Cheap meals equal good meals. On a budget? Join the cheap living club! Join us for healthy, frugal meal ideas.
We'll pare down our food bills and pinch our pennies until they squeak. All the while preparing wholesome, delicious, but cheap meals.
We'll experiment with pulses and beans (and share our successes and failures with you).
We'll try out frugal recipes and try to actually use the healthy, cheap ingredients we buy, instead of letting them moulder in our cupboards.
Naked Grocery Shopping
Not literally, of course. Unless your grocery store happens to sit right smack in the middle of a nudist resort.
Or you're a bit of an exhibitionist who can outrun the police.
But if you're serious about reducing your grocery bill and producing thrifty meals, then the food you buy should be as naked as possible.
And by naked we mean unprocessed.
Buy food basics, with as little packaging as possible.
Because basic ingredients are usually cheaper than pre-packaged, pre-made convenience food.
If you can pop it in the microwave, and have a full meal in 5 minutes, then you're probably paying more than you should if you mean to be a real frugalista/tightwad.
If you're anything like me, this return to basics means you'll have to dig out some recipes (Mom, Grandma, the library, and the internet are good sources) and learn to make cheap meals from scratch.
Because I am the Microwave Queen.
So start small and work your way up to cooking everything from scratch.
You'll be less likely to think, "This is too hard/I can't be bothered" and quit before you've even started.
Just pick your favourite convenience meal, and try to make the budget version yourself.
Do you love vegetarian lasagne? Get an Italian cookbook out of the library (or search for a simple recipe online), buy the ingredients and try it out. You can experiment with different spices, and ingredients. I tend to add a dash of sweet Thai chilli sauce to almost everything I make.
Not that I'm addicted, or anything.
Get into a regular routine of preparing things from scratch, and making cheap meals on a budget will become second-nature.
If you live on your own (and even if you don't), make more than you think you'll need, and freeze the surplus. You'll build up your own supply of home-made, healthy freezer meals, thus reducing the temptation to grab a quick microwave convenience meal when your cupboard seems bare (or you're too tired to cook).
Do this one convenience meal at a time and you'll soon have a full freezer, a cool new repertoire of frugal, healthy dishes, and a sense of satisfaction that you're not paying over the odds for unsatisfying, pre-packaged food. And you can smugly lord it over your non-frugal friends and family.
