Healthy and Cheap Family Meals for Tight Budgets

One-Pot Broccoli Tuna Pasta

10/16/2016

This is yet another one of those recipes I’ve had since I was a young married woman. It’s been one of my go-to recipes since forever because it’s a delicious, very easy, one-pot meal that can be ready in less than 30 minutes.

On those crazy weekday nights when you get home late, or the kids are dashing off to a game or practice, a dinner like this can be a lifesaver.

And my boys absolutely loved it. It was definitely one of their favorites.

It’s also about as cheap as any fish-based meal can be - if you do as I do.

Minestrone Soup (Super Hearty)

10/4/2016

Mom made minestrone soup for us growing up, but I cannot say that this particular recipe is the same as hers, since I acquired it from a different source when my children were young.

The one thing it definitely has in common with her version is how thick and hearty it is – so much so that a spoon will practically stand up in it - and what a family favorite it is.

I actually got the original recipe for this particular soup from a dear college friend when she served it to us for lunch on a playdate some 2 decades ago, and my kids and I loved it.

It made me wonder why I hadn’t tried to replicate Mom’s beloved version many years earlier. My friend gave me the detailed recipe, and as far as I can recall, I’ve kept it pretty much the same ever since.

This recipe makes a big pot of delicious, nutrition-loaded soup that will have your family practically licking their bowls.

Layered Potato, Vegetable, Cheese and Herb Casserole

9/11/2016

This is a brand new recipe for me. I encountered it just a few weeks ago when I visited an old homeschool friend in Maine. Upon entering their lovely lake cottage after a very long drive, the first thing I saw was a casserole dish with the most luscious garden tomatoes layered all over the top. It was gorgeous to look at, and just as delicious to eat, a creation of my friend’s husband.

And all of the produce had come from a local Amish farm market, I was told. Yes, there are several Amish enclaves in northern Maine, which may surprise you as much as it did me!

Of course, I asked for the recipe, to no avail, since the cook, like so many of us, simply put a little of this and a little of that into the pot, and never knew exact quantities to tell people. He gave me a list of the basic ingredients and seasonings, and I was on my own from there.

So, when I came home, I spent the next couple of days trying out a couple of different versions of the meal until I came up with the recipe I have here. It was a huge hit with hubby, and with a small gathering of friends I hosted on my patio, and two of my visiting sons also liked it very much, as did their girl friends.

For that reason alone, it would be a keeper, but it also has even more advantages.

"Baked" Bean Casserole, Stove Top and Slow Cooker Method

7/27/2016

Growing up, we typically ate baked beans a couple of times a month. Baked beans, homemade coleslaw, with hot dogs and rolls, or old-fashioned canned brown bread – was a regular meal in our house.

I loved it.

It turns out it was the result of a misunderstanding between my parents - namely, that while Mom thought that Dad liked baked beans from his time in the army, he actually didn't like them much at all because they reminded him of the army.

But he never said a word of complaint about it for decades. I think part of that was because he felt the household and the meals were Mom’s domain, and he did not want to interfere.

Mediterranean Garlic, Green Bean and Potato Stew

6/14/2016

This super simple meal is an adaptation of one of my favorite dishes introduced to me by my late, wonderful, Greek-Cypriot mother-in-law, Aphrodite.

I've tried to keep the mouth-watering, garlicky flavor she used, but have cut down on the oil to make it lower cal for those of us who need to watch our waistlines. She would literally pour the olive oil (cold-pressed from the olive trees right on the family’s land) by the cupful into the pot. I measure out a couple of tablespoons instead. It's still delicious.

Mediterranean Chicken (or Lamb) Stew

5/6/2016

This original recipe calls for lamb, but I know as well as anyone that lamb is hardly a budget food. Still, my husband is Greek, so we do splurge on it sometimes for special occasions.

And buying a pricey leg of lamb is actually one of the few instances where I deem it worthwhile to visit more than one grocery store in pursuit of a deal. Unlike the very small savings that such extra trips usually achieve, the price difference for a big ticket item like this can sometimes be $20-$30 or more.

That’s well worth the 2- mile drive across town for me.

The last time I bought a leg of lamb, it was for Easter, and I was able to get a boneless one for $2.50 per pound which is about as cheap as it ever gets here in my neck of the woods.

Definitely not an every-week food item for my frugal tastes, but a pretty darned good deal for a special occasion. By comparison, the other stores were charging $6-$9 per pound.

Since a leg of lamb can be as large as 10 pounds (and sometimes even more), that’s a lot of savings --- exactly the kind you can get when you use a little pre-planning and check the store flyers before you grocery shop.

I knew the roast was bigger than we would need for Easter dinner, so I cut it in half and prepared one half for the holiday, and one half for this meal. Of course, I could have also frozen the unused portion to use on a later date.

I recommend using this approach for ALL large cuts of meat: buy the big, budget size, but apportion it immediately into meal sizes, label, and date the packages, and freeze the ones you don’t need for a different meal.

But this recipe doesn’t have to be reserved just for special occasions. It can also be a regular Sunday dinner type of meal, too, by substituting more budget friendly chicken for the lamb.

Seafood Paella

4/10/2016

Years ago, when I was a young graduate student overseas, I spent several months in southern Spain, working on my language skills for my degree. I stayed with a Spanish family, and rabbit paella was regularly on the menu.

Now, I had just shortly before that finished reading On Watership Down, and it was one of my favorite books. Because of that, I just could not bring myself to eat rabbit. Yet I did not want to offend my hostess. So I would surreptitiously pick out the meat and put it in a napkin to throw out later when I brought my plate to the kitchen.

This was undoubtedly very silly because obviously the rabbit juices were still in the rice and vegetables I ate, but such was the logic of my thinking. And the rice portion of the paella was delicious – as it always is.

The thing about paella is that it’s a very versatile dish, and you can add just about any meat or vegetable you’d like to it. Sausage and other meat are very common, but so is fish. Clams and shrimp often adorn the top of the rice, and are steamed along with the rest of the ingredients the last 10-15 minutes or so, making it a very attractive dish.

However, while you can always add such things yourself, particularly for special occasions, that’s not really an option for the budget-conscious for a regular meal. Chicken is one choice that’s more economical. But most often I find that I use tuna or another economical fish (tilapia, pollock, etc.) for this dish. It makes it a very easy, everyday meal that takes minimal prep. And occasionally, I will use canned salmon, instead, depending on what's cheapest in the grocery store.

30-Minute One-Pot Chili Mac

4/3/2016

I’m getting into some of my very oldest recipes here. This is definitely one of them, from that cookbook I’m always mentioning that I made as family Christmas gifts way back when my husband was a student in New York City, we had very little money, and I also had an hour commute by subway.

So, quick and cheap were major criteria when looking for recipes. To give an idea, my meager take home pay was about $800 a month. Half of that went to rent for our tiny apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

By the time we paid all our other bills – including his modest tuition – and put a small amount each pay period towards savings, there was very little discretionary income to speak of. In fact, we allowed ourselves precisely $2.50 to spend as we pleased.

People are often amazed that we lived like that. But we made the conscious choice to keep our needs very simple so that we could save at least enough each year for plane tickets home to visit my husband’s family.

We knew that family was something very important to us. So were were willing to make whatever sacrifices were necessary to make it happen.

As it turned out, our frugal ways enabled us to save much more than that over the next few years, so that we were able to put aside entire raises and extra earnings until we eventually had the down payment on a house.

I cannot precisely recall, but I think I budgeted about $20 per week for our grocery bill in those years. Maybe even less, if I consider the inflation that’s taken place over the decades since then.

Butternut Squash, Cheese and Apple Casserole

2/17/2016

This delicious butternut squash and cheese dish is an old recipe that I’ve had in my recipe box since I was a teenager. It’s a very retro approach to creating meals with bread and eggs, called strata. It was developed, I suspect, by frugal homemakers of old who were looking for a way to use day old bread so that they didn’t have to throw it out.

As I’ve mentioned before, I really like winter squash, both by itself, and as an addition to various recipes. We eat all kinds of this brightly colored vegetable for its great nutritional value and naturally sweet flavor, but when I’m adding it to other dishes, I typically use the butternut variety. And when I do, I peel and dice it, as I describe in my blog post here.

Occasionally, I find a bargain in the frozen vegetable section of the grocery store and snag a bag of pre-diced squash for less per pound than the cost of a fresh squash in the produce section. That can save quite a bit of time and effort.

It's a practice I recommend for every busy cook.

However, it’s been my general experience that the frozen squash does not match the flavor of the fresh, so I do recommend using the fresh whenever you can, and particularly if it's cheaper. It’s a bit of prep work, but I think it’s worth the trouble.

Still, with lifestyles as busy as they are, it's important for people to incorporate techniques and shortcuts to keep meals realistic and practical.

Using the frozen, pre-cut squash makes this already straightforward recipe an absolute breeze -- about as simple as you can get.

Pasta Fagioli

2/3/2016

This is one of my very original recipes from a cookbook I made as Christmas gifts for my family way back when my husband was in school and we could not afford to buy presents for everyone.

That original recipe, though, was for fewer servings, so I’ve adapted it over the years to accommodate numbers and appetites in my household. As I’ve mentioned before, my boys are chowhounds who can go through food like there’s no tomorrow.

This meal was a big favorite with them. I like it, too, because it’s quite quick and easy to make. It only takes about 20 minutes or so of prep time, and can be on the table in about 40 minutes.

Shakshuka-Style Spicy Egg, Tomato and Cheese Bake

1/26/2016

Shakshuka - Spicy Egg, Tomato, and Cheese Bake

This is a recent addition to my repertoire. It’s a variation on the traditional shakshuka dish that originated in Tunisia, from what I understand, but is fairly common all over the Middle East. A Moroccan friend made it for me for lunch one day not very long ago, and I found it to be absolutely delicious.

She gave me the recipe, and I tried to make it the way she had, but I was less than successful. The flavor was great, but I didn't care for the way the eggs came out. So I decided to adapt it in order to make it easier for myself, and also to make it more of a full meal as a casserole.

The results were a huge hit with my family.

The savory, spicy sauce is what makes this dish so special.

Hearty Lentil Soup

1/23/2016

Hard as it may be to believe in this day and age of so much food diversity, the first time I ate lentil soup was during my gap year living and working in England after I graduated from high school.

I think it may well have been one of my very first experiences with legumes of any type. While we ate plenty of vegetables growing up, meat was the focal point of our main meals, and U.S. diets and grocery stores were not as cosmopolitan as they are today.

But the year I turned 18, I did what's now called a gap year overseas and shared a house on a farm near London, England with 9 other young people from all over the world. It was an intense, challenging time of personal growth where I learned more than a thing or two about long, hard hours of physical labor, getting along with people, and food.

We had a housemother named Tess who was responsible for preparing meals and keeping the household running smoothly. She was all of 17 years old, a tiny little thing with a lovely, thick Yorkshire lilt and a huge personality, who had taken care of her younger siblings for years after her mother died.

Dirty Rice with Brown Rice and Collard Greens

1/11/2016

I love the convenience and ease of one-pot meals, and this so-called Dirty Rice meal is even easier than most. However, this particular recipe calls for sausage in place of the traditional chicken parts or ground pork, and we all know that sausage is neither the cheapest protein source – even on sale - nor the healthiest one.

Of course, you can always use use diced, cooked ham leftover from a Baked Ham Dinner as an option, if you happen to have some on hand that you bought on sale and used in a previous recipe earlier. Or you can use leftover chicken from a roast chicken dinner.

But that's not always the case. So when I wanted to double the original recipe to accommodate my teenage boys’ appetites, I added a cheaper protein option by using lentils to augment the sausage and keep the meal within my budget and health parameters.

Avgolemono (Greek Egg and Lemon Soup) (Vegetarian Version)

1/5/2016

The first instance when I tasted Avgolemono, it was a bit of revelation to me. It was so different from anything I had ever experienced growing up, and I immediately loved the combination of the thick, creamy rice and egg soup and the tart, lemony flavoring.

My Greek-Cypriot husband made it for me that first time during our university days in Vienna as international students.

He used the recipe he found in an old Cypriot cookbook and struggled a bit with the decidedly vague instructions, but managed to make a success of it as far as I was concerned. I gobbled it up.

Since that first time enjoying it, this soup has been a mainstay of our family menu planning.

Mom's Chicken (or Turkey) Noodle Soup

12/29/2015

Unlike modern day meat-based soup recipes that often call for very pricey pre-packaged boneless meat, this soup recipe relies on the old-fashioned approach and makes use of leftover bones from a previous meal – such as that Sunday chicken roast or the turkey roast you made for Christmas or Thanksgiving.

Thrifty cooks have long understood the importance of getting all the mileage they can out of the food they purchase, which of course includes any meat they use. There was little waste in the kitchens of old, and cooks would make use of many things that we tend to throw away today.

In the case of soup, in particular, it was never meant to be made with prime cuts of meat. Quite the contrary. It was meant to stretch the food budget and avoid waste.

Stuffed Grape Leaves (Dolmades), Made Easy

12/1/2015

UPDATE 6/10/18 - I tweaked this recipe a bit today when I cooked it for the first time in a quite a while. I am delighted with the results! You can find the details about the changes I made in the ingredients section of the recipe below.

The original recipe for this meal came directly from my beloved Cypriot mother-in-law, Mama. Aphrodite was her given name, and she was very much a traditionalist in her approach to cooking.

Among other things, that meant that she didn’t bother to measure anything, but threw a little bit of this and a little bit of that into the pot. It took a determined effort on my husband’s part to finally get the recipe from her.

And even then, he only managed it because he insisted on being right next to her at the stove as she prepared it and stopping her at every step to write it down.

I remember well the two of them standing side by side in Mama’s old-fashioned kitchen, going back and forth loudly, but lovingly, in Greek. Her impatience at having to explain everything and his frustration at her seeming inability to be precise had the rest of us chuckling and shaking our heads affectionately.

It’s a memory I shall cherish forever.

Curry Cauliflower, Bean, and Spinach Stew (Vegan and Chicken Versions)

11/18/2015

This is another old recipe that I’ve been using since the days a few decades ago when I was the sole breadwinner of the family and my husband was in school. We had very little money and things were very tight. What with tuition, rent, utilities, and commuting costs, just about every penny was earmarked for something.

It was a good thing that after years of frugal grad student living overseas, I had acquired a few recipes that cost almost nothing and could feed us for a few days besides.

Greek Bean, Tomato, and Vegetable Stew

10/30/2015

This recipe has quite a history for me, going back as it does to the days when my husband and I first met in an international student dorm in Vienna, Austria.

Unlike at U.S. universities, there was no cafeteria or meal plan available, so we all had to get our own meals. And as was the case for most of our dorm-mates, my husband had left home with non-existent cooking skills.

Add to that the fact that most of us were trying to get by on tight student budgets, and it’s easy to understand that we would do whatever we could to save money on food and still eat.

Suffice it to say that I saw some interesting and, shall we say, “creative” concoctions in that dorm kitchen during the time I lived there. Sometimes dinner consisted of a can of herring in tomato sauce served over pasta.

Hearty Black Bean Soup

10/3/2015

This is one of my oldest recipes. I have loved black bean soup since my childhood.

It's the canned version I remember. That was what we occasionally had for lunch -- but never for dinner. Campbell's, I think it was - a pretty rare purchase made by my frugal Mom. But the flavor sure stuck with me.

Of course I didn't learn about the possibility of meatless meals until I had a vegetarian house mother the year I worked on a farm in England after high school. She introduced me to all kinds of possibilities for nutritious, budget-conscious meals.

So when I was a poor grad student and then a low-earning newlywed, I made it a point to try to re-create her delicious vegetarian fare, as well as my childhood favorites. This particular soup was definitely one of those.

I wanted to replicate the flavor, but add a whole lot more heartiness to make it a meal in a pot. I soon came up with this recipe.

It was a mainstay of my menu repertoire for many years, included in the cookbook I created for family members one Christmas in lieu of gifts we could not afford. But I had not used it in years and years, and had actually forgotten about it until recently when I happened to notice it again among my recipes.

I cooked it up shortly thereafter, fell in love with it all over again, and proceeded to make it a few times over the course of the next few weeks.

Ramen Noodle Slaw - A No-Cook Dinner in a Bowl

8/25/2015

This salad has long been a standard for barbecues or picnics, which is where I first tasted it. But it's also great as a dinner option for those hot summer days when you just don’t want to turn on the stove.

In its original form and in the versions you see all over the web, the recipe calls for packaged coleslaw from the produce aisle, but it is very easy – and much, much cheaper - to make your own. A pound of cabbage typically costs around 49-69¢ per pound and can cost as little as 29¢ a pound, whereas pre-chopped coleslaw is typically $2 per pound and up.

As you might expect, I see no point in paying triple the price – or more - for someone else’s labor.

After all, chopping cabbage and whatever other vegetables you want to include, such as celery, carrots, broccoli, etc. is a simple task that takes only minutes.

Stuffed Cabbage Made Easy

8/3/2015

Cabbage is a powerhouse vegetable, full of all kinds of great nutrition. I love it in just about any kind of recipe, and I particularly love it cooked as it is in corned beef and cabbage, in stir fry, or in this recipe.

However, I am definitely not fond of the extra work of filling and rolling individual cabbage leaves that's called for in traditional stuffed cabbage recipes, so this variation is a great alternative. It's every bit as tasty, with substantially less work and time involved. You can have it on the table in a very short time without breaking a sweat.

It’s a very simple one-pot meal that you can cook on the stovetop - my absolute favorite type of meal. And although I’ve never done it, I’m betting that it would make a great choice for a slow cooker meal. It's also quite economical, even though it contains meat, one of the most expensive sources of protein there is.