and boil in water with some onion and carrots to make the broth–this should all cost less than $7.  Remove the chicken, save the breasts for another meal, put the deboned dark meat in the pot and add some rice.

The chicken breasts can be shredded for chicken salad (just add mayo and serve on bread) or make great chicken enchiladas (tortillas, cheese, beans, can of enchilada sauce).

3.Super cheap dried beans with just 1lb of meat make for an excellent chili. The recipe on this site makes a lot so consider freezing half of it for another time.

Per #2, bean soup would be a yummy, filling lunch for just pennies per serving.

4. Use cheaper cuts of meat. Chicken thighs and drumsticks are pretty inexpensive, but make delicious meals.  We’re actually working on a few recipes using cheaper cuts that will be posted soon-ish.

5.Skip cereal and eat oatmeal instead. Not only is oatmeal better for you,it’s cheaper and comes in large containers. Big, off brand containers can sometimes be found for under $3 and would last more than a week.

6.Do it yourself. If money is tight, it’s time to grate your own cheese and to stop buying bagged lettuce–the fresh, unprocessed lettuce is about 50% cheaper. Start a small garden too. Stop paying someone else to do the work–do what you can at home and grow your own. Every little bit saves you money.

7.Switch to frozen fruits and veggies. They are usually quite a bit cheaper than fresh and much better than their canned counterparts.

Notice how these tips do not rely on highly processed foods full of refined sugars! This is healthy food on the cheap, the whole point of this blog; good food, cheap meals.

This post is part of Pennywise Platter Thursdays.

Tags: cheap meals, meal planning, menu planning, reduce the food budget
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

5 Foods You Should Not Buy in Bulk

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

One of the key refrains heard over and over again is that, in order to save money on food, we should be buying food in bulk. Volume discounts are great, but not always practical. Here are 5 foods that are not a great idea for bulk food storage.

1.Brown sugar.  Brown sugar is hard to store without ending up with a crystalline brick. Unless you use enough to go through quite a lot of brown sugar in a month (or less), I don’ t think brown sugar makes for a great bulk food buy. Regular white granulated sugar is a better option for bulk storage.

2. Flour. No question about it, bulk flour is cheaper, but only if you have the freezer space for it. Flour should be ‘frozen’ for 3 days to kill any bugs or bug eggs present*.The problem with this is that bulk flour comes in large packages. Unless you have a chest freezer, it’s hard to properly process and store flour in bulk quantities. You’re better off sticking with five pound bags that will fit in the fridge freezer.

3. Meat. This one is controversial, but most of us have no business buying meat in bulk. Why? Because we throw it in our freezer and it sits there until we excavate it two years later, when it’s completely encased in freezer burn. There’s no point in stockpiling meat if you aren’t already in the habit of rotating stock in and out of the freezer. If you’re just now starting to meal plan and stockpile food, don’t build up the freezer stash until you’ve got a workable meal plan going.

4.Bacon. I love bacon and it pains me to share this fact, but did you know bacon is only good for a month in the freezer? Apparently the fat content means it doesn’t freeze very well and it can actually go bad even in the deep freeze.

5.Ingredients you’ve never eaten before but which are now on your menu plan so you are sure you’ll eat a year’s supply in the next 12 months. Stop. Don’t go there. Only buy bulk items that you know you will eat. Otherwise you end up wasting money and food. New spices are a good example.  Never made chicken curry before? Then please do not buy a lifetime supply of curry powder–you will not be happy. For one, you’re not likely to finish the spice before it goes bad and two, you’re banking on unproven recipes that you may not even like. Don’t do it!  Buy small quantities until you are sure a new ingredient is going to be a staple.

Investing in a chest freezer, mastering menu planning, and learning about bulk food storage can eliminate all but  the bacon off this list. However, until you have that basic knowledge, be careful about bulk food storage.

*I failed to freeze my flour once and ended up hatching quite a few bugs. It was kind of gross and I now have to not think too hard about bug eggs while eating baked goods.

Tags: brown sugar, bulk food storage, bulk foods, chest freezer, flour, menu planning
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off