Reddit Frugal's Ideas For Cheap Eats

I participate in an on-line group at Reddit.com for Frugal Folks and lately there have been some really great ideas for eating on the cheap!

Some of the best:

Cheap Casserole---Chop 4 ounces of cooked meat(hotdogs, leftovers) into fine cubes and fry them lightly until they are a little crispy. Cut 1 tortilla into quarters and place them into a small square baking pan. Put 1/2 of a can of refried beans in on top of the tortilla. Hotdog pieces on top of that. Add the rest of the refried beans and top with another tortilla and a little shredded cheese. Add hot sauce and spices if you have them. Bake at 325 for 30 minutes. Serve with rice that is cooked with 1/2 cup of ketchup in place of 1/2 cup of the usual water for cheap "Spanish rice"-VicinSea

Gravy over toast or biscuits is filling and tasty. You can make this into brown gravy by cooking the oil/butter and flour longer, a cream gravy by using milk, you could season it with ketchup or garlic and stretch the butter by using half oil/half butter. -Hamsterdam

Gravy : 2tbsp oil, 2tbsp flour, 1 cup liquid, hot. To make a thinner ingredient cut the butter and flour down to 1 tbsp each and keep the 1 cup of liquid. You can add corn to this and have creamed corn. -Hamsterdam

Chicken Pot Pie. Make a double pie crust, cook one or two chicken breast saving the water to make a few cups of gravy, chop some vegetables add cooked rice (you could cook the rice in the chicken water and use thinned milk for the gravy) to the pot pie as a filler. -Hamsterdam

Double pie crust 2 1/2 cups of flour, 1 tsp salt, 3/4 cup shortening (ice cold butter and oil mixed together will work but the crust won't be as tender. 6 to 7 tablespoons ice water.) Mix everything together except the water, cut the fat in, add as much water as needed to bring it together. Press half of dough into a pie pan, add the filling, roll the second piece of dough out with a wine bottle or pin and drape over filling. Cut slits in the vent the pie. Coat with a little melted butter. -Hamsterdam

Candied carrots: 6 to 8 carrots, 1/4 cup water, 1tbsp butter, 2 tbsp honey, 1/4 tsp salt. Slice the carrots, boil in salted water until done, drain add butter and honey. -Hamsterdam

Cooked Greens: If you have some lettuce in the fridge that might be past its prime: don't throw it out! When lettuce gets wilty it takes on a tinge of bitterness that makes it useless for salads or tacos or whatnot, but wilty lettuce can be cooked like any other greens. I prefer kale or collard greens, but sauteed lettuce works well in stir-fries or alongside cornbread and rice and beans.

Heat a little bit of olive oil in a fry pan and add greens. For stir-fries, add soy sauce (cold noodles with soy sauce and lettuce is a nice lunch, and punched up with a sauce made from peanut butter, lime juice, and a little hot sauce, can be a meal tasty and impressive enough to serve to guests). For southern-style greens, add a little vinegar and hot sauce. -Beneventan

Soupy Sunday.: Basically, you have a party where the main meal is soup. Have each guest bring one ingredient to contribute to the soup pot. The more people you have the bigger that soup will get and the better chances you have for leftovers. We utilized facebook to send out invites for the party and coordinate soup ingredients. So far both events worked out great. Plenty of food and drinks for all and we didn't spend a dime on it. -Summerchilde

White Beans with Escarole: (sauteed lettuce can be substituted for the sauteed escarole easily). Cook a few servings of white beans in chicken broth rather than water. I start from dry, and have the beans cooking in the broth all day, adding water as it boils away. Some extra flavor can be had by adding the rind from Parmesan cheese (many stores that grate their own Parmesan will sell the rind for a pittance, or even give it away), but the beans and chicken stock alone will work nicely. When the beans are soft and buttery, saute up some greens in a little olive oil, with salt and garlic (or garlic powder). serve the beans over the wilted greens. It's surprisingly delicious; my husband tends to look askance at all vegetables, but he went back for thirds the first time I made this dish, and it's become a regular meal ever since. -Beneventan

Homemade Granola: You can make some excellent granola with the oatmeal, dried fruit & nuts, and honey-Alton Brown has a great recipe, just mix and match what you have on hand. -Londonzoo

Pantry Must-Haves by Hamsterdam, Powdered eggs, milk and cheese, corn meal, masa harina, baking powder, baking soda, yeast (keep it in the freezer until you need it), crisco or lard (for making biscuits/cornbread/griddle cakes/pie crust), chicken bouillon or even better chicken demi glace (demi glace is basically chicken stock that has been cooked down to a paste, you add water to a teaspoon of demi glace to make chicken stock.), pinto beans, lots of canned dice tomatoes, onions, and potatoes.

Falafal For the Masses--ReFried Refried Beans.

Q. Refried beans are available everywhere and show up quite often in food baskets given out by food banks but if you don't have any experience with them what do you do with them besides eat & eat?
A. Think of refried beans as a soggy form of meat and they are a little easier to imagine cooking with.

Falafel is really just ground cooked beans with spices, herbs and vegetables added.

I make a very passable version of falafel using refried beans instead of the traditional chick peas.

Re-Re-Fried Beans

1 can(15 ounces) Refried Beans
1-2 slices of dryish bread, grated into bread crumbs
1/4 cup of finely chopped onion
1/2 flour(or cold left over rice)
powdered garlic, other seasoning to taste.

Mix everything together into a thick batter. Drop by teaspoon into a medium hot frying pan with oil. Fry until lightly browned, turn over, flatten with a spoon or spatula, brown again. Turn over and brown the top side again. This little extra cooking allows the onions to cook.

Serve these silver dollar sized bites with ranch dressing, mustard or ketchup. Or make some homemade tortillias and wrap them around the bean bites with whatever veggies or rice you may have.

Make a batch of Traditional Falafel and divide in half. Mix 1 cup of ground turkey with 1/2 of the falafel and then form into balls, fry and add to spaghetti sauce for spaghetti & meatballs.

Sautee 1 cup of finely chopped mushrooms and add them to a batch of falafel, then fry as usual.

Crumble a batch of falafel into a frying pan and brown well in place of the hamburger in Hamburger Helper.

Form your falafel ball around a cube of cheese and fry as usual.

Frugal 15 Bean Soup at Pinto Bean Prices

15 bean soup is one of my favorite dinner staples but 1 pound of the "15 Beans" is over $4.00! That price moves them out of "Frugal" and into "Extravagent in my book! I have figured out a way to get my multi-bean fix without that high price by mixing the beans myself.

I started with a 5 gallon bucket and 10 pounds of the cheapest beans I could find: pinto beans on sale for $4.99 for 10 pounds. As I see other beans on sale I add them to the bucket:

1 pound of Baby Lima Beans at $1.45

1 pound of Small Navy Beans at $1.28

1 pound of Black Beans at $0.99

2 pounds of Garbanzo Beans at $0.85 per pound

I just add what comes on sale and never buy anything over $1.50 a pound. To balance the price and add to the mix, I also added Pearl Barley at $0.66 a pound and Split Peas at $0.59 a pound. At first we were eating mainly pinto beans but as I have added more sale items the variety has grown

When I am ready to make some soup--I just stir the top of the bucket and scoop out a couple of cups of the mixed beans! I could also stir up the whole bucket at this point and scoop all the beans into quart containers and use the bucket for something else until I need to make more 15 Bean Soup Mix!

Crock Pot 15 Bean Soup
2 cups of Mixed Beans
2 Carrots, chopped
1/2 zucchini, chopped
1 onion, chopped
2 stalks of celery, chopped
2 tablespoons of Ham-Base(Ham Bouillon)
Spices to taste.
up to 3 quarts of Water

Put everything in a 1 gallon crock pot, fill with the water. Turn on Low and cook 8-12 hours until the beans are done. Add a bit of meat if desired.

Makes about 16 servings of 15 bean soup for less than $0.25 per serving.

Cook ahead staples save time and money.

Time is the number one reason cited by people to explain why they eat out instead of cooking at home. Healthy food takes a while to cook properly and the busier our lives get, the harder it is to find the time to cook. Rather than giving up on cooking, learn to cook smarter--convenience foods are convenient because they are precooked and we can use that simple concept to make our own food shortcuts.

Brown rice: I love brown rice and it is probably one of the healthiest things you can eat but let's face it--that stuff takes a minimum of 55 minutes to cook. If your tired and hungry, brown rice isn't going to be on the menu unless you plan ahead.

Brown Rice
Boil-In-Bags of rice are showing up in the market and these are a great idea but way too expensive for my kitchen so I make my own heat and eat rice. Scale up your favorite method for cooking the rice so that you have 4 cups or more of cooked rice. Let it cool and spread it out on a cookie sheet and put the whole thing in the freezer. After a couple of hours, the rice is frozen. Spray the frozen rice with non-stick spray like Pam, put it in a freezer container and keep it frozen for up to 6 months. To use it, scoop out the amount you need and microwave it or put the frozen rice in a colander and run hot water over it, drain and serve.

Standard Brown Rice Recipe
2 cups Brown Rice
5 cups water
Start by bringing the water to a boil. Add the rice, salt and butter, and give it ONE stir. Cover the pot.

Return the pot to a boil, then turn the stove down to simmer and set the timer. It can take 45-55 minutes to cook brown rice. When cooking any and all rice, never stir the rice while it is cooking or you will end up with very mushy rice!

Beans: Beans are another super-healthy food that takes way too long to cook on a daily basis. Frozen beans cooked ahead of time make it much quicker to use beans in hurry-up meals.

Basic Beans
2 cups of dry beans
6 cups of water
Bring the beans and water to a boil in a heavy pot. Turn off the heat and let the beans soak for at least an hour or overnight. Drain and rinse the soaked beans and put them back into the pan with enough fresh water or vegetable stock to cover them. Cook at a simmer for 1-2 hours until they taste almost "done" but still a little firm. Avoid stirring too much since that will break up the beans. Dip beans out of the cooking liquid and put them into a muffin or cupcake pan with just enough liquid to fill up the space between the beans. Freeze for a few hours, then pop the beans out of the pan and store in an airtight bag in the freezer. Don't make too many at once and try to use the frozen beans in 2-3 months.

Potato Short Cuts
Potatoes are fairly quick to cook so they do make it to the dinner table regularly as boiled, mashed or baked potatoes. Because of the starch content, potatoes change consistency and flavor if they have been cooked, cooled and then cooked again allowing for a much wider variety of potato dishes. When you do cook potatoes, always make a point of cooking twice as many as you need so that you have cooked and cooled taters on hand for the next recipe. Cooked potatoes can be stored in the fridge for up to 4 days and can be frozen for 2-3 months.

Smashed Potatoes
This simple alternative to baked potatoes makes an excellent side dish. Take a cooked and cooled potato, place it in a baking pan and use a spatula or coffee mug to squash it to about 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick. Drizzle with a tiny amount of olive oil and sprinkle with salt and spices to taste. Brown under the broiler for 3-5 minutes until crusty brown.

JoJos
Slice cooked and cooled into wedges. Toss in a bowl with a teaspoon of oil, salt and spices to taste. Bake at 400 for 10-15 minutes until browned, turning at least once during the cooking.

Hash
Hash has an interesting history in the US including the fact that hash was so popular at times that restaurants, called Hash Houses, opened all over the country and served nothing but hash--not bad for a food that is basically leftovers and potatoes!

Breakfast Hash
Chop 1/2 of an onion and 2 slices of bacon. Start frying together and add a large cooked and cooled potato that has been diced. Cook everything together, add salt and pepper to taste, until the potatoes are browned nicely. Crack 2 eggs on the top and stir them in. Put a lid on the pan and cook the eggs for a few minutes. Eat as is with toast or roll up in a tortilla for hash to go!

Beef on A Dollar

I bought a huge chunk of beef at Cash & Carry. This Top Round Roast weighs 24 pounds and was on sale this week for $1.62 per pound. If cut up correctly, this chunk would yield 48 Top Round Steaks on par with steaks offered in many high end restaurants. If cut up into USDA portion sizes it will produce 22 or so pounds of high quality, low fat protein-- more than 90 servings of beef at a cost of about 41 cents per serving.

Cutting and packaging...Took 2 people 1 hour so we "made/saved" $25.00 per hour each compared to a similar amount/cuts of meat offered at Safeway!

Got these packages (Safeway Value $)

1-2# Round Roast ($2.29/lb= $4.58) Frozen whole.

16- 4 ounce Filet mignon ($9.99/lb=$39.96) And yes, I did weigh these. I trimmed meat off each steak until they were all exactly 4 ounces and added the trimmings to the stew meat. The steaks got a 2 hour marinade: Juice of 1 lime, 1/4 cup of soy sauce and 1 teaspoon meat tenderizer before being vacuum packed and frozen. (The marinade may have been a mistake, but time will tell when we take them out to cook-more on that in a future blog.)

6 pounds lean ground beef ($2.99/lb=$17.94) We ground this using an old hand grinder--run the meat through twice to get a good grind. Frozen in 1/2 pound packages.

10.5 pounds lean stew meat/20 packs ($2.49/lb=$26.14) I cooked all of this meat with onions and celery for about 3 hours at 300 degrees. I then, split the whole mess into 10 packages for freezing. Each package will make a double sized meal and have left overs too.

Here are 150+ recipes that start with stew meat & onions. When I cook up these recipes I will divide each one in half and freeze one of the halves for another day so that I get 20 meals for 2.

I also got 1.5 pounds nasty greasy fat that could possible have been made into candles or some other useful product(frontier axle grease?) but it grossed me out so I tossed it!

Total Cost: $36.99

Safeway Comparative Value: $88.62

Money Saved: $51.63

Plan to Save Money

While cooking is the key to cheap food, planning and shopping are the foundation of the whole program. Spending 2 hours planning a monthly menu can save hundreds of dollars a month on the average food budget. Planning allows a family to buy larger quantities and then use them before they spoil. Pay attention to sales papers and plan around them. If pork is cheap, plan a month of pork meals. When chicken goes on sale, switch to chicken. Let the market be your guide rather than, "I feel like a pizza today." Also be aware that rock bottom dining doesn't allow for the luxury of a daily balanced diet. Try instead, for a weekly balanced diet by eating a variety of side vegetables and fruit that are in season.

Vary what you plan by what is on sale.
Most meals can start with just a few cheap ingredients:

Protein	Starch	Veggie or Fruit
Pork	Potatoes	Lettuce
Chicken	Rice	Tomato
Beef	Pasta	Green Beans
Beans	Bread	Broccoli
Tofu	Beans	Cauliflower
Meat Replacement	Crust	Carrots
Cheese	Couscous	Bananas
Egg	Dumplings	Oranges
Liver	Falafil	Apples

Vary the way you cook.
There are many ways to cook any type of food and using variations is a great way to save money. For example, cheap pork steaks can be breaded and fried, breaded and baked, cubed, breaded and deep fried, cut into strips and sauteed with veggies, cubed and sauteed-followed by simmering with veggies and noodles, ground and mixed with spices for homemade sausage, baked with BBQ sauce for sandwiches and many other ways. Same cheap cut of meat, but at least 7 very different meals.

Pork 6 Ways
Pork Shoulder Steaks are on sale this week at Safeway for $2.29 per pound and comes in a 3 pound package for $6.87. That is enough for 7 meals for 2 people (or 2 people with a child). Split the package up at home like this:
Bone each steak, cut the steaks along the major division lines. Save the largest 4 pieces for steaks(save an extra, cut in half, for a child) Make 2 packages. Reserve bones and most fat. Cube the rest of the meat. Divide into 3 parts--Large cubes, small cubes, smaller bits.

Monday: Pork gravy over biscuits, & green beans
Tuesday: Pork Steaks, lettuce wedges, chopped tomato, baked potato
Wednesday: Pork Kabobs with carrots, potato and onion, couscous
Thursday: Leftover couscous or rice stir fried with small bits of pork with candy carrots
Friday: Sweet & Sour Pork with veggies, rice.
Saturday: Pork Pot Pie
Sunday: Meat Free Day-Homemade Pizza, Soup or veggie chili.

A word about vegetables: Frozen veggies are a tremendous value if you know what to buy. My current favorite is California Mix(Broccoli, carrots, yellow squash, & green beans) in a 4 pound bag for $3.58 that I get at Cash & Carry(a restaurant supply store). When you buy mixed veggies, you do not have to use them mixed. You can pick out just broccoli or just squash so that meals look more varied than your supplies are.

4 Way Chicken
Take 1 small whole chicken(about $3.00 on sale) dust it with your favorite herbs and spices and bake at 350 for 45 minutes or until done. Split the chicken into 4 meals for two people: Breast meat, thigh meat, legs & wings, soup bones.

Soup bones doesn't mean you have to make soup from them. Boil the meat off and make chicken pot pie instead, YUM!

A few words about beef.
Beef has gotten dramatically more expensive this last year. Hamburger is $2.50 or more per pound so it is very hard to make it fit into a Dollar Dining menu. But, keep in mind that a serving of ground beef should be about 3-4 ounces. By controlling serving size, the cost per serving is 50-65 cents and well within the guidelines. Ground beef can also be mixed with cheaper foods to extend it and cut costs. Some examples of this would be mixing ground beef with an equal amount of grated carrots or finely chopped onions. These mixtures work well for fried burgers and they stay nice and moist. Or, mix ground beef with 2 parts of cooked rice and bake up some meatballs.

Rediscover Eggs
Even with recent price increases, eggs are still a great deal. At 20 cents or less per egg, you can whip up a super omelet for next to nothing and eggs and hashbrowns are a good meal any time of the day. Stock up when eggs are on sale, they will keep in the fridge for at least 3 months.

Fish & Seafood
Low cost meal ideas coming soon!

The "Other" Meats
Liver, tongue, balony, & spam...more info soon!

What is Dining on a Dollar?

Food prices are up and will continue to increase, but food costs are still the number one area to save money on a household budget. Unfortunately, many people have used convenience foods for so long that they have forgotten how to cook good cheap food. This blog is about reviving forgotten recipes and techniques to greatly reduce the cost of everyday food.

Most Fast Food Restaurants offer "Dollar Menus" and have an assortment of things to buy for a buck or less, but they still make a profit! They make money on every purchase because the "Dollar" items actually cost around 15-25 cents to make. You can save a lot by simply preparing the same items at home, and that is just the beginning.

In coming posts, I will introduce cheap foods, cheap places to buy food, and cheap ways to use more expensive foods. The goal is to prepare meals that cost less than $1.00 per serving. The servings will be generous enough for adult men, yet lower in fat, cholesterol, and sodium than similar fare found elsewhere.

Real food is still really cheap, but many of us are so dependent on highly processed foods that our budgets have spun out of control. Planning menus and shopping lists can help a lot to lower food costs. If that hasn't worked for you in the past, then the ultimate way to plan is to use grocery delivery if it is available in your area. Another way to cut impulse spending is to shop at a different kind of store such as a restaurant supply that offers large packages of a limited number of products. There are less brand names to confuse you so you will tend to spend less overall on the products you do buy.