I love cooking at home.

I used to hate cooking at home, though. I was awful at it. I burnt things. I messed up scrambled eggs beyond all recognition.

But over time, I got better at it. I started figuring out lots of little things that made the entire process smoother and made my results much better without necessarily improving my skills.

Now, I vastly prefer what I make in my own kitchen over what I can get at most restaurants. What I make at home is tastier, usually healthier, and quite a bit cheaper, too.

Along the way, I’ve picked up lots of little techniques for making home cooking much easier and faster. Here are ten that really changed things for me.

Hone your knives. One of the biggest frustrations I had with home food preparation is that whenever I had to chop anything, it took forever and I often smashed them into oblivion. I thought it was cheap knives, but after getting a much nicer one, I had much the same problem after the first use or so. The entire problem was a simple one – the edge of the knife wasn’t honed. Honing a knife’s edge is incredibly simple. Just take a sharpening steel and lay your knife on it, with the hilt of the blade near the hilt of the sharpening steel. Then, with the blade forming a small angle with the steel, drag the blade slowly but firmly back down the steel to the tip. At the end, the tip of the blade should be near the tip of the steel. Then, switch hands and repeat with the other side of the blade, and alternate back and forth a few times. Your previously-dull knife will now slice through vegetables like a hot butterknife through butter.

Don’t fear the crock pot. Crock pots have this strange reputation for turning out bland food. In truth, though, crock pots are just as good as what you put in them – all they really do is cook things at a low heat over a long period of time. The trick is to make sure your ingredients are good and that you’ve added plenty of herbs and spices right off the bat. Crock pots are absolutely perfect for making stews and soups and chilis that benefit from long, slow cooking – just put the ingredients in the crock pot in the morning, turn it on low, and let it sit all day. In the evening, you’ll have a tremendous meal waiting for you. We’ve also found a lot of success slow-cooking pot roasts with lots of vegetables in a crock pot.

You can almost never over-season a dish. The only exception to this seems to be hot peppers, which can drive some people away. Aside from that, you have to go to almost grotesque lengths to over-season most dishes. So, if you’re unsure, toss in some more spices. It’ll usually make the dish more tasty than simply following the recipe absolutely.

Use fresh ingredients. Fresh ingredients are often the key to making a recipe really pop. While frozen vegetables (for example) are passable, nothing beats the pop of fresh vegetables in your mouth. While canned vegetables can work in a pinch, they just don’t compare. Canned meats are convenient … that’s about all I’ll give them. In most cases, there’s more nutrition in fresh ingredients as well.

Store staples in the freezer. Whenever you prepare something that might be used as a staple in another meal, make plenty of it and store the extras in the freezer. Chicken breasts, loose ground beef, loose sausage, and diced onions all work well in this way.

Always make stock out of leftover bones and leftover vegetables. The meal is done. You have leftover chicken bones, or maybe you have some leftover vegetables of various kinds. Perhaps you have a leftover hambone or the bone from the middle of a roast. Quite often, these things get thrown out. Save those leftovers. Just take them to a crock pot, add enough water to the crock pot to cover whatever you add (and maybe half an inch more), then turn it on low and let it slowly cook all night. In the morning, strain the liquid (just to get the big pieces out) and save the liquid in a jar in the fridge. Then, the next time you need to make something using those flavors, just bust out that jar. That stuff is fantastic flavor.

De-glaze at every opportunity. Another great source for flavor is the “glaze” on the bottom of a frying pan after you cook something – that stuff is pure flavor! Just put some water into the hot pan, watch it sizzle, and notice how much of the glaze on the bottom of the pan comes off into the water. That liquid can now be used in a lot of ways, from adding flavor and moisture to rice and side vegetables or allowing the meat to simmer in it.

Stick with comfort foods at first. It’s easy to get caught up in the sexy idea of preparing some novel dish in the kitchen, but if you don’t have the skills yet, it will likely end in frustration and an underwhelming result. Instead, at first, stick with dishes that you know you like that you’re intimately familar with. For me, that means tuna casserole, hamburgers, and broccoli with rice.

Try cooking something familiar without a recipe. Another great way to really amp up your skills in the kitchen is to attempt making a familiar recipe from memory without using a recipe. This requires you to begin thinking on the fly a little bit as you cook and often forces you into doing things a little different. Sure, sometimes you’ll fail, but you’ll learn a lot from abandoning the recipe.

Get others involved. For me, no kitchen experience is better than cooking in the kitchen with people whose company I enjoy. Being in the kitchen while my wife chops vegetables, my daughter stirs a mixture, my son snaps green beans, or my best friend butters some garlic bread makes the entire experience far more enjoyable no matter how the meal turns out. Get people into your kitchen and cook together – it becomes an amazing social experience.

Many weekends – like this upcoming one, for instance – our family is quite busy. We have guests over. We go on family excursions to places like the Science Center of Iowa. We shop for groceries. We go to club meetings. We go to church. We play for hours with the kids. We get caught up on housework – and on our reading. We play a few family games.

Sometimes, I’ll put aside time to prepare a really special meal, but many weekends, we look for ways to get a healthy and inexpensive meal on the table quickly. Even better are meals that are conveniently eaten by guests whenever they arrive.

Our solution, often, is a big pot of soup or a stew. Here are some of the tactics we use to keep guests happy and also tantalize our taste buds with a convenient, tasty, and healthy meal that’s also very inexpensive.

If there’s an opportunity, I’ll make stock during the week. Stock is really easy to make. All you have to do is roast a chicken or a bone-in pot roast in the oven. This just requires a roasting pan – put some salt and pepper on the meat, put it in the pan, put it in the oven at 350 F, and check the temperature after an hour or so and keep it cooking until it’s appropriately heated. Enjoy that meat for supper. Then, take the bones, put them in a crock pot, add a few leftover vegetables and any other vegetables you find tasty, toss in a handful of peppercorns, and turn the crock pot on low before you go to bed. The next morning, just strain off the liquid and save that liquid in a jug, tossing everything else. Voila! You have homemade beef or chicken stock! If you’re a vegetarian and prefer vegetable stock, just do the same thing without the animal bones – put leftover vegetables and any others you like for flavor into a crock pot, cover with water, cook on low overnight, then strain and save the liquid.

In my opinion, stock is the best frugal meal ingredient there is. You turn what would otherwise be thrown away into an incredibly flavored liquid that forms the basis for some absolutely mind-blowing soups that weekend – and all it costs is water, a couple minutes of effort, and maybe a dime or two of electricity.

I also cook extra meat on Thursday night. If I have chicken stock on hand and want to make a chicken-based soup, I’ll make some sort of chicken meal on Thursday night and make plenty of meat so I can have a couple of pounds of leftovers. The same goes for beef – I’ll cook extra of whatever beef we use, whether it’s hamburger, steak, or roast. The same goes for vegetables – if I have vegetable stock, I’ll make a very vegetable heavy meal and save the leftover vegetables from the meal.

On Saturday or Sunday, I’ll prepare the stew or soup in the morning. There are countless soup, stew, chili, gumbo, etc. recipes out there – find one you like and just remember the ingredients. Add the ingredients to the crock pot, then turn it on low and just let it simmer all day long.

Here’s the great part about doing it this way: whenever your activities allow you to eat – or whenever guests arrive – you have a bowl of delicious soup/stew/chili/gumbo waiting for them.

Even better, since you’re utilizing the leftovers and remnants of meals made earlier in the week, the soup is pretty cheap. It’s also incredibly tasty, especially if you utilize a stock that you made earlier in the week.

Can’t wait to get started on doing this? Here are five of my favorite soup/stew/chili/gumbo recipes.

Beef Stew
2 lbs. stew meat, cooked
2 cups beef stock (or water)
1 1/2 tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
1 clove garlic (peeled, of course)
1 onion, sliced
4 carrots, sliced
4 celery stalks, sliced
2 tsp. pepper
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. paprika
2 tsp. corn starch

Put everything but the corn starch in the crock pot and turn it on low. Sometime in the hour before you expect people to begin eating, add the corn starch and stir it in thoroughly to gently thicken the stew.

Chicken Noodle Soup
2 lbs. chicken, cooked (mix of white and dark meat)
16 to 24 oz. egg noodles, uncooked
1 onion, diced
1 carrot, sliced
1 stalk celery, sliced
1 small potato, diced
Enough chicken stock and water to cover the ingredients – if you don’t have stock, add four chicken bullion cubes

Put it all in the crock pot on low.

White Chili
2 lbs. cooked chicken breast, cubed
2 cans great northern beans, rinsed
1 whole white onion, diced
1 bell pepper, diced
1 1/2 cups fresh mushrooms, sliced (optional)
1 cup frozen corn (optional)
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup white wine
2 chiles (or 1 can mild chiles)
2 tsp. cumin
1 tsp. coriander
1 tbsp. ground pepper
3 tbsp. olive oil
1 lime
3 cups chicken stock or water – for every cup of water used, add a bullion cube

As before, combine everything and put it in the crock pot on low.

Chicken Sausage Gumbo
3 lbs cooked chicken
2 cups flour
1 onion, chopped
1 celery stalk, chopped
1/2 bell pepper, chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
6 cups chicken stock or water – for every cup of water used, add a bullion cube
1 lb. andouille sausage, sliced
1 tbsp. salt
1 tbsp. ground pepper
1 tbsp. cayenne pepper

Add these all to the crock pot and turn it on low.

Vegetable Soup
4 cups vegetable stock, chicken stock, or water
2 quarts water
2 bay leaves
3 carrots, sliced
3 celery stalks, sliced
8 garlic cloves, crushed
1 small onion, sliced
1 large red pepper, chopped
1 leek, sliced
5 mushrooms, sliced
1 scallion, sliced
1/4 tsp. pepper
1/8 tsp. salt

Add these all to the crock pot and turn it on low.

Good luck!

Now that my wife has returned to full time work, we’ve been focusing a lot on careful meal planning for the coming week. We’ll sit down on Sunday mornings, plot out what we’ll eat over the coming week, and prepare a grocery list.

One very helpful technique for a busy family like ours is making “modular” meals – ones with elements that can be easily reused in meals later in the week. Quite often, the meal preparation on Monday evening is helping to prepare some element of a meal that we’ll have on Wednesday or Thursday evening, for example. Even better, those “modular” meals can sometimes provide source materials for a quick hot breakfast or an easy lunch that goes far beyond leftovers.

Using and reusing meal components in this fashion is an incredible money and time saver. Here are some examples to get you started.

Roasted Chicken
When you get home one evening, put a whole chicken in the oven to roast. It’s easy – a whole chicken at the store is pretty inexpensive. Just rub the skin down with salt and pepper, put a few things in the chest cavity for flavor (like garlic cloves, quartered onions, celery, and the like), and put it in the oven at 350 F for about 75 minutes or so. I like to pull it out about halfway through and use a baster to get the juice out of the pan and squirt it all over the chicken itself.

In the end, you’ll have a golden-colored chicken with crinkly, tasty skin and deliciously moist chicken meat, somewhere between two and three pounds of it. Enjoy the chicken as the main entree for the meal, but then save the bones and the leftover meat.

The bones? Just put them in a crockpot with a few vegetables before you go to bed. Put in some onions, carrots, celery, and things along those lines – I also like to put in whole peppercorn. Then turn the crockpot on low and go to bed. When you get up in the morning, strain off the bones and large vegetable pieces and save the liquid in the fridge. That liquid, my friend, is an incredibly delicious chicken stock. It can be the basis of a great chicken soup a few days later, white chili, and countless other dishes. Stock is also easily frozen and saved for later. Be aware, though, that at cold temperatures, stock sometimes becomes gelatin-like – that’s completely normal.

The leftover meat can be used in countless ways. Save it for chicken chili, chicken soup, chicken stew (all three of which can also utilize the stock), chicken pizza, or a pasta with a chicken-oriented sauce. You can even dice the chicken and cook them with eggs for an interesting omelet.

Chili
Chili can easily be assembled in the morning, with ingredients tossed in a crock pot and left to cook all day long, resulting in a very quick and simple (and tasty) home-cooked meal in the evening.

Chili is a spectacular leftover dish, as it often has a completely different flavor when reheated as the ingredients tend to meld together more, meaning that a large pot of chili can directly be the source of a second meal.

Beyond that, thickened chili (with a bit of added corn starch) can also serve as a burger topping or as an ingredient in a breakfast omelet or alongside eggs. It’s a utilitarian food that can be used many different ways.

Tacos
Do-it-yourself tacos are a regular early-in-the-week meal here because the individual elements can be used in many other ways.

We generally only lightly spice the primary protein content of the taco – the meat or the beans – so that it can be reused in many ways, from soups to casseroles.

The remaining lettuce can form the foundation of a light starter salad for a later meal.

The remaining cheese can be used in any number of dishes, from casseroles to sandwiches.

The remaining tomatoes always find a home in soups, stews, or sauces. They can also find a home with a roast that’s left to slow cook all day long.

Roasts
Speaking of roasts left to cook all day long, we’ll often put a roast in the crock pot with some beef stock and some pepper and allow it to slowly cook all day until it’s nearly falling apart at dinner time. With some simply-prepared vegetables on the side (or even directly in the pot), it can be an incredibly delicious and savory meal.

The best part? The roast leftovers can be used in a wide variety of ways. A well cooked roast pulls apart easily to make hot beef sandwiches. The remaining roast can be chunked to make a beef stew or beef noodle soup.

The leftover broth is also a functional beef stock, which you can save to use as the basis for things like French onion soup and other hearty soups. It can be frozen easily until you need it.

Hamburgers
“How can hamburgers possibly be modular?” it’s actually incredibly simple. Make extra hamburgers and grill them all at once, then take the extra hamburgers and tear them into tiny chunks.

The cooked hamburger meat is then perfect for making a chili (yes, we might have hamburgers on Monday, chili on Wednesday, and chili and eggs for breakfast on Saturday) or inserted into a pasta sauce or a casserole of some fashion.

In Conclusion…
… the general idea is simple. If you prepare plenty of a staple, modular meal early in the week – which usually contains low-cost ingredients to begin with – you’ve already done much of the preparation for completely different meals later in the week. Your main course on Monday might turn into a stew on Wednesday or a pasta dish on Thursday. Your main course on Thursday might be part of a Saturday potluck dinner or a Sunday brunch.

And since the staple ingredients you start with are so inexpensive (I’m still convinced that a whole chicken is one of the best bargains out there), it ends up making several of your meals inexpensive, drastically cutting down your costs.

Chaining meals together in this fashion cuts down on your prep work (making it possible to prepare more meals at home much quicker) while also reducing your overall cost (by increasing your use of low-cost central utilitarian ingredients). Sounds like a big win in the kitchen to me!

Here in the Midwest, it’s harvest season. People’s gardens are full of produce which is currently being picked, and many kitchen tables are full of vegetables. For a gardener, this can be the best part of the year – the sheer possibility of all of these fresh vegetables and fruits is intoxicating.

But it can also be overwhelming.

For some people, after several months of keeping a vegetable garden in tip-top shape, collecting giant baskets of vegetables means just the beginning of another round of work – often a round that they don’t enjoy as much. The deep, frugal pleasure of spending hours out in the garden with your hands in the dirt is often far separated from the work involved processing the harvest.

So what can you do with all of the vegetables?

The worst choice is to let them go to waste. You’re far better off doing something with the vegetables you harvest than letting them grow old and unusable. Thus, if you’re unable or have no desire to do anything with the vegetables, consider one of the first options on the list below.

Here are seven methods my family uses for dealing with the abundance of a large garden harvest.

Eat it fresh – go vegetarian.
There’s truly no better time to dabble in a vegetable-heavy diet than when fresh vegetables are coming in out of the garden. Just eat them, as many as you can!

It’s surprisingly easy to find creative and tasty ways to use an abundance of vegetables. Slice up cucumbers and onions and put them in a bowl of water with a bit of vinegar mixed in and some salt and pepper available and just leave them out on the table – you’ll find they quickly become your snack. Prepare dishes using all of the vegetables you’re bringing in – go beyond salads to preparing things like tomato pie. Slice zucchini and squash, dip them in olive oil, and grill them.

The possibilities are endless. Try going vegetarian – or almost vegetarian – and sock those veggies away. They’re good for you – and in a few months, you’ll wish you had all of those fresh veggies again.

Give it away.
If you have extra produce, give it away. Give it to your friends. Give it to your neighbors. Give it to the local food pantry. Leave it on the doorstep of families that could use the food.

This is the simplest way to handle the produce – and it has its own benefits as well. First, it provides a great opportunity for social interaction as well as a chance to get to know the people around you. After all, if you’re giving vegetables to your neighbors, there’s a perfect chance to have a conversation and build a relationship a bit. Second, it simply feels good to donate food to people who truly need it.

Dry it.
Yes, bust out the ol’ food dehydrator. It enables you to take garden-fresh fruits and vegetables and put them into a form where they can be stored dry. This works really well for some items, like tomatoes, but not as well for others. You can also dry them outside on a screen, if you’d like.

The advantage of this method is that dried fruits and vegetables are incredibly easy to store while also being very flexible in terms of consumption and cooking. The work to dry them is also quite passive – you mostly just let them sit. The disadvantage, though, is that it requires some equipment to dry (you either need a screen to do it in the sun or a food dehydrator).

Sell it.
Drive around Iowa in the middle of August and you’ll see countless roadside stands with people selling corn and other vegetables, and the farmers markets are loaded with people selling produce. Similarly, August seems to be the month when people really buy these things by the ton – you’ll always see people at the sweet corn stands, buying a dozen ears.

Perhaps the best tactic I’ve seen was a large pile of corn in front of an old farmhouse. The sign said “Peaches and Cream Sweet Corn Here!” I wandered over, only to find that there was simply a box with a slot on top with a sign attached that said, “Take what you need. Pay what you can.” I dropped in a five and took a dozen ears. This is a great way for them to get rid of their excess corn, giving to people who need it and selling to people who can afford it without a ton of additional effort.

Freeze it.
If you have a large freezer, many vegetables can easily be frozen for a few months, particularly if you just intend to use them as ingredients in other dishes. Freezing vegetables is incredibly easy – just soak them in water for an hour, dry the surface, spread them out on a baking sheet, and stick them in the freezer for a few hours. Once they’re frozen, put the whole veggies right into bags or other storage containers.

Obviously, the big requirement here is a freezer for long-term storage. Without a large freezer, vegetable freezing isn’t really an option. Another drawback with this solution is that vegetables last at most several months before beginning to have serious taste and texture degradation, making them unusable.

Still, you’ll find quite a few vegetables in our own freezer. We make sure to use these frozen vegetables during the following winter so stale veggies don’t build up.

Have a party.
You’ve got a harvest, so why not have a harvest party?

Not sure what to do? Boil up fifty ears of corn. Get some cheese, grill the tomatoes, and put a bit of cheese on each one. Use the cucumbers and onions idea from earlier in the article and make a giant bowl. Slice zucchini and squash, rub them in olive oil, and grill them. Make coleslaw. Have a gigantic salad bowl.

In other words, use simple techniques to make these vegetables as delicious as you can and share the results with everyone around you. It takes the idea of giving away your vegetables to a whole new level, creating a great social event out of your harvest bounty.

Can it.
We usually have an abundance of tomatoes and, as a result, we often end up making a lot of different things with the tomatoes: whole tomatoes, diced tomatoes, tomato juice, tomato sauce, ketchup, tomato jam, salsa, pasta sauce, and so on. Given the acidity of the tomatoes, it’s incredibly easy to can these items without spoiling them – just get some jars and lids, sterilize everything, boil what you’re going to cook, fill up the jars, put rings and lids on them, bathe these in boiling water for half an hour or so, then allow them to sit. When they cool, tap the lids – if they spring back, then eat what’s inside right away – otherwise, they’ll keep for years.

My parents tend to grow acres of tomatoes and put away so much canned tomato items that, frankly, we don’t have to do this ourselves – they give us jars regularly. We intended to can some salsa this year, but we had a disastrous year with our tomatoes and it didn’t quite work out.

Another good idea – if you’re able to can salsa or hot sauce or pasta sauce, the jars can easily be decorated and given as wonderful Christmas gifts. It’s a great thing to give to your neighbors during Christmas season, for one.

These are merely the techniques I’ve used myself in my own life to handle an abundance of garden vegetables. What do you do with yours?

As I’ve discussed many times before, eating at home is a huge money saver. Even if you use expensive ingredients all the time (like saffron or morel mushrooms), it’s still cheaper to cook at home than it is to consistently eat out (assuming you’re eating better than the McDonalds Dollar Menu). Similarly, it’s cheaper to make a meal out of basic ingredients than it is to use prepared and processed ingredients – the closer to the raw ingredients you are, the cheaper the meal is (usually).

Along the same lines, I’ve come to realize that I tend to snack on and eat whatever’s convenient. For lunch, I’ll usually eat leftovers because it’s easy – it’s sitting in the fridge and usually only requires a bit of pepper and a trip to the microwave. At snack time, I’ll look at the fruit bowl and flip open the refrigerator door and grab whatever’s quick and at hand.

So why not combine the two and really crunch your food budget?

I was inspired to try some of these things by Mark Bittman’s interesting Food Matters. He suggests a similar phenomenon, that if you make good, healthy food as convenient as possible, you won’t be as tempted to eat processed, unhealthy foods.

By a lucky coincidence, many of the healthiest foods are also quite cheap in their raw form.

So what I decided to do is start cooking some healthy and very inexpensive staple foods once a week in bulk, store them in containers in the fridge, and utilize them all throughout the week in various dishes.

Here’s the game plan.

First, cook a big batch of beans/wild rice/whole grains once a week. You can get these ingredients at the store incredibly cheaply and they’re very easy to cook up in bulk. Just cook a whole bag of beans, a small bag of wild or brown rice, and some amount of a whole grain that you like.

When you’re done, just put the material you cooked into a large container in the fridge. A large Rubbermaid container or Gladware works really well because you can see what’s inside at a glance.

Throughout the week, just eat simple stuff that uses these for ingredients. Here are five examples.

Burritos Put some beans and some rice on a tortilla, heat it up, pour some salsa on it, enjoy.

Omelets Stir up two eggs, toss ‘em in a pan with some beans, spice with lots of pepper, enjoy.

Stir fry Toss whatever vegetables and meats you have on hand in a pan with a bit of vegetable oil over medium heat until cooked, put them on the rice, enjoy.

Swiss breakfast Mix the cooked whole grains with some milk and whatever fruit you have on hand, enjoy.

Bean burgers If you have black beans, this works great. Just mash ‘em together, add a bit of flour, garlic powder, onion powder, salt, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce to the beans, make some patties, and cook them with some oil, enjoy.

With the huge amount of variations in these recipes – and the many, many more simple things you can toss together – it’s easy to make tons of very simple snacks and meals from these cooked staples in your fridge.

You can take this idea even further by doing the same thing with whatever fruits and vegetables are on sale at the store. Just pick up that vegetable, chop it up, and cook it in some appropriate fashion (or just leave it raw). Just get it to the point where it’s really convenient for you to just grab it and eat it or add it to a simple dish.

The benefits here are tremendous. Suddenly, your snacks and many of your meals become really simple to prepare, really cheap, and pretty healthy, too (regardless of what you add, if most of the meal consists of beans and wild rice and vegetables, it’ll be good for you on the whole). Plus, since you can add whatever you want to those ingredients that are already on hand, it’s versatile and will be quite tasty to pretty much any palate.

Give it a shot and see how it works for you!

Over the past eight Fridays, I’ve posted a series of recipes based on NPR’s “How Low Can You Go” series, highlighting meals that can serve a family of four for under $10. Here’s the list of recipes, for those interested:
Vegetarian Burrito Bowls
Potato-Peanut Curry
Chicken-and-Corn Fried Rice with Lemon Spinach
Lemony Fettuccine with Asparagus
Cheesy Corkscrews with Crunchy Bacon Topping
Dal, Chilean Style
Coriander Meatballs with Yogurt-Mint Sauce
Moorish-Style Chickpea And Spinach Stew

Lots of good food and ideas there.

However, during the process of preparing those dishes and posts, I realized that there were actually a lot of useful general lessons for cooking at home that could be extracted from the experiences. Let’s walk through some of them (along with some tasty pictures of the meals I prepared).

Moorish-Style Chickpea And Spinach Stew

Let the ingredients lead
Recipes are useful because they list ingredients and explain how they can be combined into something tasty. Often, when selecting a meal, people think first of that tasty result. “Mmm, chicken carbonara sounds really good right now,” for example.

That’s usually the wrong approach to food, though.

Instead of looking at recipes in terms of the result you want, consider recipes in terms of the ingredients first. What do you have on hand? What fresh ingredients are on sale this week? What fresh ingredients are in season in your area (meaning they can usually be had at farmers markets on the cheap)?

That doesn’t mean you have to corner yourself. Use search engines like Foodie View or SuperCook to find tons and tons of recipes that match up with what you have available (or can get for cheap).

There are nearly infinite possibilities for tasty meals out there. Don’t limit yourself by starting your search based on the result. Instead, start with the ingredients – the inexpensive, healthy ingredients you have easy access to – and go from there. Plan ahead a bit, making plans for meals throughout the coming week.

Coriander Meatballs with Yogurt-Mint Sauce

Practice makes all the difference
Recently, a friend of mine tweeted “I used to think I could cook I just chose not to… turns out I just can’t cook.” Many, many people seem to fall into this category. They head into the kitchen, immediately try something complex (without having practiced at all), and think cooking is impossible because they fail at it.

Guess what? I’ve made tons of disasters in my kitchen. I’ve burnt countless things under the broiler. I’ve made dishes that are nearly inedible because of an awful ingredient mix. I’ve had bread turn into bricks.

You know what, though? With each failure, I learned something. I learned to keep a careful eye on anything under the broiler. I learned that it’s better to under-season something at first than to over-season it. I learned that it’s usually better to give dough more time than necessary to rise than to rush it.

And, gradually, I got better at it. Now, I can toss together bread without a second thought. I can make all kinds of crazy things in the kitchen. I now tackle complex things out of Mastering the Art of French Cooking which would have basically been impossible for me a few years ago.

It takes practice to make tasty stuff at home, and you should expect some giant mistakes and failures along the way. Start simple. Learn how to make great scrambled eggs. Learn how to pan-fry a chicken breast. Learn how to make a simple soup from scratch.

Then start trying more complicated stuff. Make baguettes from scratch. Bust out some scary recipes. You’ll find that if you’re good at the simple stuff, the complicated stuff is easier.

Soon, you’ll be confident enough to tackle pretty much anything without too much worry (although, I’ll admit, there are still some dishes that scare me – I have yet to not completely wreck a bearnaise sauce).

Dal, Chilean Style

Never be afraid to substitute
For many, recipes are gospel. They must be followed down to the letter – to not do this will result in disaster.

That’s rarely the case. Almost every ingredient has some sort of substitute. Sure, you’re likely to change the end result of the recipe, but that’s fine – you might discover something new and delicious.

This works best, again, with practice. The more you cook, the easier it is to know what can be substituted without much worry. If you’re unsure, there are tons of online ideas for what can be substituted and what can’t (but most things can be substituted).

Even better, sometimes you discover better solutions through substitution. Onions and shallots, for example – quite often, they can be substituted for each other and make the recipes better (since shallots taste like mild onions).

Never be afraid to substitute. It’s the first step to really mastering the kitchen.

Cheesy Corkscrews with Crunchy Bacon Topping

Make sure your key tools are efficient
If your tools in the kitchen stand in your way, it will make your kitchen experience much more difficult.

That does not mean that you should go out there and buy a kitchen full of expensive equipment before you try making a grilled cheese sandwich. Instead, I usually suggest that people get one really good knife and one really good pan and a very inexpensive large pot (since that’ll be usually used just for liquids), cooking sheet, spatula, and a Pyrex 13″ by 9″ casserole/cake pan. Everything else is secondary, things you don’t need unless you’re cooking at home every day.

However, going for a cheap pan will be frustrating – stuff won’t cook evenly, everything will stick, and if you get one with a coating, the coating will come off sooner than you think. Instead, I suggest getting a large cast iron skillet. Seriously. They’re easy to wash (you just use water and a brush, no soap) and once they’re seasoned (meaning you’ve cooked bacon or something similarly fatty a few times), you can cook anything in them. You can get a Lodge one for $30 or so. As for a knife, get a single Global 8″ chef’s knife and learn how to care for it. It’ll do almost everything you need very quickly and efficiently.

That’s really all you need to make almost everything. Don’t dump money into a lot of low-end equipment. Instead, get one good knife, a small handful of low-end additional items, and go from there. Spend your money on ingredients, not stuff.

Lemony Fettuccine with Asparagus

Keep yourself well-stocked with staples
People always ask for big lists of kitchen staples. “What should I have in my cupboards?” they ask.

The problem with such lists is that they vary widely from person to person. What foods do you enjoy eating the most? What spices do you like? What do you gravitate towards?

Some people like pasta, for example, and thus it makes sense to have a few pastas always on hand. Perhaps you like rice or beans. Maybe you particularly like some spices and herbs – I love garlic, for example – and don’t like others.

Here’s what to do if you want to have a well-stocked pantry. Instead of going out and stocking your pantry, instead empty out your pantry/cupboards and put them in boxes. Yes, everything. Then start making the meals you would normally make. Put things back in the cupboards as you use them (or replace them ASAP if you use them up and put the replacement in the cupboard).

After two months or so, look at everything that’s in the cupboard. Those are your staples – the things you actually use consistently. Keep plenty of all of it on hand – don’t be afraid to buy it in bulk. Everything else that’s still in boxes is stuff you rarely use. In fact, most of that stuff will probably be old enough that it should be used immediately or tossed.

Vegetarian Burrito Bowls

Base your meals on vegetables, not meat
Meals based on vegetables are not only healthier, but they’re usually cheaper than meals based on meat.

I’m not suggesting that you go vegetarian or anything like that. What I am suggesting is that instead of having your main dishes oriented around meat and your vegetables on the side, try regularly having your main dish centered around vegetables and a side dish oriented around meat.

So, for example, instead of having a big ol’ steak with a potato on the side, why not have a large salad with some chopped-up steak on top of it as your main course? Instead of eating chicken parmesan as a main dish, why not eat half of a chicken breast with a large selection of Italian-seasoned vegetables taking up most of your plate? Instead of having a giant pork chop, slice up that pork and make some rice and bean heavy burritos with a few pieces of that pork in it. When you grill up burgers, by all means have one, but instead of chasing it with another one, grill up some veggie kebabs along with the burgers and knock back a kebab before the burger and after it.

It’s unquestionably healthier. It’s also way cheaper. But, surprisingly, it’s tastier.

Think about it this way. When you get a steak or a burger, which bite do you remember the most? Unless something weird is going on, it’s the first bite – the first awesome taste of that meat. The second bite is almost as good.

After that, though, it becomes somewhat repetitive. The pleasure isn’t nearly as high with subsequent bites. So why not make those subsequent bites healthier?

What I’ve started to do is to really enjoy that first bite of a burger, but instead of just knocking back the rest of that burger, I put it down and eat four bites of something else – whatever vegetable I’ve prepped along with the meal. Maybe it’s corn on the cob. Maybe it’s fresh broccoli. Whatever it is, it’s a side dish that’s cheaper and healthier than that burger. Then I take another bite of that burger – delicious, nearly as good as that first bite.

The amazing part? Every bite of that burger is now tremendous. Every time is almost as good as that first bite. I really savor it.

Making the main part of your meal vegetables instead of meat makes your meals cheaper, healthier, and tastier. It’s awesome.

Potato-Peanut Curry

Overcome your food fears
Pictured above is easily the most controversial recipe I posted in this series. Potato-peanut curry was met with comments from lots of people about how they would never, ever eat anything like that. A main dish with peanut butter in it? Unthinkable!

Whenever I read comments like that, I immediately think of my three year old, who exhibits the same behavior sometimes. I’m not eating that! At our house, we have a simple policy: you can eat as little or as much of anything served for the meal as you want as long as you take one bite of each thing.

This is a well-understood rule, so our son usually just tries everything on his plate with one bite. Sometimes, I can predict what he will and won’t like. Interestingly, though, sometimes he’ll completely surprise me. He’ll try something I expect him to hate and, before I know it, he’s eaten all of it.

What have I learned from that? A person’s initial idea of whether or not they’ll like something is often wrong. It’s reached the point with me where I no longer even bother thinking about whether I’ll like an unfamiliar dish or not in advance – if it’s considered a remotely standard part of a cuisine somewhere in the world, I’ll try it and make up my own mind about it. This leads me to discovering new, tasty things all the time. Sure, sometimes I don’t like the new things I try, but more often than not, I do.

Doing this really opens your horizons and possibilities. You suddenly begin looking at things like peanut butter as a cooking ingredient in savory dishes. I look at a box of Sun-Maid raisins and I think of stir-fried dishes. For most Americans, that’s pretty out in left field.

Try it. Have some courage. Step outside the box. It’ll make your food preparation much more resourceful as you’ll be using inexpensive ingredients you never expected.

Chicken-and-Corn Fried Rice with Lemon Spinach

Go beyond the recipe
This is something of a final step – you no longer follow recipes much at all.

I’ve reached a point where I tend to read recipes for ideas, but I only rarely actually follow them step-by-step. Instead, I use ratios and known pairings that work well. Ham tastes good with gruyere cheese. A cup of any flour, a cup of water, and an egg, mixed with whatever random ingredients I have on hand, makes for a good fritter. Citrus and black pepper often pair really well. Three eggs and whatever items I have around makes an omelet.

I have tons of these little ideas floating around in my head, and I just pull them together when I look at what vegetables are on sale this week or what meats I can get from the local butcher at a good price. I have tomatoes coming in from the garden and we have lots of garlic and some basil on hand – and there’s some pasta – and we have some sourdough starter in the fridge, so let’s make some pasta with a loaf of sourdough on the side.

Recipes aren’t laws or strict procedures you have to follow – they’re just ideas and suggestions you can pull together however you want. Combining that with the other ideas here on how to save money on cooking, you can constantly come up with interesting meals for just pennies at home. How low can you go, indeed.

Good luck.

(And if you think this is, at least in part, a dry run for some ideas for my future food blog… you’d be right.)

In April and May, National Public Radio featured a series on inexpensive gourmet dishes entitled “How Low Can You Go?” Although many of the dishes looked quite tasty, most of the dishes weren’t actually all that inexpensive, often narrowly getting below $10 to feed a family of four, and many involved arduous cooking processes. I decided to try out some of these recipes throughout the summer to see how I could take the recipes and reduce them down to a simple and very inexpensive form.

Sarah and I were looking for a very simple “How Low Can You Go” recipe that we could actually use for a picnic at the park. It had to be quite simple, something that could be mostly prepared at home with only minimal prep at the park, and it had to be easy to transport.

We were intrigued by the flavor in Kenzie Crosley’s vegetarian burrito bowl submission to the “How Low Can You Go” contest, but we didn’t want to use the amount of prepared food suggested. Here’s Kenzie’s recipe:

1 box Archer Farms(find at Target) Cilantro and Lime Rice
2 Cans Black Beans
Guacamole
Sour Cream
black olives
Queso (Rotel and Velveeta)

Prepare rice as directed on box. Boil black beans in a small pot. Melt 1 can rotel and velveeta in a small dish in the microwave. If family of 4, bring 4 bowls out to serve individually and lawyer as follows. Rice at the bottom, black beans, queso, quacomole, sour cream, olives on top.

These are all things I love-so I just threw them all together for a yummy and easy meal for my husband and I. We have lots of leftovers!

Velveeta? An Archer Farms boxed meal? Hmm… why don’t we just do it from scratch? So that’s what we did.

Here are our ingredients:

Our guacamole spice packet is just a mix of various herbs that’s really tasty and pretty much everything else is from base ingredients.

You’ll notice no black beans are present – that’s because we boiled up some dried beans:

The guacamole was simple to make. Simply peel and core the avocado, then add some spices – salt, a bit of black pepper, garlic, cumin, and/or cilantro. We just used a packet that had this stuff already in it that we had in the cupboard:

Since our daughter is a little iron-deficient, we chose to add a little bit of ground beef that we had in the refrigerator to give her a little extra iron. Not a requirement at all, just something we keep an eye on.

Anyway, we packed up everything into two reusable bags, with reusable bowls and containers:

Once there, we assembled the bowls. Here’s Sarah (who handled most of the prep work for this meal), scooping beans into each of four bowls:

And here’s my finished bowl, enjoyed with a bottle of Dos Equis XX:

The best part about a picnic at the park is that it can immediately be followed by fun on the playground equipment.

Everyone loved it. The bowls were devoured with only a bit of leftovers. It helps that my children love black olives, which made the overall meal seem better than it otherwise would have been.

Our cost for this was about $9, without many leftovers. All we wound up with was leftover black beans, which we intended to use in another recipe later on. So, the cost per bowl was about $2.25 – a little high, but it was very easy to prepare, pretty healthy (aside from the sour cream), and portable enough that it could be eaten at a park.

Changes I Would Make
Obviously, we weren’t strong fans of the prepackaged original meal, so we modified it big time. Here’s what we did instead, which turned out really well.

Trent’s Vegetarian Burrito Bowls

1 cup dry black beans
1 1/2 cups dry rice
1/2 cup lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon cilantro
1 avocado
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 clove garlic, crushed
1/8 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 cup black olives
2 cups shredded Monterey Jack cheese
sour cream to taste

Cook the black beans according to recipe. Cook the rice according to recipe, replacing half a cup of water with half a cup of lime juice and the cilantro. Cut up the avocado, add the salt, garlic, and black pepper, and blend into a paste to make guacamole. Assemble the bowls, starting with rice, then beans, then cheese, then guacamole, then sour cream, then black olives on top. Enjoy!

In April and May, National Public Radio featured a series on inexpensive gourmet dishes entitled “How Low Can You Go?” Although many of the dishes looked quite tasty, most of the dishes weren’t actually all that inexpensive, often narrowly getting below $10 to feed a family of four, and many involved arduous cooking processes. I decided to try out some of these recipes throughout the summer to see how I could take the recipes and reduce them down to a simple and very inexpensive form.

Linda Watson submitted this rather simple recipe for potato-peanut curry to the How Low Can You Go? contest, a recipe that intrigued both me and my wife:

1 pound potatoes
1 can (14 oz.) diced tomatoes
1 cup water
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 tablespoons tahini
2 tablespoons peanut butter
1 teaspoon ground chipotle or cayenne pepper
4 cloves garlic
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
2 tablespoons chopped parsley leaves

1. Scrub potatoes. If they are not organic, peel them. If they are, just cut out any bad spots. Dice the potatoes into 1/2 inch cubes.
2. In a medium pot, add the potatoes, tomatoes with the juice, water, and salt. Cover and bring to a boil over medium-high heat, then turn heat down to medium low so the mixture just barely boils.
3. In a small microwave-proof bowl, combine the vegetable oil, tahini, peanut butter, and chipotle or cayenne pepper. Put garlic through a garlic press or mince it very fine. Stir the garlic into tahini mixture. Cover bowl and microwave on medium-high for about 2 minutes, until the mixture is fragrant. Stir in the turmeric, then add the tahini mixture to the potato mixture.
4. Simmer for about 10 minutes, until the potatoes are tender. Garnish with chopped parsley.

Tahini is a paste of ground sesame seeds and is far and away the most expensive element of this meal. Honestly, I had never heard of it before I attempted this recipe, but I figured, “Why not be experimental?” The only jar we could find at nearby grocery stores cost almost $7 and we used only a small portion of it, which isn’t exactly a value proposition. Thankfully, we do like this recipe and we intend to make it again.

Here are the ingredients we used:

The preparation of this dish was quite easy. You just simply cooked the potatoes and tomeatoes together with water and salt…

… then combine the other ingredients and microwave them:

Once that’s done, combine everything together and wait until the potatoes are done:

Then serve!

Really, not much commentary needed. We served it with some leftover couscous and some green beans straight out of our garden, simply because they were nutritional sides that were right on hand.

Did we like it? My wife and I really liked the dish – we both ate it hungrily and had seconds. Neither of our young children seemed to like it at all, though.

Our total cost was somewhere near $11, with most of the cost coming directly from the tahini, which you can find in the Asian food section of a well-stocked grocery store. We had enough leftovers for all four of us to eat it as leftovers again for lunch two days later, so it makes plenty.

Changes I Would Make
This recipe was inexpensive and straightforward enough that I wouldn’t modify anything at all.

Having said that, though, people might not want to drop $7 on tahini – understandable for an ingredient used in such small quantities. If you decide to skip it, substitute two more tablespoons of peanut butter for it. The curry will definitely have a stronger peanut flavor, but it’ll be substantially less expensive and still quite delicious.

I would definitely recommend a green vegetable as a side dish with this, however. We found the fresh green beans were a very nice complement.

Enjoy!