More Ways to Eat Cheap

In a previous post, 3 Easy Ways to Eat Cheap, the subject of how to ensure your family gets good nutrition and enough to eat during hard financial times was broached. It’s winter in the US right now, so most of us don’t have the luxury of starting a Victory Garden in December. While growing your own can certainly supplement your family’s daily diet with amazingly tasty fruits, herbs and vegetables during the warm months, getting through the cold months is the current issue.

In this post we’ll look at some ways to make use of inexpensive staples to create tasty meals that should be able to supplement the soups and stews and quick breads discussed previously. The list of ingredients of course includes pulses and legumes, many of which can serve as base for fine meals even those who suffer from celiac disease (an auto-immune sensitivity to gluten) can eat without guilt or concern. These include chickpeas, dried split peas, other kinds of beans and lentils. Rice is still a bargain in US grocery stores, and can be purchased at a few cents’ savings in bulk amounts. Brown rice is higher in nutritional value, but many people don’t like the chewy texture and the cooking time is greater. Must most of the rice available in your local store is nutritional enough to count, so get the kind you like best.

A good many of us who were once starving college students (or artists) are way more familiar with the 5 for a dollar staple food known as Ramen Noodles than we like to admit. But surprisingly, there are people out there who have turned Ramen into a regular culinary art form by using it as base for some scrumptious recipes. How about soaking some broken noodles in hot water, draining and adding to stir-fries? Adding the noodles to your basic ham and peas scramble makes it go farther and can add to the ‘comfort’ factor of this comfort favorite. If you don’t eat meat, try a stir-fry of fresh cooked lentils, some chunked potatoes and any vegetables you like or can get at the end of the day for cheap at the local farmer’s market. Use olive oil exclusively if you can, for its health benefits as well as taste. It is more expensive than canola, corn or other vegetable oils, but there are some nutritional items worth the extra investment.

Couscous is a pasta product the size of small grains, and can star in dishes as simple as a side (cook in your favorite broth instead of water) or as exotic as tabouli salad. For some dense-packed nutritional value, you can buy or rig up a system for producing sprouts. Most health food stores sell sprouting mixes or individual seed types. These are untreated (as agricultural seeds usually are), and can produce crunchy, tasty green-stuff for stir-fries, salads and sandwiches within just a few days in a jar with a mesh cover for rinsing and draining. Mung beans and alfalfa are the ’standard’ sprout fare, but the tang of sprouted radish, onion or broccoli is a welcome taste treat! Some grains sprout well, such as millet, wheat, amaranth and such. Just peruse the selection at your local store and pretty soon you’ll be using sprouts instead of tasteless, nutritionally useless iceburg lettuce in every application.

Onions and potatoes can be among the least expensive whole foods you can purchase in bulk, and often you can get them very cheaply at the farmer’s market late in the day, especially if they’ve begun to sprout. A great deal of food is simply thrown away when it gets to looking “too old” to sell with the fresher produce, I’ve been given 20-pound sacks of sprouting potatoes and onions for nothing on more than one occasion. Good onion or potato soup (or onion & potato soup) are among the most comforting of comfort foods and aren’t difficult or time-consuming to make from scratch. Served with some stale or toasted bread and a chunk of good cheese (Swiss works great with onion soup) floating in the bowl, these simple favorites can be among your family’s most popular soups.

If your family eats meat, consider in lean times making use of cheaper cuts and meat products that don’t sound all that appetizing, but will deliver the familiar flavors that can make your stews and soups acceptable. Cheap cuts of beef may be unacceptable as a roast or steak, but they make fine cubes in a beef stew, slow cooked so as to make them tender. A pot of white beans and onions with ample cornbread makes a fine afternoon or evening meal, with a chunk of pork fat-back or a ham hock thrown in for that ham-bean taste (minus the expensive ham). Pork belly is another inexpensive pork item, and ground burger meat (beef or turkey) can be extended by the addition of dry oatmeal and some chopped onions before you shape the patties. Toss in some soy and/or worchestershire sauce (or regular steak sauce) and your kids may decide they like your hamburgers much better than the mystery meat at McDonald’s!

Check out some of the good recipes at the sites below, and don’t be afraid to educate yourself on making filling, nutritionally-dense meals for very little money by surfing the web. Sometimes I peruse cookbooks or recipe sites just for fun or when I’m bored, and this inevitably translates into some great meal by the end of the day that my family thinks is the tastiest thing EVER. Americans don’t do enough of their own cooking, and are suffering for that. Even after a hard day’s work in the factory or office, many people find that time spent with their food in their own kitchens is a good way of relieving stress and replenishing energy reserves.

Moreover, every time you do the cooking for yourself and your family (and friends, when they’re visiting) instead of going out to eat – even at the Steak House with the all-you-can-eat buffet for ten or twelve bucks apiece – you’re getting better nutrition, avoiding foods and additives that are dangerous to your health, and saving significant amounts of money. That one-pot hearty beef stew that cost a total of $6 for all ingredients plus electricity for the crock pot is more than $30 cheaper than one night out at the Steak House for a family of four. If you eat out three times a week, you’ll have saved about a hundred bucks you can use for something else.

Links:

Dirt Cheap Ramen Noodle Recipes
One Dish Crock Pot Meals
The Coolest Sprouting Seeds on the Planet!
Frugal Fridays: Eat Cheap Edition

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