Healthy and Cheap Family Meals for Tight Budgets

30-Minute White Bean, Parmesan, and Spinach Soup

2/7/2018

I found this recipe on Pinterest, and it was billed as a 10 minute recipe.

In my experience, that’s not a realistic timeline for any healthy meal, so I immediately assume that someone saying that is either stretching the truth a little or using a whole lot of processed ingredients.

In this case, I was pleasantly surprised. Yes, the blogger admitted that she'd underestimated the time. But I have to say that it isn't by much. This really and truly is a quick recipe. Maybe not 10 minutes. But 20-30 minutes, easy. And that's still pretty darned good by any measure.

And it's also delicious, hearty, healthy, and family and budget friendly. A keeper, for sure.

Spicy Pumpkin Vegetable Soup, Haitian Style (Soup Joumou)

10/18/2017

I happened upon this recipe because a young colleague mentioned in passing this wonderful Haitian stew a friend had made for her. She raved about it. So I promptly looked it up and was immediately intrigued.

I found several recipes on-line and tried various combinations before hitting on this one that was a big hit with my family.

We love the blend of lime, pumpkin, and the tang of pepper. It makes for a unique, mouthwatering flavor, and you couldn’t ask for a healthier meal in terms of the power vegetables it includes. Really, a combination that is great for whatever ails you, and for those cold winter days when soup or stew is just the thing.

Chick Pea Noodle Soup

5/12/2017

This recipe is brand new to me. I discovered it on Pinterest and tried it. My family loved it, and so did I. It really does hit all the buttons – easy, quick, cheap, and very tasty.

Of course, as I am always inclined to do, I made some changes to the original (which you can find here) and substituted less expensive ingredients for some of the pricier ones called for. The results were still delicious.

First off, I noticed the sea salt in the recipe, and knew immediately that I wouldn’t be using that, since it’s much more expensive than the regular table salt I ended up using.

Salt is salt, so there’s simply no reason to pay 5-10x times the price for it, for an absolutely indiscernible difference in flavor. I recommend holding firm against marketing hype and the pressures of lifestyle cachet in making your food choices.

Salt is just one such example.

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.

Gazpacho-Style Tomato Soup with Arugula, Quinoa & Garlic

8/15/2016

We are having unexpectedly warm, humid weather right now in September, so it's too darned hot to cook. Which put me in mind of this old recipe.

It's a perfect dish for when you want an easy meal that doesn’t require standing over a hot stove. And it's also super quick and ready in about 20 minutes.

I came by it originally way back in my grad student days when I was studying to be a translator, and lived for several months in the south of Spain.

For part of that time, I rented a room in the home of an elderly Spanish woman who also provided lunch and dinner for her boarders. These meals were simple, everyday affairs – nothing lavish or grand about them - but I enjoyed them nonetheless.

One of my favorite dinners was the Señora’s gazpacho, a delicious tangy medley of tomato, garlic and hot pepper that she served with a generous portion of bread and some salad.

This chilled soup was an entirely new culinary experience for me, and it tasted sublime in the heat of a late August Andalusian day. I loved it.

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.

Split Pea Soup (Ham and Vegetarian Versions)

3/28/2016

This thick, hearty soup is really more like a stew. It was a standard in my childhood home whenever we had ham for dinner. You can find my recipe for Baked Ham Dinner here.

My frugal Mom would cut every bit of usable meat off the bone and then use the bone to make the broth for the soup. Sometimes, she’d freeze the bone if there was a reason she could not use it right away. But she never threw it out without getting another meal out of it.

I’ve continued that tradition. We don’t eat ham a lot in our family, or much of any meat at all for that matter, but whenever I do buy one, I make sure to put split pea soup on the menu.

Other options for using leftover ham or a ham bone are things like Dirty Rice or Lentil Soup.

But this soup is also excellent as a vegetarian option, which is actually the way we eat it most of the time now. We may have started eating vegetarian meals for budget reasons as a struggling young couple years ago, but we now try to minimize our meat intake primarily for health, environmental, and ethical reasons.

So we focus on getting our needed protein from plant-based sources, such as legumes, like split peas, instead of animal-based ones.

That approach has paid big dividends to us in terms of our excellent physical health and well-being - a case once again of a frugal lifestyle providing benefits beyond the pocketbook.

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.

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.

Healthy Vegetable Broth from Food Scraps

1/18/2016

Many recipes list broth among their ingredients, and they usually call for the canned variety.

One of the problems with that is that it’s usually quite expensive. Most of the time, I get around the cost by using the far more economical option of bouillon cubes and water, but sometimes I just use the cheapest option of all - water and salt.

Because the truth is that salt is the major component of canned broth and bouillon cubes alike, with only minimal other ingredients. The sodium content is typically quite high, particularly in the canned versions, with only somewhat less in the bouillon cubes.

One way I work around this and you can, too, is to dilute the broth with extra water.

Real broth - or stock, as it’s also called - is of course made by simmering vegetables and/or some kind of meat for an hour or more on the stove. I use it in almost all of my soup recipes, so I am very familiar with the process.

But until I had the opportunity to spend the day in a professional kitchen during a visit with some of my students, I had never heard of this “poor man’s” approach to making stock.

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.

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.

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.