Under $3 TF meals

[ltlmrs]

I was looking at the frugality and finances page and they have a low cost meal thread going, I thought maybe we should have an equivalent TF thread. And maybe a few of you could also give me some suggestions for TF on the super cheap.

Here's our situation:

My husband and I were looking at our budget and for a variety of reasons we must drastically cut our food budget. I have been spending anywhere between $400 to 500 for three people and now I have to get it down to $250. I've worked with this sort of budget before for a few months at a time of economic hardship, but we've usually had a full pantry and meat in the freezer and had prepaid for a csa so all I really had to get was milk and eggs. This time it's different because $250/month or $3000/year is all I have to work with from now on for the foreseeable future.

I figure that's slightly more than $8/day and around $2.75/meal. Very very tight, at least in my mind. Here's what we've done so far:

1) Limit 1 gal raw milk per week. Use store-bought, non-organic milk for yogurt & kefir.
2) Cut meat to maximum 4 meals a week.
3) Use meat in one-pot meals (like casseroles) rather than the traditional meat + starch + 2 veggies
4) No more coconut oil, which I was using only for a supplement and not cooking. We cook with lard and butter. However, I can't give up our olive oil, any suggestions? Has anyone tried this one from Amazon? The price is great for a subscribe & save...

And I do have some standard meals that I fix almost weekly that are very cheap and come in at or under $2.75/meal:

1) rissottos and pilafs
2) lentil and bean based soups (we especially like the curry lentil soup recipe from NT)
3) pastas (I make my own pasta, though we mix it up with either rice noodles or even durum pasta every once in a while)

I've also found this site very useful.

Any other suggestions and meals that you'd like to share?

[Magelet]

I would recomend going more by week, and by day than by meal, though it's good to aim at. For instance, you might spend more like 4 on the meat dinners, but 1.50 on the veggie ones. And if you eat oatmeal for breakfast, it might be more like .75 cents, which leaves you more money for dinner.

Some of our least expensive meals: beans and rice (w/ or w/o cheese) (we cook white beans with spices, then cook the rice in with the beans once the beans are cooked. add some butter or lard, cheese, acv, and hot sauce.

homemade pita and hummus and a little yogurt (usually we put salt, and dill in, or cucumber). sometimes we have some feta as well. I think even with the feta it's around 3 dollars or so.

[chaoticzenmom]

Here it costs almost 11 dollars for a gallon of Raw milk. I've decided that it's not worth it for us while we're on such a strict budget. Organic is 5 a gallon and that frees up 5 dollars to spend on something else. If you get vat pasteurized, it should still have some of the same qualities of raw.

Call local butchers and see if you can get organ meats for cheap or free. We got lots of liver, heart and tongue and bones for free when we ordered 1/4th of a cow. So many people don't want it, so it goes to waste. Some stores that sell organic stuff will have frozen organic chicken livers in a different section of the store. Ask the meat dept. if they have them. They're great fried next to mashed potatoes.

Call a local butcher and ask if they have dog bones from grass-fed beef. You can make great soups from those and eat the marrow on toast.

Mix lentils with stale bread and hamburger meat to spread it out farther for dishes such as meatloaf, burgers and sloppy joes.

Make your own broth. I save carcasses and make broth whenever I can. I use them for soups which I make often. You can usually get enough chicken with your broth to make a chicken soup, so dig around for good meat when you strain for broth.

Make leftovers into soup. I'm the soup master! If I've got an onion and some leftovers, I make soup. If I have one small piece of meat, a little leftover starch (potatoes, rice, pasta) one or two vegetables, I make soup. Saute onion, then add crushed garlic if you have it. Then, chop all the ingredients up small and add them to the pot with some homemade broth. You can purée this for a velouté type soup or leave it chunky. Last night, I had leftover sausages and mashed potatoes, so I made Tuscan sausage soup. I had some leftover parsley, so I put that in instead of kale.

Make these with chicken http://www.cookingninja.com/115-Quen...-volaille.html Quenelles are so good when done right, with a slightly firm, moussy texture. Baked in a white sauce, it's cheap and sooo good. You can also reheat these in any kind of veloute type soups or tomato sauce. You can cook plenty and freeze them for later.

Use leftover starches for breakfast. Make extra plain rice with dinner and for breakfast, add some butter, sugar and milk. Leftover vegetables, meats, rice, pasta or potatoes make a great omelet additions. Make it even fancier by putting it into a tortilla. Make and freeze muffins using leftover oatmeal or bananas that are about to go bad.

One chicken can make many meals. Take one chicken raw and cut it up. Cut off the breast meat to make quenelles (makes one or two meals). Cut off the legs and thighs and bake them for one meal. Boil the carcas for soup. Or, bake a chicken, then pull off all of the meat and separate into several baggies for freezing. Then, boil the carcas.

When you're at the grocery store, go look at the deli to see if they have whole baked chickens on sale. I can usually find them for 3.00 there. Saves me money because it's cheap and I don't have to waste energy cooking it.

[Rainbow2911]

Left overs! I stretch them by rolling them in oatcakes (the north Staffs variety - I use buttermilk for the liquid and soak over night before adding the yeast), making suet crust pies, pastys with yogurt dough, turning it into stew with soaked dumplings.... so much to do with left over bits and pieces.
Potatos are cheap so dishes like colcannon, cottage pie (make with left over meat and gravy) and potato currys are good.
I make a big dish of beans, or rice and beans once a week that does week-day lunches. I find cooking once like that is more economical in terms of waste produced as well as time.

[ltlmrs]

Originally Posted by Magelet

Some of our least expensive meals: beans and rice (w/ or w/o cheese) (we cook white beans with spices, then cook the rice in with the beans once the beans are cooked. add some butter or lard, cheese, acv, and hot sauce.

I have made your beans/rice recipe from another thread and we loved it! We added shredded pork to ours and it turned out great.

[ltlmrs]

Chaoticzenmom you and I think alike!

Originally Posted by chaoticzenmom

Here it costs almost 11 dollars for a gallon of Raw milk. I've decided that it's not worth it for us while we're on such a strict budget. Organic is 5 a gallon and that frees up 5 dollars to spend on something else. If you get vat pasteurized, it should still have some of the same qualities of raw.

Ours end up costing slightly more than $8/gal after the cow share fees and such. We get 1 gal and I usually have a quart left over each week for yogurt.

I actually don't really see the difference between the organic & non-organic milk at the store since they are both homoginized and pasturized. In fact the organic milk is usually ultra-pasturized. So I get the store-brand (non-rBGH, non-organic) for $2/gal to make kefir and for use in coffee. Even the raw cream here is only $6/quart versus pasteurized/homogenized at $5/quart. This makes it much more doable. I actually feel very blessed.

Originally Posted by chaoticzenmom

Call local butchers and see if you can get organ meats for cheap or free. We got lots of liver, heart and tongue and bones for free when we ordered 1/4th of a cow. So many people don't want it, so it goes to waste. Some stores that sell organic stuff will have frozen organic chicken livers in a different section of the store. Ask the meat dept. if they have them. They're great fried next to mashed potatoes.

This is another area where we are very blessed. We do get organ meats and bones for very cheap. And we love chicken livers

Originally Posted by chaoticzenmom

Mix lentils with stale bread and hamburger meat to spread it out farther for dishes such as meatloaf, burgers and sloppy joes.

Great idea! I haven't been making meat loaf, but adding lentils would definitely make the meat stretch.

We actually use chicken in the same way you do, too. Here's what else I do. On Sunday, I'll roast a meat dish and have vegetable sides. For example: if I make pork roast and smothered cabbage on Sunday, I'll make an extra large amount of the cabbage (usually about 2 pounds worth). On Monday, I'll take the leftover cabbage and make rice & cabbage soup (served with bread and a salad). Tuesday, there's still a ton of soup left over and we have it for lunch with grilled cheese. I'll cook something new for Wednesday, but Thursday's supper will be a casserole made with the left over soup (which is very thick by this point in time), pork (from Sunday's roast) and covered with a bechemel sauce. I'll also use the pork for stir-fries, pilafs & sandwiches (my favorite sandwich is pork with greens and garlic).

Originally Posted by Rainbow2911

Left overs! I stretch them by rolling them in oatcakes (the north Staffs variety - I use buttermilk for the liquid and soak over night before adding the yeast), making suet crust pies, pastys with yogurt dough, turning it into stew with soaked dumplings.... so much to do with left over bits and pieces.
Potatos are cheap so dishes like colcannon, cottage pie (make with left over meat and gravy) and potato currys are good.
I make a big dish of beans, or rice and beans once a week that does week-day lunches. I find cooking once like that is more economical in terms of waste produced as well as time.

Thank you so much, you have given me so many ideas for recipes to try!!! My family loves dumplings and all things with dough.

[Magelet]

you lucky folks who get organs and bones cheap. folks have caught on here, and thus butchers have caught on to charging for liver and heart here. (and yet, one can't find kidney, sweetbreads, etc at all). feed lot NON organic livers are like a dollar a pound, pastured chicken livers, if they can be found, which is hard are about 6-8 dollars a pound. pastured bones 2-3 dollars a pound (and a pound isn't much bones).

we do a chicken over several days as well. usually we roast the whole chicken, eat it as roast chicken and veggies and gravy day 1, and then use the meat in various ways after that (pulled chicken in salads/fry bread salads, curries, stir fries etc, then stock with the bones.) it saves us a lot of money.

[chaoticzenmom]

Originally Posted by ltlmrs

Chaoticzenmom you and I think alike!



Ours end up costing slightly more than $8/gal after the cow share fees and such. We get 1 gal and I usually have a quart left over each week for yogurt.

I actually don't really see the difference between the organic & non-organic milk at the store since they are both homoginized and pasturized. In fact the organic milk is usually ultra-pasturized. So I get the store-brand (non-rBGH, non-organic) for $2/gal to make kefir and for use in coffee. Even the raw cream here is only $6/quart versus pasteurized/homogenized at $5/quart. This makes it much more doable. I actually feel very blessed.



This is another area where we are very blessed. We do get organ meats and bones for very cheap. And we love chicken livers



Great idea! I haven't been making meat loaf, but adding lentils would definitely make the meat stretch.

We actually use chicken in the same way you do, too. Here's what else I do. On Sunday, I'll roast a meat dish and have vegetable sides. For example: if I make pork roast and smothered cabbage on Sunday, I'll make an extra large amount of the cabbage (usually about 2 pounds worth). On Monday, I'll take the leftover cabbage and make rice & cabbage soup (served with bread and a salad). Tuesday, there's still a ton of soup left over and we have it for lunch with grilled cheese. I'll cook something new for Wednesday, but Thursday's supper will be a casserole made with the left over soup (which is very thick by this point in time), pork (from Sunday's roast) and covered with a bechemel sauce. I'll also use the pork for stir-fries, pilafs & sandwiches (my favorite sandwich is pork with greens and garlic).




Thank you so much, you have given me so many ideas for recipes to try!!! My family loves dumplings and all things with dough.

Not to mention, we usually culture the milk or cook with it, so either way, I can't justify raw since nobody here actually drinks a glass of milk.

That's a great tip about the roast to soup to casserole...I may have to share my soup queen title

[ltlmrs]

I just realized that a major expense for us is fresh grain for bread and other baking. I don't have a grain mill, but borrow a friend's once a week. We get spelt berries at $1.50/lb, but I can get KA white wheat flour for $3.99 for 5 lb making it only 80 cents a pound! Each week we use at least 5 pounds of flour, so that's an extra $3.50/week. That's an extra dozen eggs, or an extra half gallon raw milk, or 3 pounds of bones (the kind with some meat still on them, making for extra good stock!).

I'm almost out of spelt, should I just switch to the store-bought flour or is that a bad compromise?

[serenbat]

I'm almost out of spelt, should I just switch to the store-bought flour or is that a bad compromise?

all depends on what you want to put in your body-we only do organic flours, I don't like added thingies in my flour so if you can get flour that doesn't have it but all store brand I know of has extras

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/he...on/04foli.html

[ltlmrs]

Originally Posted by serenbat

all depends on what you want to put in your body-we only do organic flours, I don't like added thingies in my flour so if you can get flour that doesn't have it but all store brand I know of has extras

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/he...on/04foli.html

Well, the King Arthur whole grain flour doesn't have additives, what I'm really concerned about is the nutritional content. There's a local whole wheat flour that's for sale here too, slightly more expensive.

The WAPF claims that flour looses 45% of its nutrition within 24 hours of grinding and then by the time we buy it off the shelf it's more like 90%. I'll be honest this doesn't particularly make sense to me. Both my and DH's grandparents and great-grandparents ate a mostly TF diet since they lived in very rural, isolated areas. The grandparents bought white flour in bulk once a year (which is not good, I'm sure), but both sets of great-grandparents would purchase (definitely whole grain on my side, probably on his too) flour from the local mill in bulk (based on what our grandparents have said). I know for sure that in Siberia (where my great-grandparents lived), people did not grind their own grain.

That said, even back in the middle ages people took their grain to be ground to the communal mill and that was probably not done every day...

Here's a good discussion about it:
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/880...r-being-milled

I guess up to this point, since I've had the opportunity to get fresh milled flour, I've taken advantage of it. But, now that I must cut our costs dramatically I'm trying to figure out if the extra $ each week is worth it...

[serenbat]

you can always add things to bread to boost the content - soaked/cooked wheat berries, ground flax, seed of other types, wheat germ, etc.

in my local chain grocery stores everything is enriched unless you can find tiny & $$ bags of organic

[my_baby_love]

Is there any way you can grow some food, and maybe even preserve it? You can even garden in containers if you don't have any yard space. I save money in the summer on all our salad fixings and greens by just growing a few rows of that stuff in my garden. A package of seeds costs about $1.50 and you can harvest some of the greens all summer long. Plus, we have fruit trees and berry plants and I preserve or freeze a bunch of the fruit to use in the winter. Organic produce can be expensive in the stores, so growing it myself can be way cheaper!

[serenbat]

A package of seeds costs about $1.50 and you can harvest some of the greens all summer long.

this is great- depending on your light- we also grow inside for a few months since we live in an apt.

I get lots of leaf veggies and herbs this way and no need to buy

[ltlmrs]

Originally Posted by serenbat

this is great- depending on your light- we also grow inside for a few months since we live in an apt.

I get lots of leaf veggies and herbs this way and no need to buy

We also live in an apartment and I actually have many herbs and a few strawberry bushes on our porch. But, I've found that aside for things like herbs (many of which are really expensive fresh) and maybe salad greens (which we get through our CSA share anyway), it's more expensive to garden in containers than to just purchase produce at the store. We used to have a vermicomposter eliminating the cost of organic fertilizer but then our worms died while we were out of town and it got really cold and I just haven't been able to bring myself to spend more money on worms even though right now we have tons of compostable material...

Please keep the ideas coming!



Oh and what do you think is more frugal long term, buying several smaller roaster chickens (in the 3-4 lb range) or 1 big one (7-8 lb)?

[serenbat]

Oh and what do you think is more frugal long term, buying several smaller roaster chickens (in the 3-4 lb range) or 1 big one (7-8 lb)?

what are your cost per pounds? in my area large seem to cost less per pound

bulk in general seems to cost less be it shrimp or chicken per pound-we also stock up seasonal specials

[seim.ge]

We are in a similar financial situation and the only workable solution we've found was going vegetarian. We still eat meat when it's offered for free (at a BBQ or something), but we don't buy it to prepare at home. We eat a lot of Mexican foods, partially because I was raised in SW Texas and I'm familiar with the cuisine but partially because it's way more affordable and vegetarian friendly. Homemade tortillas are ridiculously cheap! Our favorite is the not-entirely-traditional Tortilla Soup, which we serve over a bed of black beans and rice. It's delicious, and it takes no time at all and pretty cheap if you don't buy chips.

[ltlmrs]

Originally Posted by serenbat

what are your cost per pounds? in my area large seem to cost less per pound

bulk in general seems to cost less be it shrimp or chicken per pound-we also stock up seasonal specials

Well, these are both free range organic chickens from local farmers for the same price $3/lb, which is what our supermarket sells organic chickens for as well, so it doesn't get any cheaper than that. So the total price for two small chickens or one big one is the same, but I would think that more of the weight of the big chicken is meat whereas between the two of them, the smaller chickens have a higher percentage of bone mass. That said, maybe having more bones for stock is better. Oh, I'm so confused now...

[ltlmrs]

Originally Posted by seim.ge

We are in a similar financial situation and the only workable solution we've found was going vegetarian. We still eat meat when it's offered for free (at a BBQ or something), but we don't buy it to prepare at home. We eat a lot of Mexican foods, partially because I was raised in SW Texas and I'm familiar with the cuisine but partially because it's way more affordable and vegetarian friendly. Homemade tortillas are ridiculously cheap! Our favorite is the not-entirely-traditional Tortilla Soup, which we serve over a bed of black beans and rice. It's delicious, and it takes no time at all and pretty cheap if you don't buy chips.

That's great that you were able to do that! I won't say never, but I think we'd sacrifice a lot before we'd be able to do that. We've given up breakfast meats and meat for lunch and are down to meat for 3-4 dinners a week. But, I think DH would rather I stopped buying grass fed meat and go conventional (yuk!) before giving up meat entirely.

The fact is though, that organ meats are as cheap as bones around here, so that's definitely a big help! That way I only buy one chicken OR one roast a week whereas before we would go through a chicken, a roast, sausage and probably something like chops... We used to eat a lot of meat.

[serenbat]

and you have smaller bones, if they both are the same price it doesn't seem really too different in the end