The item is usually something I can turn into a casserole or soup, perhaps, or another meal or even two. It may even be something like a chicken breast dinner with a few extra baked up to make chicken salad later, or a budget priced ground beef with Meatloaf as the main dish, meatloaf sandwiches later and another preparation altogether Tacos?

a third time. Whatever this item is, beef, pork or poultry, will help determine what else I will serve on the other nights.

Family Fun Night: This is one night I make something fun: Tacos or Pizza or appetizers for dinner, or whatever our current favorite dishes are.

Depending on ages, it might just be popcorn and a movie night. Vegetarian Meal : I always try to work in one healthy vegetarian meal a week, and sometimes more. Think tofu, maybe some type of brown rice bake, a stir fry, a pasta dish. Think wonderful salads, gazpacho or wraps.

Other meatless options perhaps not as healthy could be potato pancakes and applesauce, pastas, grilled cheese and tomato soup, scrambled eggs or cheese rarebit.

Waffles or pancakes can be a good choice, but if I do something like this, I do try to health it up with whole grains of some type. Smorgasbord Night: Late in the week, we pick and choose our favorite leftovers and reheat or reinvent.

Fish Night: Unless fish is featured in another meal, I work in at least one meal featuring fish or seafood. While fish can be a pricier option, it is one option where the potential health benefits outweigh the price.

The other two nights I base on bringing in another type of meat or protein. If big meat night is chicken, then we might have chicken salad for one night, hamburgers one night and pork chops the next.

If big meat night is a pork dish, like pulled pork, we might have pulled pork sandwiches again one night, and then chicken another night and some type of fish another. It becomes almost second nature after a while to fill in the blanks on these meals.

Cooking takes time, a precious resource, and the better use you can make of yours, the easier it is to get meals on the table.

Here are a few examples:. Get your spouse, roommates, kids, etc. Like this: Like Loading Tweet Pin Share Hearing from you makes my day! Comment below. These recipes will help you cook good healthy meals for your family while still letting you pay what you want.

It can be hard to stay on a budget in a family when you are not using frugal family recipes. These recipes help you to make a large family dinners while still using ingredients that help you stay on a frugal budget. Try out these family recipes on a budget for your family meals and help your family to live well on less!

It is easy to have healthy and good meals when you use frugal recipes. These recipes will help you to live on less and still have good food. It can even help you to have get togethers on a budget as well!

Check out these cheap and easy to put together dinners that will help you to continue to save your hard earned money and have a healthy meal. Healthy meals are always important in a family.

Calzone Chickpea and Pumpkin Curry Mushroom Risotto

Frugal cooking inspiration - Sourdough Pizza Calzone Chickpea and Pumpkin Curry Mushroom Risotto

All you need is chicken, salsa, cheese, seasoning, and tortillas to make this easy meal. You are going to fall in love with this creamy chicken curry! No need for takeout, because this version is healthier and so simple to make.

And I love that it's made in one pan for easy clean-up. We make this recipe all of the time and my kids love it!! I like to double the gravy because we love lots of sauce, plus it stretches it farther too!

If you love beef stroganoff, you have to try the chicken version! It's quick, easy, and only requires pantry staples! Tender juicy chicken, mushrooms, and tomatoes made in a skillet and so delicious you would never think it could be ready so quickly! No need for sides, unless you want to serve it with rice or potatoes.

The perfect mouthwatering comfort food and made totally from scratch. Yet simple and quick to make too!

Rich, creamy, delicious and with just the right amount of cheese, this classic favorite is always a hit! Serve with your favorite pasta and a simple salad for an easy weeknight dinner.

Get the taste of Mexico in just minutes with these easy-to-make fajitas. They are hearty, tasty and also very versatile! Add more veggies, swap out the chicken for other meat or add in some hot pepper for a bit of heat. Budget-friendly and made with simple ingredients, this one-pot chicken and rice recipe is great for an easy simple dinner!

Made with simple ingredients, this rice bowl recipe is full of delicious Asian inspired flavors and it's ready in under 30 minutes!

You'll love these chicken tacos! They're crunchy, nutritious and have just the right amount of spice. This one-pan meal is so cheesy and delicious! I love that it's made with simple, frugal ingredients too. Always a win! This vintage recipe has a deliciously flavorful sauce that's made using basic pantry staples.

Simple and kid-friendly too! Made with simple ingredients, this recipe makes a great weeknight dinner. And we think it's 10 times better than Hamburger Helper! One Pot Mexican Rice Casserole is the perfect meal when you're in a hurry.

It's fast, easy and full of tasty taco flavors! Packed with veggies, this simple soup makes a comforting, hearty dinner. Even my pickier eaters love it!

This skillet recipe is a one-pan wonder that allows you to make tacos in less than 25 minutes. It kind of reminds me of a Mexican pizza with the layered corn tortillas! Made with just seven simple ingredients, this easy recipe makes for a budget-friendly, quick family meal!

You can easily make this soup in the slow cooker or Instant Pot - it's comfort food at its finest, freezer friendly, and tastes like the traditional dish. This simple skillet meal will have your family asking for seconds!

It's packed with classic flavors, but so much easier to make than the traditional recipe. I love that this recipe cooks the pasta right along with everything else.

Super easy! And it's such a great hearty, family-friendly dinner! Craving easy, delicious comfort food? This simple recipe combines Italian sausage and penne pasta with a quick tomato sauce and then tops it all with gooey cheese!

Made with just a few simple ingredients, packed with flavor and ready in under 30 minutes! What's not to love? A quick, one-pan dinner that you can whip up when you are short on time. Even the leftovers are delicious! If you don't like smoked sausage you can swap it for your favorite variety. Zucchini is stuffed with sausage, peppers and mushrooms, then topped with bread crumbs and cheese.

Healthy, easy and delicious! Full of veggies and ready in under 30 minutes, this is the perfect quick and easy meal for busy days! Quick to assemble, budget-friendly and made with simple ingredients, these rice bowls are a family favorite and great if you want a meatless but filling meal.

Kick up pizza night with this thick French bread pizza recipe. It's simple, quick, and a favorite that is covered in melty cheese and pepperoni. Add your favorite toppings to make the options endless! This hearty bean soup is flavorful, made with simple ingredients and ready in just 30 minutes.

We love serving it with sour cream and corn chips. So good! You can't beat a good Shakshuka for breakfast or dinner. It's simple, healthy and delicious! Made with tomatoes, eggs, onions, and a variety of seasonings that add the best flavors.

This cheesy pasta recipe is great to make when you need a meal that's fast, fresh and full of flavor. It only takes one pot so it makes clean-up easy too! Super healthy and made with simple pantry staples! Plus, it's ready in less than 30 minutes too. Personally, my favorite meal is pizza.

You can customize it for the whole family — each person can pick their own toppings. Yes, totally agree with your comment! Your email address will not be published. Skip to primary navigation Skip to main content Skip to primary sidebar Home Welcome!

Pin 4. Share Yum 1. Super Easy Mexican Chicken and Rice Casserole. It may be a bit of a stretch to call this a pie, but it goes down a treat with some baked beans! Cook and mash as many potatoes as you think you will need, and mix in some fried onions.

If you have any leftover cooked veg, that can go in too. Grate some cheddar and mix half in with the mash and put the other half on top. Bake for about 20 minutes. Very similar to the dish above. Yes, there is a theme developing! Mix a can of tuna in with some mashed potatoes and fried onions.

Top with cheese if you have some and brown under the grill. Eggs make a cheap meal, and omelettes are a super quick and easy way to eat them. Add thinly sliced cooked potato, peppers, peas, cheese, mushrooms, canned sweetcorn — whatever you have to hand.

Fry some onions and garlic for five minutes, then add any other veg you have available. Throw in a can of chickpeas, a can of tomatoes and some seasoning and cook for 20 minutes to combine the flavours.

Serve with rice, pasta, potatoes or bread. I regularly add cooked spinach or tinned potatoes to make it more substantial. My recipe is here. This is an old one, from my copy of a s frugal cook book called the Goode Kitchen, by Shirley Goode. If you ever see this second hand, I heartily recommend you purchase it.

Parboil the rice for 5 minutes, drain, then return to the pan. Add the tuna and the soup, then the peas. Bring to the boil and simmer until all of the liquid has been absorbed about 10 minutes.

Season and serve. If you have a family, it is worth buying your spuds from the farm shop in sacks, so that you can pull out the larger ones for baking. Pretty much anything is good as a topping: cheese, tuna, baked beans, leftover chilli, bolognese or any kind of casserole.

You could add cheese and sweet corn to this basic meal if you have them. Season well with black pepper and mixed dried herbs. Make a tin of baked beans more interesting by adding 1 tsp of curry powder and a tablespoon of raisins as you heat them through.

You could also fry an onion and garlic and mix them in too. Serve with some crusty bread or on toast. I deliberately make too much rice when I am cooking some, so that I can make the leftovers into egg fried rice.

Chop up a small onion and fry in some oil for five minutes. Add the cooked rice — about g is enough for two people — and fry a further five minutes. Add a little more oil and two beaten eggs. Allow to set for a minute and then stir vigorously. We enjoy this with a simple stir fry of whatever veg needs using up, soy sauce and some vegetable stock.

Dumplings are great for filling you up an, when you are aiming for a cheap meal, vegetable stew is a cheaper option than meat. Add some pulses to your stew to make it more substantial. This is a good basic dumplings recipe.

People baulk at the idea of eating offal these days. However, meat such as kidneys and liver are still very cheap in comparison to muscle meat. So perhaps now is the time to try a liver and bacon recipe, such as this one from the Hairy Bikers. The price of sausages varies, depending on the quality.

Personally, I would rather have a couple of decent, meaty sausages than three or four cheap ones that taste like mush. Therefore, it makes sense to stretch sausages with other cheaper ingredients, like pulses and vegetables.

Chop up an onion and some garlic and to it add a can of tomatoes and about g cooked green lentils, along with some seasoning. Brown the sausages separately, then combine and cook for around half an hour.

Cook some pasta and drain, add a can or two of tuna, depending on how many people you are cooking for, a small can of sweetcorn and a large dollop of mayonnaise.

Stir well and serve. Pancakes are a great way to use up the flour that many of us seem to have lurking in our cupboards. How about filling them with cooked spinach or leeks and grated cheese? Or chopped ham and sweetcorn?

Cheap and filling. A really quick and easy veggie meal is chilli beans and rice. This can be made with a can of three bean chilli mixed with some tinned tomatoes.

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Frugal cooking inspiration - Sourdough Pizza Calzone Chickpea and Pumpkin Curry Mushroom Risotto

Cut it in half lengthwise, sprinkle with sauce and cheese and stick it in the oven. If you have a garden going salad is basically free- lettuce, spinach, cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes. Add cheese, apple, hard boiled egg for a more filling salad. the old standby- grilled cheese, peanut butter, lunch meat if you can find a good deal on it.

Homemade bread makes it more economical and healthier too! Write down all of your favorite recipes in my Blank Recipe Journal! Having good recipes on hand for homemade food is one of the best ways to keep your food budget down!

Get the Blank Recipe Journal today! Pasta, especially if you pair it with homegrown, homemade sauce , is the ultimate frugal meal. You can add meat to it to make it a more complete meal, or add in extra veggies to add some more nutrition.

Chili, especially if you go heavy on the beans and light on the meat, if a wonderful frugal meal. Try out my Instant Pot Chili for an easy way to make chili using dry beans cheaper!

This is virtually free if you have a garden- dump in whatever vegetables you have growing, water, tons of herbs, salt, pepper, maybe a handful of pasta or can of beans, and you are good to go. If money is super tight, skip the broth and just add lots of herbs and spices to your water to increase the flavor.

Dry beans are more frugal than canned ones and not much harder to cook with- you just have to remember to soak them ahead of time or use a pressure cooker to speed up the process. Check out how this mom makes one pot of bean soup and uses the leftovers to make new meals all week!

Refried bean burritos are on our menu weekly. Save more money by making the refried beans yourself! I use it for chili, pasta, and of course tacos. Make your own Taco Seasonings to save a bit more! There are so many ways to cook rice. You can have it multiple times per week and not repeat a meal.

Some of our favorites are fried rice, Mexican rice, and garlic butter rice. Sometimes the most frugal meals I could come up with at the time was simply piecing together what I had or what was on sale.

And you know what- I think those easy meals were always the favorites! There are 20 or so ideas to get you started. Are you struggling to keep your food budget down? What are your cheapest meal ideas? Be sure to check out my post on How to Stop Living Paycheck to Paycheck for more tips!

How to Take a No Debt Vacation. Hello Sarah and Family We are backyard gardeners and chicken owners in SC…working toward the goal of having year round food.

Thanks Lancer Shull. It depends. Most of the time we go in on an order with Country Life Natural Foods my mom lives on a delivery route so we get lbs or more than.

When that runs out we either buy 25lb bags from Walmart or just buy a lot of bags at once at Aldi. Despite living alone for more than one year, I plan out my menu every week.

Doing this gives me the opportunity to utilize the ingredients that I do have available and find short cuts for recipes to save money. Great tips. Eggs, however, are a staple food. Oats are brilliant too. You can also make French bread sloppy joes! This is a great read! Thank you for sharing.

As a Hispanic-American family, we cook a lot of Mexican food. An easy, inexpensive meal is picadillo ground beef or turkey,diced potatoes, fresh or canned veggies, tomato sauce or canned diced tomatoes and spices.

You can also add cooked pinto beans. You can also sub elbow macaroni for the potatoes. Potato soup is fairly cheap if you use vegetables from your garden.

We use milk instead of cream to keep costs down and use whatever cheese is on sale for flavor varieties. Hi, Sarah! My family was hit pretty hard during the recession. Both my husband and I lost our jobs. As I was trying to find ways to feed our family on an extremely low budget, I remembered talking to my grandfather as a kid about his experience during the Great Depression.

One thing he said his family made use of was dandelion greens. I had never tried them before we found ourselves unemployed, but our yard was untreated, so I added them to salads to stretch them out. I also sauteed them with a little garlic in olive oil as a side dish or added them to scrambled eggs.

Soak the greens in a bowl of salt water before using them to help with the bitterness. They grow like, well, weeds! Even though we have both been employed for many years now, I still continue to search out ways to live frugally and save.

You never know. This is how I stumbled upon your site. Thanks for the great ideas! My struggles with money and having to do things frugally is when I started taking care of my elderly mom who is on a lot of medication for her health issues and a restricted diet.

We have to stretch each penny we have to make it last each month. So I learned and am still learning healthy within my moms restricted diet meals that I can stretch. It is just me and my mom, but being from a big family I am or was use to cooking for a big family. I now still cook like I am cooking for 8 and now I make freezer meals with the leftovers.

I stretch each meal as far as i can. Plus it makes life easier now that my moms health is getting worse. I cook several big meals and it lasts a month. We do not waste anything. Plus I stock up on things when they are cheap and I have coupons.

These are all great ideas! I have been doing great buying bags of frozen chicken tenderloins. So I can either make fried chicken strips , but have been doing chicken parmesan which is amazing, so cheap to make , i buy most of my stuff at Aldi.

I do love tacos but feels expensive after purchasing lettuce , tomato, sour cream, cheese, meat and shells. Plain yogurt subs easily for sour cream.

If you have an Instant Pot, making your own is super easy and quite frugal. If you strain it, keep the whey liquid for baking or smoothies. Tacos are great, but can be pricey, a bit fussy Andy frankly quite messy with kids.

We prefer to do taco salad instead. Load a big bowl with lots of salad other veggies, black beans, and corn. Love this! The item is usually something I can turn into a casserole or soup, perhaps, or another meal or even two. It may even be something like a chicken breast dinner with a few extra baked up to make chicken salad later, or a budget priced ground beef with Meatloaf as the main dish, meatloaf sandwiches later and another preparation altogether Tacos?

a third time. Whatever this item is, beef, pork or poultry, will help determine what else I will serve on the other nights. Family Fun Night: This is one night I make something fun: Tacos or Pizza or appetizers for dinner, or whatever our current favorite dishes are.

Depending on ages, it might just be popcorn and a movie night. Vegetarian Meal : I always try to work in one healthy vegetarian meal a week, and sometimes more. Think tofu, maybe some type of brown rice bake, a stir fry, a pasta dish.

Think wonderful salads, gazpacho or wraps. Other meatless options perhaps not as healthy could be potato pancakes and applesauce, pastas, grilled cheese and tomato soup, scrambled eggs or cheese rarebit. Waffles or pancakes can be a good choice, but if I do something like this, I do try to health it up with whole grains of some type.

Smorgasbord Night: Late in the week, we pick and choose our favorite leftovers and reheat or reinvent. Fish Night: Unless fish is featured in another meal, I work in at least one meal featuring fish or seafood. While fish can be a pricier option, it is one option where the potential health benefits outweigh the price.

The other two nights I base on bringing in another type of meat or protein. If big meat night is chicken, then we might have chicken salad for one night, hamburgers one night and pork chops the next. If big meat night is a pork dish, like pulled pork, we might have pulled pork sandwiches again one night, and then chicken another night and some type of fish another.

It becomes almost second nature after a while to fill in the blanks on these meals. Cooking takes time, a precious resource, and the better use you can make of yours, the easier it is to get meals on the table.

Here are a few examples:. Get your spouse, roommates, kids, etc. Like this: Like Loading Tweet Pin Share Hearing from you makes my day! Comment below.