Your Favorite Cheap Meals To Cook?

I too enjoy making tamales, like you said, they're great for freezing. However, it takes a lot of work to make them. In any case, I like cooking with rice because it's cheap and very versatile. Plus you can store it uncooked for a while and it won't go bad. You can make it sweet as in arroz con leche or just as plain white rice. Usually, rice is a side dish instead of the main item on the menu, but if you cook it with some vegetables and maybe add some chicken, it's not bad.

 

One of the things that I have been cooking a lot recently is spaghetti and minced meat or ground beef as it is also called. This is a very easy meal to prepare and is one of the cheapest meals in my opinion. I also like to cook macaroni and corned beef or rice and corned beef, both of which I also consider to be cheap meals. These are my favourite meals to cook when my budget is low. Mackerel is not a bad choice either when it comes to price, and it is also packed with nutrients.

 

I love black bean burritos with or without rice. If you soak your own beans, it's like 30 cents for a huge burrito, maybe 40~50 if you add avocado. Buying in bulk helps a ton, but I am doing a little better these days and don't need to buy so many of them. I still keep stocked, love dropping the average price per day of my meals

 

Most of the time we would eat noodles, either different flavors of topramen noodles or spaghetti with tuna or meatballs.
Then we also like spring rolls that we serve together with simple rice.

 

We love tuna noodle casserole, grilled cheese and tomato soup, and chicken pot pie from scratch. We do serve a lot of meals with rice, too, which is extremely cheap and filling as well.

 

Beans and Rice are really good for saving money. With a pan of cornbread to go with. Really all kinds of beans and peas are good. Pintos, Butter Beans, Lentils, Blackeyes, Green beans... Delicious!! Throw some ham or bacon in the pot and it really does flavor them up good. Also, add some potatoes to the green beans. yummy!!

 

It is hard to beat Mac and cheese for saving money and a low cost meal. Whether it is the boxed kind or store bought you can save money with this meal. Any kind of pasta, is usually very cheap. I make pasta salad alot in the summer time, and just put different meats or fish and cut up veggies in it. It is a way to save money and have a delicious meal to boot.

 

The cheapest meal I like to cook (and also the simplest meal) is pasta. Just a bowl of pasta (usually about 50g dried), when it's cooked I drain the water and stir in some passata. I add some basil and sprinkle some dried basil in. Grate on a bit of cheese. Voila!

It's also one of those recipes that you can add in your leftover or close to expiry date veg or meat.

 

Everyone has been mentioning pasta and I make it a bunch of different ways, too! Really, I just pick a type of pasta, make a sauce, and pick some add-ins. I have a few good homemade sauce recipes that work: marinara, meat sauce, alfredo, brown gravy-type sauce, a carbonara, as well as a few others. Add-ins usually are meat or veggies or both. It always seems to be filling and a crowd pleaser..

 

Well since I don't know how to cook, then I'm stuck with instant noodles and canned goods. There are also a lot of artificial ready-made soups that are instant as well, so that can be a cheap alternative.

 

Our home has one of the easiest and cheapest foods to make and cook. It's fried noodles pasta style. Just regular spaghetti noodles cooked just right. Then fry up in olive oil and put a little soy sauce on it and fried noodles is ready to eat! You can put all sorts of left overs in the noodles that'll make it a bit more special. Then there's the other store bought Knorr packages just add water and a side salad and you've got dinner ready in a jiffy.

 

The cheapest meal here is the instant noodles that can be eaten after adding steaming hot water. That is becoming the staple of poor people here. But we don't eat instant noodles because of the risk to the kidneys.

The cheap meal I usually prepare is the roasted drumsticks. I wipe the chicken with salt and tomato before putting in the oven. Let the timer do the job for 45 minutes and another 45 minutes for the other side. It goes well with bread or rice and with lettuce or cucumber for the garnishing. Chicken is the cheapest meat here at just $3 per kilo sometimes.

 

I prefer a food called ugali in my country which is a stiff solid porridge made by boiling water and mixing it with maize flour which are mixed to a stiff consistency. Its very versatile and cooks in a short time. Its very cheap since maize is grown in my area in large quantities. I sometimes simply consume it with avocado or even goat soup.

 

For me the cheapest and easiest dish to cook and eat will always be fried or mixed rice dishes where I almost don't have to put in that many ingredients or even really put in that much work. Sometimes if I'm really lazy I'll just put all the ingredients into the rice cooker and add some rice and leave it, though most of the time I do tend to just stir fry since it's much more practical to cook white rice regularly since it goes with much more whereas when I make mixed rice right off the bat it sometimes won't pair up well with whatever dish I do have that day.

 

There are so many cheap ways to make pasta! I love mac n cheese, so I make that a lot, and even from scratch it's so cheap! The way I make it is kind of strange though- I just use shredded cheese and mix it into the boiled noodles, and that is so good to me! I thought everyone did it that way until my fiancé saw the way I prepared them and commented on it. I don't add any milk or butter or anything to it, but to me it tastes just fine!

 

I always use rice or pasta to stretch food. Unfortunately, I have used rice so much that my family is rebelling. I have been trying to get my son to like breakfast for supper as eggs are inexpensive. He isn't buying into it yet. I am also trying to get him to like taco's as they are inexpensive. He, however, like every good Texas wants steak, potatoes, and rolls. I will, however, continue to fight the good fight for less expensive meals.