How I Save Money Cooking Healthy, Cheap Dinners

1. Use a crock pot.  Make some kind of chicken or beef one day, and re-serve it a day or two later in disguise. Like, chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy one day.  Then, chicken chopped up and served with cilantro, tomatoes, cheese in tortillas another day.  This is cheap and also easy because you can put a frozen hunk of meat in a crock pot.  Today I'm doing a pot roast in the crock pot.  I'll serve it with baked potatoes and carrots tonight.  Then I will serve it as barbeque beef sandwiches tomorrow night.

2.  Make breakfasts for dinners.  We love omelettes, french toast, eggs, breakfast casseroles, pancakes, waffles, eggs and bacon and toast, cereal, etc.  Eggs and bread are cheap so it makes a good dinner.

3.  Buy in bulk but only when it's on a killer sale.  I get tons of bread for example, and freeze it, when they have the good kind on sale.  Same with cereal, oatmeal, soups, toothpaste, etc.

4.  Rice is cheap.  Make your main thing rice and have the meat and veggies almost like a condiment with good sauce (soy, teriyaki, salsa, etc.)

5.  Have "Smorgasbord night" once in a while.  You put out the leftovers from the week, cut up fruit and veggies, put out bread and jam and cheese, and let everyone just make whatever they feel like.  Then you throw away the leftovers and feel less guilty.

6.  Don't make recipes that use more than five ingredients.  They just cost more.  (The five is not including salt, sugar, oil, etc.)

7.  Beans are cheap and one of the healthiest foods on earth.  Make taco soup without the meat.  Make beans and kielbasa.  Make bean and cheese enchiladas, meatless.  You can even substitute refried beans for oil in brownie mixes, and it comes out less oily, more cakey, less fattening, and super delicious. But do not tell anyone!  It will gross them out.  I made that mistake.  The people who didn't know, loved it.

8.  If you like oatmeal, eat it almost every morning.  We do.  We add a little salt, some brown sugar, honey, jam or cinnamon, or bananas.  It is very cheap and we just put it with water in the micro for 1 or 1 and 1/2 minutes.  So fast and so good.  It is way cheaper than buying cereal. 

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Emergency Food Storage

I read an article about food storage today on MormonTimes, and I want to paste a piece of the article here, to keep this information at my fingertips:

What are the basic foods and suggested amounts?

The LDS Church gives the following recommendations:
Store grains: 25 pounds/person/month. Grains include oatmeal, long-grain rice, pasta, cornmeal, barley and white flour. White flour has a shorter shelf life. Many people choose to store wheat, which stores a very long time. With a grinder, you can take your time to use your stored wheat when you feel like it.
Store beans: 5 pounds/person/month. This can include other legumes like lentils and split peas.
Four big reasons for storing these basic foods
1. They are the least expensive foods to store.
2. They are the most space-efficient foods to store. Think of all the space taken up in packaging of the usual foods we eat.
3. They have a significantly longer shelf life than the usual foods we eat. Dry beans and most grains will store 30 years when packaged for long-term storage and stored in a cool, dark place. Storing some canned beans and meats, too, can save time and fuel; they store for around five years in a cool, dark place.

         WATER

Oh, I also read that you should add 8 drops of bleach to a 2 liter soda bottle and fill it with water.  This is the cheapest way to gather a water storage supply.  Just don't throw away your soda bottles and after you rinse them out, fill them with water and a tiny bit of bleach to keep the water from growing things that you don't want to drink.

         BULK

At the local LDS cannery, bulk foods (grains, sugar, beans) are incredibly cheap.  You can buy huge sacks of grains (25 lb) for about $5. You can buy huge cans of grains for a little bit more, too, which I recommend over the sacks because we got weevils in our sacked grains last year.