Frugal Meals

I've been in a cooking funk eating the same things all the time, so I decided to give myself a challenge!

2sday! So every Tuesday I will try to eat only 2 dollars worth of food, and have different meals than any previous 2sday! Figured I'd share my misadventures here.

Here is what I ate today and prices! (I used winco which has buckets of stuff you scoop into bags and sells a ton of things by pound.)

Breakfast:

1 cup of Instant Oats @ .98/Pound

small handful dried dates cooked into the oats @ 2.58 per pound

Spoonful of sugar

A biscuit! Made mostly for lunch, but had one here with margarine.

Dates tasted pretty good in the oatmeal! Honestly a cup of dried oats is a lot, but the goal is to get over 2000 calories today, so needed to start off strong!

Lunch:

Biscuits made with just salt, baking powder, and flour mixture, used 1 cup of flour, mix was .60/pound

Chicken gravy made with a table spoon of oil, flour, and broth from bouillon cube. The cubes I have are .28 cents each.

1/4 cup dried split peas that I cooked until tender the day before, then heated up into the gravy. @ .86 per pound

Small amount of fake butter from my fridge. IDK how much I paid for it, but it's a super cheap brand.

Ate 4 of the biscuits smothered in the gravy with butter, and turned out pretty good! Split peas didn't have the exact taste I was looking for since I'm used to sweet peas, but they still added something really good and I probably would just add more to give more heartiness and protein. They're super calorie dense for price so probably could have just used them as a soup along with the biscuits and had a much heartier meal. Or could have added more peas and ditched the bouillon cube in favor of just using salt/pepper for the gravy.

Dinner:

1 cup rice @ .78/pound 1/4 chickpeas @ 1.17/pound 1/2 can hunts seasoned tomato sauce @67 a can

Cooked rice, cooked dry chickpeas during the day, mixed with tomato sauce and salt. It tasted pretty good, nothing creative here.

So the primary goal was calories today! I've watched some youtubers rave about how "filling" budget meals are... that if you do the math are like 200 calories. So wanted to focus on calories. I don't have a digital scale so don't know if I hit the goal of 2 dollars exactly, but napkin math says I was pretty close on one side or the other.

Would love suggestions on any other meals that would be part of a 2k calorie diet and fit into 2 dollar budget!

If you can't find a good place to buy a specific ingredient for cheap near you, you can see if it's cheaper on amazon based on price per pound. Really nice if you can't find something local.

It's not perfect if the lister messed up the info, but it's a great place to start.

A caveat: We don’t eat meat from factory farms. Your actual value may differ.

We have found that the cheapest way to purchase chicken is whole. (Sometime chicken quarters are similarly priced)

As we’ve tightened our budget we’ve opened up to new ideas. So, instead of buying just breasts or thighs we got a whole chicken and to our delight it’s been super easy.

I’ve added a link as an example but basically layer some veg (or not) at the bottom of a slow cooker. Place your whole chicken inside and cook on high for about 4 hours. I’m telling you that’s it’s. If you want some crisp you can broil for 5 minutes at the end.

We usually have this with rice and veg the first night. Then, after the meal we pick off the extra chicken to us for a casserole or burritos. Then you can even boil up what remains to make a broth or chicken soup base. That’s 3 meals!

This tip is for Kroger stores, specifically Dillons, but I’m sure other stores do something similar and I’d love to know.

At Dillons, nearly all I’ve been too, somewhere near the “back” of the produce section around the bananas there is a wooden rack with net-type bags filled with discount produce. In my experience it’s just slightly misshapen or off-color produce marked down to $0.99.

6 large Servings

Total $5.16/meal or $0.86/serving

This is one of those “end of the week, what do we have left in the fridge” type meals. This is a basic version of a recipe you can do just about anything with.

Basic Expenses:

Crust:

• Flour $0.26
• Butter $1.40
• Water ??

Filling:

• Eggs $0.80
• Spinach $1.59
• Cheese $1.00
• Milk $0.11
• Salt/Pepper ??

At the end of the week we ended up with some extra eggs, some garden spinach and a bag of frozen chopped spinach. Throw in some cheese, make a crust. Voila! Frugal Meal!

Basic Directions—

Make (any old) crust: Combine 2 cups flour, 10 tbsp butter. Then add 5 tbsp water one at a time. Spread into pie plate.

Make filling: Combine 7 eggs, bag of chopped frozen spinach (or your choice of others filling), 1/2 cup of cheese, dash of milk, salt and pepper. You can adjust the ratio of fillings/egg as needed to accommodate more or less extras. We went heavy on spinach and light on egg. Add mushroom, left over cooked meats…you name it!

Pour filling mixture into crust and bake for around 45min to 60min at 375°. It’s ready when it’s not runny.

As the picture shows, most (all??) grocery stores will show the price per ounce on the item’s price tag.

It’s usually on sales tags too.

I was FAR too old before I realized this and it’s made price comparisons in-store much easier.

Note: Not my photo. Just generic photo from google.

TLDR: A 5lb bag of white rice comes out to $0.10/cup cooked.

Doing the cost breakdown for the last post left me a bit shocked at the price of rice per cup. Especially when you think of the $4.00 or more companies charge for premade rice cups.

The breakdown— Kroger sells a 5lb bag of white rice for $3.69. You can get it for $2.99 on sale but for the sake of argument let’s use retail pricing.

5lb of rice = 12.5 cups dry rice ≈ 36 cups cooked rice. Based on this, each cup of cooked rice costs about $0.10/cup cooked.

4 servings (2 adults, 1 teen, 1 preteen)

Total $19.93/meal or 4.98/person

The protein (and feeding two teens) is this meals biggest expense. As a base without the protein the cost for the ENTIRE meal is $5.95 or $1.49/person. Substituting in a cheaper protein like tofu or increasing the portion of spicy beans would keep this meal well under $8.00 while keeping stomachs full.

Basic Expenses:

• White Rice-2 cups dry: $0.48
• 2lb Shrimp: $13.98
• Frozen Okra Bag: $1.50
• Spice Black Beans: $1.98
• Avacado x 4: $1.99

Breakdown of the Numbers:

5lb bag of rice = 12.5 cups dry = 36 cups cooked This equates to $0.24-$0.30 cents/cup dry or $0.08-$0.10 cents/cup cooked.

2lb Sand Bar Shrimp @ $13.98 = approximately 80 shrimp or $0.17/shrimp.

Frozen Okra $1.50/bag (We’re also growing this in the garden and hope to cut this cost soon!)

Spicy Black Beans: 1 x Black beans $0.79/can 1 x Tomato Paste $0.99/can 1/2 Onion $0.20* Salt/Pepper/Chipotle Powder ??

4 x Avacado $1.99

*Kroger sells a 2lb bag of onions that has 7 medium sized onions in it. Prices @ $2.79/bag or $0.40/onion.