Quite often, I’ll see people spend exorbitant amounts of money on lavish Thanksgiving spreads. While I completely understand the reason for doing this – often, it’s the one time in the year that we can gather around one table with a lot of people we love – there’s still a lot of simple things we can do to reduce the financial outlay and the stress of the meal without reducing the quality of the day in any way (and often improving it). Here are ten ways to do just that.

Cook and slice the turkey on Tuesday. What? No beautiful turkey on the table? Whatever will we do? In truth, though, the turkey on the table during Thanksgiving dinner often results in lots of problems: it keeps someone away from the meal because they’re carving the bird, the bird is often dry because it hasn’t had a lot of time to rest, and the finished bird often arrives later than expected, delaying the whole meal and often reducing the quality of the other food. Solve all of these problems by cooking the bird on Tuesday or Wednesday, slicing it at your own pace, then putting all of the meat on a platter along with all of the juice and a few pats of butter. Cover the serving platter and put it in the fridge, then just turn on the oven (or the electric roaster) on Thanksgiving to thoroughly warm the meat.

Use nature for your decorations. During the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, there are thousands of colorful leaves all over the place, free for the taking. Be picky – go outside and look for some nice, clean, colorful leaves. All you need is a plain tablecloth and a row of colorful leaves sprinkled down the middle to create a very festive setting.

Get the slow cooker into the act. Many Thanksgiving side dishes can easily be prepared in a slow cooker. Slow cookers consume less energy and quite often can be used in a “fix-it-and-forget-it” mindset. It’s the perfect tool to make cranberry sauce, for example.

Be creative with your Thanksgiving dinner leftovers. By the third day, turkey sandwiches start to get tired. Instead of allowing that to happen, share some of your extra food with people in need (for example, make a couple plates of food for shut-ins you know and deliver the plates) or make something interesting, like kugel or tetrazzini, out of the leftovers.

Round up when you estimate. I’ve been to two different Thanksgiving dinners in the past three years where there was just barely enough food to make ends meet for the number of guests (to put it politely). People showed up bringing unexpected dining companions and estimates for how much each person would eat were strangely low. Don’t fall into that trap. Estimate high, but estimate realistic. After all, you can always eat leftovers, but you can’t undo unhappy guests.

Don’t be afraid of potlucking it. Ask your guests to bring a dish or two with them so that you can focus your time, energy, and money on a few key dishes. Most people are quite willing to help (provided, of course, that they’re not coming from out of town).

Save the bones. Seriously. Put the entire carcass in a large Ziploc bag and save the bones and small pieces of meat for a day or two. Then, take all of the leftover vegetables (potatoes, corn, non-glazed carrots, etc.) and the carcass, stick them all in a crock pot, then add enough water to just cover the bones. Turn it on low overnight (this is perfect to do on Saturday evening after Thanksgiving). Then, in the morning, save the liquid. What will you do with this delicious turkey broth? Freeze it (along with a pound or two of leftover diced turkey meat). Then, in a few weeks, use it as the base for an amazing soup – just add vegetables and/or dumplings to the stock and the turkey (along with perhaps a bit of water to thin it).

Have appetizers. Inexpensive appetizers – like a selection of vegetables – helps people keep the edge off of their appetites and keeps them from over-eating during the main meal. Not only does this make the overall meal more healthy, it often makes it cheaper, since a vegetable tray can be really inexpensive. Much like the turkey, this can also be assembled the day before.

Don’t try to “impress” with your wine. There are countless great wines under $10 (here are five of my favorites from a few years back). Don’t feel the need to buy an expensive bottle of wine to impress anyone. Just stop by your local wine and liquor store and ask for a low-cost full bodied wine for the Thanksgiving table. They’ll be happy to point out something great for you.

Save your recyclable containers for leftovers. Instead of just tossing large containers of items like margarine or whipped topping, save the containers. Then, on Thanksgiving, fill the containers with leftovers and give them to your guests. There’s no responsibility at all for them to return the container and it gets an extra use out of the items that would normally be tossed.

As I dug around in the cupboards and refrigerator to make sure we had everything on hand, I came across a few scary outdated items in the back of the refrigerator. They looked scary. They smelled scary. And, sadly, they headed right to the trash can.

One of the most disappointing things at our house is food that’s gone bad. It finds its way to the back of the refrigerator or cupboard and, eventually, gets too old to use. I look at such things with disappointment, as it’s good food simply going to waste.

Throwing away food – just like throwing away anything else – is a waste of resources. Our money and/our our time was invested in acquiring and preparing that food and simply throwing it away means that your time, money, and energy went to nothing. That’s a conclusion that doesn’t make anyone happy.

Of course, much like anything else, food can sometimes be recycled to a spectacular second use. Before you decide to toss out the food, give it a serious second look and ask yourself if the trash can is the best ultimate destination for it.

Quite often, the food really is bad and needs to be discarded. If something is moldy, I don’t mess with it (well, excepting certain kinds of cheeses, of course – blue cheese is all about the mold). If something has a smell that indicates that it’s gone wrong, I’ll just toss it. If it’s opened and past the date, I’ll almost always toss it immediately.

Sometimes, though, food that I’ll pass on in its current form has value if it’s used in another context. Here are some examples.

Stale bread If you have stale bread that’s gone dry and hard, get out the grater and grate it into bread crumbs, then save those crumbs in a jar. After all, this is exactly what bread crumbs are. Bread crumbs make a fantastic breading for fish, chicken, and vegetables, helping to seal in the moisture and flavor while making a crunchy outer shell.

Old fruits As long as they’re not genuinely rotting, most over-ripe fruits can easily be turned into an excellent bread. One great example of this is banana bread, which just requires a loaf pan, a spoon, some over-ripe bananas, a bit of butter, sugar, an egg, vanilla, baking soda, and flour. Just mix them in a bowl with a spoon until it’s consistent and put it in a loaf pan. You can make something very similar with many overripe fruits – I’ve made strawberry bread, pineapple bread, and zucchini bread and all were good (we just tend to eat a lot of bananas, so banana bread is a regular thing).

Old vegetables I save these in a small box in the freezer. When I have a full box, I’ll use the vegetables to make a vegetable soup. I’ll just put all the vegetables into the crock pot, add water until it’s got about half an inch of liquid over the top of the vegetables, and then season the whole thing like crazy. It makes for a pretty good – and pretty healthy – meal.

Another old vegetable and fruit tactic Add them to a compost bin. If you don’t have one, ask around, particularly among your gardening-oriented friends. It’s far better to return the leftover materials to the earth than to put them in the trash and watch them head to a landfill. You can use coffee grounds and eggshells in a similar fashion.

Here’s the real message: don’t look at old food as something to immediately be thrown out. Sometimes, it’s a resource that can be used in future meals. It’s far less wasteful to approach things in this fashion, which means that you’re not only conserving your own resources, time, and money, but you’re also sparing the earth.

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.

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!

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!

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?

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!

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.)

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!

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!

A great example comes from my recent recipe for lemony fettuccine with asparagus:

Commenters on the recipe offered lots of great suggestions for how to improve the recipe: use broccoli instead of asparagus, use olive oil instead of canola, and so on.

One reader emailed me and offered up a further interesting suggestion:

Your lemon fettuccine recipe was pretty low on protein. I make my own pasta and sometimes add ground flaxseed to the dough to increase the protein count. It creates a great taste and keeps my grocery bill low.

Undoubtedly, making my own pasta (something I do from time to time) is a great way to make mind-blowingly delicious pasta and it’s way cheaper than the boxed stuff. You can make a giant pile of pasta with just a couple cups of flour and a few eggs.

Time
There’s a problem, though: from-scratch pasta is time expensive. Making the dough, pressing it, cutting it, and drying it can eat up a good hour of your time. Considering that I’m trimming about a dollar in cost off of a box of pasta for that effort, I’m only saving $1 for that hour of my time.

For a busy person (and who isn’t), saving $1 for an hour’s worth of work is not a good deal.

This is true for many from-scratch dishes: the closer you get to the raw ingredients, the less it costs, but the more involved time it takes. I don’t mean total time – it’s often comparable between from-scratch recipes and others – but the time you have to spend focused on the meal itself.

Time has a cost. Time spent on one activity is time not spent on something else – even if it’s just idle relaxation. That time could be used to increase your earnings or to save money in other ways.

Health
Most of us are biologically wired to enjoy and to crave fattening foods. Our ancestors found such foods so rarely that they were hard-wired to love them and to pack it away when such an opportunity arose.

Today, with the abundance of food around us, that can be a real danger. Without psychological reinforcement that we shouldn’t, we tend to eat everything served to us. Without being careful, we’ll eat an unbalanced diet. Both of these are detrimental to our long term health.

This problem is made worse by the fact that unhealthier options are generally less expensive. Take a look at the cuts at your local butcher or meat counter – the fatty cuts are the cheap cuts. Wander through the aisles and compare the cheap pasta sauce and the organic pasta sauce on the nutrition label. Compare a loaf of bread made from whole grains and a loaf of generic white bread. Time and time again, the unhealthy option is the cheap option.

I look at such food purchases in a very simple way: you save money now to pay more later on. Pay more later? A consistent diet of unhealthy foods will cost you later in life with medical bills and other health-related choices that are foisted upon you.

Personal Values
For some people, food is merely a fuel to help you plow through the day. For others, it’s an art form that speaks directly to your soul. The rest of us are in the middle, alternating back and forth.

Take me, for example. Most days, I’m perfectly content to eat leftovers for lunch and prepare a really simple dinner with my family.

Yet, every once in a while, I’ll devote three hours to making coq au vin from scratch, as I did last Friday. I’ll splurge and make croque-madames for a surprise lunch on a lazy Saturday. I’ll attempt some soul food dish from my own childhood, slaving for hours to recapture some flavor from my youth.

I don’t make these things because they’re quick. I don’t make them because they’re healthy, either, and they’re certainly not cheap. I make them because cooking is a pastime I get a great deal of personal enjoyment from.

Finding Value
In the end, it’s all about value. What’s truly important in your own life? Do you view an occasional afternoon in the kitchen as drudge work or as a soul-nurturing experience? Do you look at breads in the bread aisle by their price tag, by their nutrition facts label, or by their texture and color – or some combination thereof?

For many people, minimizing your food bill is a worthwhile goal. You live an active and very busy life and minimizing the costs in an area where you don’t have much personal added value is a great way to maximize value in your overall life.

For others, personal health is a key value and thus spending money on healthy ingredients is key. It’s worth your extra dollar to get raw organic vegetables for the meals you create and you pride yourself on putting pure, whole foods in your body.

For still others, food is their art form, a way to get in touch with their spirit. It’s worth their extra money and extra time to create the perfect meal, combining sublime flavors like an artist at the canvas.

Each of those groups sacrifices something along the way, whether it’s time or flavor or money, in order to get in touch with what really matters to them.

The happiest person is the one who has looked inside themselves, figured out what they really valued, and chased it with gusto. No matter which path you follow, if it’s in line with what your true values are, your dollars are being spent in the right place.

I know of Ming Tsai from his excellent public television cooking show Simply Ming. He tends to make a lot of fairly unusual dishes with Asian themes that are really palatable to Western taste buds. So I was excited to try out the recipe he submitted to “How Low Can You Go,” Chicken-and-Corn Fried Rice with Lemon Spinach. Even more interesting, he claimed his kids love it, which made my foodie thoughts perk up even more. Here’s the recipe:

1 pound ground chicken
2 eggs
1 large yellow onion, minced
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 teaspoon ginger powder
2 ears of corn when in season, or 1 bag frozen (12 ounces)
1/2 (10 ounces) bag spinach (washed, spun dry, de-stemmed, leaves torn)
2 tablespoons naturally brewed soy sauce
Juice of 1 lemon
4 cups cold, cooked long-grain rice, brown and white combination, preferably day-old so it’s nice and dry*
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Canola oil

Heat a wok or large saute pan over medium-high heat. Lightly coat with oil. When oil shimmers add chicken, season with salt and pepper, and brown, breaking up any large chunks with wooden spoon or spatula. Remove chicken to a plate. Add about 1/2-inch oil to wok and allow to heat; add eggs, which will puff up. Cook scrambled eggs and remove to a paper towel-lined plate. If necessary, add more oil to wok to lightly coat, then add onions, garlic, and powdered ginger, and cook until nicely caramelized, about 5 minutes. Add corn, rice, chicken and egg, and toss to combine. Add naturally brewed soy sauce, toss to combine, and check for seasoning. Place mound of raw spinach in center of four dinner plates. Drizzle with lemon juice and season. Top with fried rice to cover. Enjoy!

My wife Sarah took charge of this recipe, so my notes below are largely taken from her comments as she was making it.

First of all, here are the ingredients we used.

We wound up using Dole spinach for this because the spinach we got at the farmers market (our usual source for summer produce) was utterly abysmal – the two purveyors had some of the saddest looking spinach we’d ever seen, so we passed. The rice – a mix of white and brown long grain – was pre-cooked a day in advance. We also chose to substitute some ground turkey for the ground chicken, because that’s what we had on hand.

So, anyway, on with the cooking. She cooked the turkey with quite a bit of seasoning by itself, breaking down the pieces. Here it is, frying away on our stove:

Sarah suggests spicing the meat quite a bit here by putting on plenty of pepper and I agree wholeheartedly – black pepper really complements things well.

After the turkey was finished, she cooked the eggs, essentially making scrambled eggs in a bit of oil. This part smelled really good to me:

After the eggs were finished, she cooked the other ingredients together in the remaining oil. A quick note: she decided that there was an excess of oil after the eggs finished and removed most of the oil. I agree – I think with that much oil, there would have been too much in the pan. Half an inch might be the right amount in a wok, but not in a large pan – use just barely enough to cover the pan (once the eggs are done).

Upon adding the rice, the turkey, the eggs, and the corn to the mixture, there was a huge amount of food, filling up our rather large pan.

It smelled heavenly at this point. I (personally) suggest adding a bit more soy sauce than what the recipe calls for, but it was quite good as-is.

Serve it on top of spinach leaves, as the flavor of the spinach combines well. Here’s our final plate:

Did we like it? Almost universally, yes. Even our son, who is the pickiest eater in the house, seemed to really get into it, gobbling it down like crazy. Both children had seconds, though neither one finished their second helping. I loved it, though I would have included just a bit more soy sauce. Sarah loved it, too, though she’s intrigued as to whether it would be significantly different with chicken.

What about the cost? Our cost for this recipe totaled $9.80. But here’s the kicker – there was more left over than we consumed at the table. We were able to get eight more meals out of the fried rice, for a total of twelve meals. Thus, the cost per meal was $0.81 – not bat at all.

Still, if you’re eating for a small family and don’t want to eat this four times, you should reduce the recipe significantly.

Changes I Would Make to Save Cost and Time
The first thing I would do is halve the recipe. The recipe makes a mountain of food and, unless you want to eat it several times or have an enormous family, it makes too much food and the rest will go to waste. One could freeze it, I suppose, but the dish does not strike me as one that would tolerate freezing well.

The second thing I’d do is reduce the oil. This doesn’t change the time, but it slightly reduces the cost and definitely improves the health of the meal. You don’t need half an inch of oil here unless you’re using a wok – even then, it’s perhaps too much.

Third, de-stemming the spinach seemed flatly unnecessary to us. It would be a time investment that doesn’t gain too much – the small stems on most spinach is just fine. We served ours just as it came, after washing.

Those changes alter the recipe quite a bit. Here’s my alteration:

1/2 pound ground chicken
1 eggs
1 small yellow onion, minced
1/2 tablespoon minced garlic
1/2 teaspoon ginger powder
1 ear of corn when in season, or 1/2 bag frozen (6 ounces)
1/4 bag spinach (washed and dried)
1 tablespoon soy sauce
Juice of 1/2 lemon
2 cups cold, cooked long-grain rice, brown and white combination, preferably day-old so it’s nice and dry (that’s about 3/8 cup of white and 3/8 cup brown when dry)
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Canola oil

Heat a wok or large saute pan over medium-high heat. Lightly coat with oil. When oil shimmers add chicken, season with salt and pepper, and brown, breaking up any large chunks with wooden spoon or spatula. Remove chicken to a plate. Add about 1/4-inch oil to wok (unless using pan, then just coat bottom) and allow to heat; add eggs, which will puff up. Cook scrambled eggs and remove to a paper towel-lined plate. If necessary, add more oil to wok to lightly coat, then add onions, garlic, and powdered ginger, and cook until nicely caramelized, about 5 minutes. Add corn, rice, chicken and egg, and toss to combine. Add naturally brewed soy sauce, toss to combine, and check for seasoning. Place mound of raw spinach in center of four dinner plates. Drizzle with lemon juice and season. Top with fried rice to cover. Enjoy!

Sharon Guenther submitted this very simple and tasty fettuccine recipe to the “How Low Can You Go” contest. We decided to prepare it on a warm summer evening and serve a chilled white wine with it. Here’s the recipe she submitted:

1 lb. of good Fettucini
Zest and juice of 2 lemons
1 clove garlic, smashed and minced
1/4 c. scallions, including tops, sliced crosswise
1/4 c. Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1 lb. fresh asparagus
1/4 chopped, fresh Italian parsley

Set a pot of water to boil for the pasta. Meanwhile, trim the tough ends of asparagus and place, single-layer, in a lightly oiled roasting pan. Lightly spray or brush olive oil on asparagus as well. Roast at 400 degree, 15 minutes or until it becomes aromatic but not mushy.

In a serving bowl, place lemon juice and zest, garlic, scallions, parsley and EVOO. Whisk together gently.Add salt and lots of fresh ground black pepper.

By this time, the water should be boiling so cook the fettucini until it is al dente.

When asparagus is done, cut it all crosswise, leaving the tops intact.

Drain pasta and add to ingredients in serving bowl. Toss to coat the pasta. Add asparagus and top with a generous amount of grated parmesan.

For the scallions, we just used fresh green onions – a simple and easy to grow substitute. We had the rest of the ingredients on hand except for the fettuccine (and I could have made that with some more time), the lemons, and the asparagus. Our total bill wound up being very close to $7 for the meal.

Here’s what we did. First, the ingredients:

You’ll notice two ingredients are missing right from the title: the fettuccine and the asparagus. These were already on their way to being cooked. The fettuccine was in a pan of water soaking (I often do the trick of getting the water to boiling, adding the pasta, then turning off the heat and letting it soak for 20-25 minutes in cooling water, as it saves a ton of energy) and the asparagus was freshly in the oven. I just took the asparagus stalks, chipped off the bottom of each, spread them out on a cookie sheet that had just a bit of canola oil rubbed all over the surface, and stuck the sheet in the oven. Here’s the asparagus, about to go in:

Those of you with a sharp eye will notice an unusual “ingredient” in the ingredient pic – a Ped Egg. Yes, that bastion of infomercials is actually really useful – but not on our feet.

We wound up with a PedEgg somewhere along the line – I honestly couldn’t tell you when. It was likely a gift from someone for some reason, because I can’t conceive of a reason why we would buy one.

So why is a PedEgg in this picture? It’s a great zester. All you have to do is rub it around lightly on the surface of a lemon or an orange or a lime – whatever you’re trying to get zest from – and it neatly collects inside the egg. In fact, here’s the zest of two lemons, added to some of the other chopped ingredients:

Perfect zest – and very easy! If you’re given a PedEgg at some point and have no idea what to do with it – or see a new one for just a dollar or two someday – pick it up. It’s the easiest zester I’ve ever tried.

Anyway, that bowl contains all of the other ingredients in the recipe. When the asparagus and fettuccine were finished, I chopped the asparagus up into smaller pieces, put the fettuccine and asparagus into this bowl, and mixed them:

(I look kind of bushed in that picture because it had been a very long day of waking up way too early and writing and jogging and chasing children.)

Anyway, after mixing it all up thoroughly, we transferred it to our treasured handmade pasta bowl, simply because it looks so nice in the middle of our table:

And here’s what our plates looked like. We served the pasta with applesauce and Virgin Chardonnay:

It was a big hit – everyone liked it. There was enough left over for my wife and I each to enjoy it for lunch the next day, meaning we got six meals out of it for $8 of ingredients – a cost per meal of about $1.33.

Changes I Would Make to Save Cost and Time
I would not make any changes to the recipe itself. However, with some thoughtful ordering, you can go from nothing at all to a finished meal on the table in about twenty minutes. Here’s how to do it.

First, get a pot of water on to boil before you do anything else. Then pre-heat the oven for the asparagus.

While the oven is preheating, cut the asparagus up and put it on the cookie sheet. We used just a bit of canola oil rubbed on the sheet to keep the asparagus from sticking. When the oven’s ready, pop in the asparagus for fifteen minutes.

When the water is boiling, toss in the fettuccine, then cut the heat immediately. Let the fettuccine rest in the water for twenty or twenty five minutes, tasting it near the end to see if it’s done yet. If the asparagus is mostly done by the time the water gets to boiling, you can also just boil the pasta to save some time, but ideally you want to have the asparagus finish 5 to 10 minutes before the pasta so you can cut up the asparagus and add it to the other ingredients.

While the asparagus and pasta are cooking, prep the other ingredients. Zest the lemon, peel it, and squeeze out the juice. Chop the scallions. Add the olive oil. Add the garlic. Get those ingredients all ready.

When the asparagus finishes, get it out and cut it into little pieces. Add it to the other ingredients and mix.

When the pasta finishes, drain it, then add it to the bowl and mix it thoroughly, then serve it immediately.

One “How Low Can You Go” recipe that sounded incredibly tasty (but also pretty unhealthy) was Cheesy Corkscrews with Crunchy Bacon Topping, submitted to the contest by Pat and Gina Neely, authors of the cookbook Down Home with the Neelys: A Southern Family Cookbook. Here’s the recipe, as submitted to NPR:

Cheesy Corkscrews
—
6 tablespoons butter, plus more for greasing
Kosher salt
1 pound cavatappi (or other tubular pasta)
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
4 cups whole milk, warmed
1 teaspoon dry mustard powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
Pinch freshly grated nutmeg
Dash hot sauce
Dash Worcestershire sauce
4 cups grated sharp white cheddar cheese
1 1/4 cups grated Pecorino Romano cheese

Crunchy Bacon Topping
—
1 1/2 cups crushed potato chips
1/2 cup grated Pecorino Romano cheese
5 slices cooked bacon, crumbled
3 tablespoons chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

Heat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Butter a 3-quart casserole dish.

Bring a large pot of generously salted water to a boil and cook the pasta until it’s al dente. Melt the butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the flour and cook, stirring, for 1 minute. Whisk in the warmed milk and bring to a simmer, whisking constantly (the mixture will thicken as the heat increases).

Stir the dry mustard, salt, black pepper, cayenne, nutmeg, hot sauce and Worcestershire sauce into the thickened milk. Stir in 3 cups of the cheddar, and the Pecorino Romano, until the cheeses melt.

Add the cooked pasta to the cheese sauce, and toss to combine. Pour the cheese-apalooza mixture into the prepared casserole dish.

Make the topping: In a medium bowl, combine the potato chips, Pecorino Romano, crumbled bacon, parsley and the remaining cheddar. Sprinkle the crumb mixture on top of the macaroni and cheese, and bake for 35 minutes. For a crunchier topping, finish under the broiler for 3 minutes, until golden brown and crisp. Remove from the oven and cool for 5 minutes before serving.

I have a three year old boy and a one year old girl at home and macaroni and cheese is pretty much a guaranteed hit. However, I usually find the stuff out of the box to be pretty blah – I’ll jazz up my own with all kinds of things, but it’s still not the best. Thus, I really like homemade mac-and-cheese recipes – they let me create something quite enjoyable for me and the kids still go wild. This recipe is right in that wheelhouse.

However, it’s awfully unhealthy. Six tablespoons of butter? Five slices of bacon? Potato chips? Six cups of cheese? Four cups of whole milk? Wow. That’s not the most healthy recipe one could make, though the thought of it from a purely flavorful standpoint made my mouth drool. Unsurprisingly, the NPR commenters felt similarly, offering up such thoughts as:

To select this dish as a “meal” is an insult to your listeners.

NPR says “a budget-conscious meal for a family of four that’s healthy”. I guess that we should expect a not-so-healthy option from the owners of a BBQ establishment.

… and so on.

My perspective is a bit different. I fall in line with Julia Child, who advocated a widely varied and balanced diet that included some fat, and she lived a very long life doing just that. For us, a recipe like this is fine if it’s used as a side dish and is complemented with some healthy options – we chose to eat it in conjunction with a large spinach salad, as you can see in the picture above.

However, we did make some substitutes right out of the chute. Instead of using pork bacon, we chose substantially healthier turkey bacon. We used skim milk instead of whole milk. We used low-fat cheeses as well and we used a healthy penne rigate for the pasta because we couldn’t find a healthy cavatappi. Even with those choices, though, this wasn’t the healthiest entree – it should definitely be a side dish.

Here’s what we wound up using:

I started off by melting the butter in a pan, then added the flour and stirred rapidly. As expected, it became a lumpy paste quite quickly, looking like this:

This is arguably the most unhealthy substance on earth, but it gets quite a bit better from there.

Next, I poured the milk on top, stirred it steadily over the heat, and waited until it was bubbling. The milk thickened up a bit from the flour and butter but it still largely looked the same, with perhaps just a very slight yellow hint (contributed by the butter):

I then added the spices and the cheese and stirred it rapidly as the cheese melted. It began to look like a very tasty cheese sauce at this point – I couldn’t help myself and tasted it a time or two … or six:

At the same time as I was preparing the sauce, the pasta was boiling over on the other burner. Once the sauce was consistent (and delicious!), I drained the pasta, then added the creamy sauce to the penne, stirring them together. This itself looked good enough to serve as a side dish – and tasty enough, too.

I wasn’t done yet, though. I poured the pasta and cheese into a three quart casserole (note: a three quart isn’t quite big enough to contain all of the ingredients – I had just a bit of extra pasta that wouldn’t reasonably fit). Then I tossed the remaining ingredients together – the chips, the crushed turkey bacon, and the cheese – and put this mixture on top.

Here it is before it went in the oven.

I baked it at 375 F for thirty five minutes, then moved it under the broiler for three minutes. But just after I moved it under the broiler, disaster struck. The kids needed help, so I ran and helped them. When I got back, sure enough…

It was fine, though. The top was a bit crunchier than expected, but still tasty, especially if you broke it up and stirred it into the pasta.

As I mentioned above, we served this with a large spinach salad. We also had a white wine with it – Twin Fin Pinot Grigio. Here was my final plate:

We had a ton of leftovers. We wound up eating this as a side three more times, so this will make plenty unless you eat an exorbitant amount. I would halve the recipe.

Did we like it? We loved it, all of us. The kids ate it like there was no tomorrow and my wife and I both loved the variety of flavors it offered.

Our cost (minus fractional things we had on hand) was $11.04, more than half of which was cheese. Given that we were able to get roughly 16 servings out of our pot, the cost per serving was about $0.63.

Changes I Would Make to Save Cost and Time (and Health)
First, I’d substitute ingredients all over the place. Use margarine instead of butter. Use skim milk instead of whole. Use low-fat cheese. Use turkey bacon. Use whole-grain pasta. Surprisingly, if you want to substitute for the chips, slice some kale and bake it – it tastes an awful lot like a potato chip. These things won’t drastically change the taste but will drastically reduce the fat content.

Second, I’d halve the ingredients and serve it as a side dish. The whole dish would have served a small army, even as a main course. I wound up with an overflowing three quart baking dish – totally overkill for a family of four.

Third, I wouldn’t sweat the cavatappi. Cavatappi can be hard to find and expensive when you find it. Just use whole wheat penne as your pasta, or even elbow macaroni.

Fourth, I’d grate your own cheese. Turn on the water to boil the pasta first, then sit down to grate the cheese. It won’t add any time to the overall recipe, but it will save you some cash.

If you want to get ready for it the night before, grate the cheese and cook the penne. The rest can be done pretty quickly.

With those things in mind, here’s the recipe I would prepare:

Trent’s Cheesy Mac with Crunchy Bacon Topping

Cheesy Corkscrews
—
3 tablespoons butter, plus more for greasing
1/2 pound penne
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
2 cups skim milk, warmed
1/2 teaspoon dry mustard powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
Pinch nutmeg
Dash hot sauce
Dash Worcestershire sauce
1 1/2 cups grated sharp white cheddar cheese
3/4 cup grated Romano cheese

Crunchy Bacon Topping
—
3/4 cup crushed potato chips
1/2 cup grated white cheddar cheese
1/4 cup grated Romano cheese
2 slices cooked turkey bacon, crumbled
1 tablespoon parsley

Heat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Butter a 3-quart casserole dish.

Bring a large pot of water with a pinch of salt in it to a boil and cook the pasta until it’s just slightly firm. Melt the butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the flour and cook, stirring, for 1 minute. Whisk in the warmed milk and bring to a simmer, whisking constantly (the mixture will thicken as the heat increases).

Stir the dry mustard, salt, black pepper, cayenne, nutmeg, hot sauce and Worcestershire sauce into the thickened milk. Stir in 1 1/2 cups of the cheddar and 3/4 cup Pecorino Romano, until the cheeses melt.

Add the cooked pasta to the cheese sauce, and toss to combine. Pour the cheese-pasta mixture into the prepared casserole dish.

Make the topping: In a medium bowl, combine the potato chips, cheddar, Pecorino Romano, crumbled bacon, and parsley. Sprinkle the crumb mixture on top of the macaroni and cheese, and bake for 35 minutes. For a crunchier topping, finish under the broiler for 2 minutes, until golden brown and crisp. Remove from the oven and cool for 5 minutes before serving.

Dal is a delicious simple Indian dish, often served with rice or wheat flatbread (called “roti”). It’s often a mainstay of vegetarian diets because it provides quite a bit of protein, and the rich flavorings make it palatable to us omnivores as well. Valerie Gaino, of Pichilemu, Chile, submitted a delicious Chilean variant on the dish to the How Low Can You Go contest:

3 cups of lentils
2 cups of chopped potatoes
2 chopped carrots
3 chopped tomatoes
1 hot pepper, chopped
1 small onion chopped
2 gloves garlic chopped
16 ounces tomato sauce
1 tsp cumin
a little beer or sherry
a little red vinegar
olive oil
1/2 cup chopped cilantro
salt and pepper

1. Soak and cook lentils till soft. Drain and rinse, set aside.
2. Sautee onions, garlic, hot pepper, and cumin in olive oil. Add beer or sherry.
3. Add potatoes and carrots, cover with water, bring to boil.
4. Add tomatoes and cook till potatoes are soft.
5. Add lentils and tomato sauce.
6. Salt and pepper to taste. (I sometimes add more water or beer if it’s too thick, or vinegar if it’s too sweet.) Add more cumin or hot sauce if you like it really spicy.
7. Throw in the cilantro, take if off the heat. Serve after a few minutes.

One immediate problem I observed is that the “three cups of lentils” likely refers to three cups of lentils after boiling, which means that 1 1/2 to 2 cups of dry lentils should be more than adequate for this recipe. Three cups of dry lentils would make this recipe mostly flavored lentils with a few other pieces thrown in.

Sarah (my wife, for those of you new to The Simple Dollar) handled most of the food preparation for this dish, so most of the notes that follow come from her. Here are the ingredients we used:

First, you simply boil some dry lentils, easily found in the bean section of any grocery store. We only used two cups of dry lentils to start with. Just boil them in a large pot with plenty of water for about thirty minutes or so and they’re fine, then drain the water off of them. This can be done a day or two in advance – store the cooked, drained lentils in the refrigerator. Here are the lentils we had after boiling:

While the lentils are boiling, you’re going to be spending that time chopping vegetables – again, something you can do a day or two in advance. The potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, onion, and garlic all need to be chopped.

We use a special knife called an ulu to make this process easier. An ulu is an all-purpose knife used by the Inuit for many different purposes, but it works really well for quickly chopping small amounts of vegetables. You simply grasp it by the handle and rock it back and forth on a cutting board with the vegetables underneath.

Of course, you can use pretty much any knife to chop vegetables – this is just a recipe where the ulu really comes in handy.

Next, I sauteed the onions, garlic, pepper, and cumin together, with about two tablespoons of white sherry. The same amount of a mild beer would be fine.

Next, add the potatoes and carrots, then add enough water to cover everything, then raise it to a boil. Once the water is boiling, add the tomatoes and then let it boil for ten minutes or so. Check a piece of potato and see whether it’s soft enough for your tastes – if it isn’t, let it boil for another five minutes and check again.

Once the potatoes are finished, it’s basically done. Just add the tomato sauce and the lentils, stir it a bit, season with some salt and pepper, and serve it!

Of course, you’ll want to serve it on something. If you have access to a flatbread, that’ll do just fine. Alternately, you can simply use rice. Here’s our rice steamer in action, steaming while the dal was cooking:

You might also want to have something else on the side. We had a very simple chickpea curry – basically just chickpeas (garbanzo beans) loaded up with curry paste. Yes, we love our chickpeas at the Hamm household!

Here’s our final plate:

This made a huge amount of dal. We had enough for our dinner that night, lunch the following day, and lunch two days after that for all four of us, and we still wound up freezing some of it.

Did we like it? All of us liked it quite a bit. Sarah perhaps liked it the least, particularly on reheating, and strongly suggested trimming the amount of cilantro, which I agreed with. It was delicious, though, and I was happy eating it even the third time.

Our total cost (ignoring fractional items we had on hand): $8.29, almost entirely on fresh vegetables. Given the amount we made, though, the cost per meal was $0.69 – pretty nice!

Changes I Would Make to Save Cost and Time
First of all, I’d trim the entire recipe by half. This made far too much food for us as is. Without some significant changes, you’ll either be freezing it – not a great option, since the texture will be ruined – or eating it all the time for days.

Second, I’d cut the remaining cilantro by half – and use dried cilantro. Fresh cilantro has a stronger flavor, but dried will work fine.

Third, I’d chop the vegetables and boil the lentils the night before. Turn on a radio in the kitchen and take care of these tasks in the evening so you can toss the meal together very easily when you arrive home from work the next day.

These changes modify the recipe a fair amount, making it cheaper and perhaps slightly faster. Here’s what the new recipe would be, as modified by me:

Trent’s Chilean Dal

1 cup of lentils
1 large red potato, chopped but unskinned
1 chopped carrot
2 chopped tomatoes
1/2 hot pepper, chopped
1/2 small onion chopped
1 clove garlic chopped
8 ounces tomato sauce (small can)
1/2 tsp cumin
1 tbsp beer or sherry
olive oil
1/8 cup chopped cilantro
salt and pepper

Night before:
1. Chop potato, carrot, tomatoes, pepper, onion, garlic, and cilantro.
2. Soak and cook lentils till soft. Drain and rinse, set aside.

Next day:
1. Sautee onions, garlic, hot pepper, and cumin in olive oil. Add beer or sherry.
2. Add vinegar, potatoes, and carrots, cover with water, bring to boil.
3. Add tomatoes and cook till potatoes are soft.
4. Add lentils and tomato sauce.
5. Salt and pepper to taste. Add more water or beer if it’s too dry, or add hot sauce if you like it spicier.
6. Throw in the cilantro, take if off the heat. Serve after a few minutes.

While digging through the submissions, I came across this interesting recipe by Wendy T., who states that she’s “writing a cookbook of economical meals for working people – this is one of my husband’s favorites.” Intriguing. Here’s what Wendy offers up:

1 lb ground beef
1 slice white bread, crumbled
1 tbsp ground coriander
1 tbsp ground cumin
1 small yellow onion, minced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp olive oil
1 egg, beaten lightly
1/4 cup flat leaf parsley, minced
1/4 cup mint leaves, julienned
1 cup plain yogurt (preferably whole milk)
salt and black pepper

In a small bowl, mix the yogurt, a large pinch of salt, and the mint. Set aside.

Crumble white bread crumbs over ground beef and parsley in large bowl.

Place a large frying pan over medium low heat. Add the olive oil and sweat the onions and garlic until translucent. Add 3/4 tsp salt and the coriander and cumin, and saute a minute more. Cool a minute and then add to the meat-bread crumb mixture. Add the beaten egg and mix with hands lightly just to combine. Form a test meatball and fry – taste for seasoning and add additional salt if necessary.

Form into meatballs. Fry in batches in the pan on all sides until cooked through. Drain on paper towels if necessary.

Serve the meatballs with the yogurt-mint sauce. Delicious as sandwiches with pita or naan bread.

A few things popped out at me immediately that indicated this recipe would be a lot of work. First, the ground coriander – dried coriander in the store is not the same thing at all. Ground coriander needs to be freshly ground or it loses most of its flavor. Second, the julienned mint leaves – meaning you’re slicing the mint leaves into thin strips – will be significant work as well, and likely the most expensive aspect of the recipe if you don’t have a source of fresh mint.

In order to try out the recipe as is, though, I did both of these.

I also went through the cupboard and the freezer to see what we had on hand. The only ingredients that we didn’t already have in spice jars were the mint leaves ($2), the yogurt ($0.99), the onion ($0.30), and the ground beef ($2.49 for a pound of lean meat), for a total cost of $5.78. We did, of course, use lots of spices and other materials we had on hand.

Here are the ingredients as I used them.

(The horse statue in the picture is a Breyer version of Man o’ War, included at the encouragement of my three year old son.)

I made one major change. Instead of mincing the onions, I coarsely chopped them, because I love the caramelized flavor of onions and felt it would add to the meatballs.

Once the work of prepping the ingredients is done, the recipe itself is pretty easy. First, I made the yogurt-mint sauce by putting a pinch of salt, a cup of yogurt, and the mint leaves in a bowl and mixing them.

I then tossed the onions and garlic into a frying pan along with the olive oil and cooked them over medium heat until they were nicely caramelized – taking on a light brown color roughly the same as caramel. I then added a pinch of salt, the coriander, and the cumin, and cooked it for a minute more.

When that was finished, I let it cool for a bit. While doing that, I added the bread crumbs and the beaten egg to the pound of ground beef and mixed them together with my hands, then I added the onion mixture to the meat and mixed that in. The result was a large ball, ready to be shaped into smaller meatballs.

Making meatballs is easy. Just pinch off a bit of the meat – whatever size you like – and roll that bit around in between your hands until it forms a round ball. If you’re not sure what size to make, just divide the ball into equal halves, divide each of those halves into equal halves (four bits), divide each of those halves into equal halves (eight bits), then divide each of those halves into equal halves (sixteen bits). Each of those sixteen bits will make a nice meatball.

So, I rolled up the balls and tossed them into the frying pan.

Obviously, if you chose to mince the onion, you wouldn’t see the large pieces of onion in the meatballs.

I simply browned these in the pan over medium heat, rolling them around about every minute or so. When they became dark brown – the color of a cooked hamburger, roughly – I cut one in half and checked the insides to make sure it was no longer pink. Here they are, about halfway cooked (with some sides looking finished, others still pink, and yet others in the middle):

I chose to serve the meatballs with the mint sauce on the side, a long grain rice and vegetable medley, some steamed broccoli, and a glass of Wandering Grape 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon Shiraz (a free trade wine). Here’s how it looked on the table:

And there you have it!

Did we like it? This meal was a big hit. The kids were not big fans of the mint sauce, but the meatballs were completely consumed with gusto – no leftovers at all. Both my wife and I liked everything – I wound up drowning the meatballs in the sauce after trying them together.

Our total cost for the main course and the mint sauce (ignoring fractional items we had on hand): $5.78. Our cost per meal: $1.45. Not bad. But we can do better – and we can certainly make it less involved.

Changes I Would Make to Save Cost and Time
First of all, I’d skip the coriander and use more cumin as a substitute. If you don’t have a grinder, smashing the coriander seeds will take forever and it doesn’t contribute substantially to the meal, especially when you can easily substitute a bit of cumin for nearly the same effect.

Second, if I was pinched for time, I’d substitute dried mint for the fresh mint leaves. I’d just add dried mint – probably two tablespoons full – to the yogurt to taste and skip the julienning of the mint leaves.

Third, I’d substitute garlic powder for the minced garlic cloves. Although you miss the caramelization of the cloves, you also save the work of peeling the cloves, cooking the cloves, and smashing the cloves.

Fourth – and I did this in my own version above – I’d skip the fresh parsley and use dried. I used 1/4 cup dried parsley and it was perfect.

These changes modify the recipe a bit, but it also reduces the cost and vastly reduces the time. Here’s the new recipe, as I’d do it:

1 lb ground beef
1 slice white bread, crumbled
2 tbsp ground cumin
1 small yellow onion, chopped
1 tbsp garlic powder
1 tbsp olive oil
1 egg, beaten lightly
1/4 cup dried parsley
1/4 cup dried mint
1 cup plain yogurt (preferably whole milk)
salt and black pepper

In a small bowl, mix the yogurt, a large pinch of salt, and the mint. Set aside.

Crumble white bread crumbs over ground beef and parsley in large bowl.

Place a large frying pan over medium low heat. Add the olive oil and gently cook the onions until caramelized. Add 3/4 tsp salt and the cumin, and saute a minute more. Cool a minute and then add to the meat-bread crumb mixture. Add the beaten egg and mix with hands lightly just to combine. Form into meatballs. Fry in batches in the pan on all sides until cooked through. Drain on paper towels if necessary. Serve the meatballs with the yogurt-mint sauce.

Jose Andres’ Moorish-style chickpea and spinach stew looked and sounded delicious – a vegan recipe that appeals to a burger-eating guy like me. Andres’ recipe was submitted as follows:

9 ounces dried garbanzos (chickpeas)
Pinch bicarbonate of soda
6 garlic cloves, peeled and whole
1/4 cup Spanish extra-virgin olive oil
2 ounces white sliced bread, with the crusts removed
2 tablespoons pimenton (Spanish sweet paprika)
1 pinch Spanish saffron
2 tablespoons Spanish sherry vinegar
1/2 pound spinach, washed and cleaned
1 teaspoon ground cumin
Salt and white pepper to taste

The day before you cook, soak the chickpeas in cold water with a pinch of bicarbonate of soda. The next day, drain and rinse the chickpeas.

In a big saucepan, combine the chickpeas with 2 1/2 quarts of water. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to low and simmer for two hours, until the chickpeas are tender. Every 10 minutes or so, add 1/2 cup of cold water to slow down the simmering. By the end, the water should have reduced so it is barely covering the chickpeas. Turn off the heat and let sit.

In a small saute pan over medium to low heat, brown the garlic in 1/4 cup of the olive oil. When the garlic is browned, after about 3 minutes, remove from the pan and set aside. Add the bread and brown on both sides, about one minute each side. Remove the bread and set aside.

Remove the pan from the heat and allow to cool for a few minutes. Add the pimenton and saffron to the saute pan, and the sherry vinegar immediately afterward to prevent the pimenton from burning.

In a mortar, smash the reserved garlic and the browned bread to make a very thick paste.

Bring the chickpeas back to a low boil and add the spinach. Simmer for 5 minutes. Add the pimenton mixture along with the garlic and bread paste, to create a thick, stewy sauce. Simmer for another 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste, and serve immediately.

Got that? It seems rather … involved … to me, but the end result sounded fantastic, so I gave it the old college try.

I went through the cupboard and discovered what we had on hand. We had some ordinary extra virgin olive oil, plenty of slices of whole wheat bread, sweet paprika (I decided pimenton was a bit much – ordinary paprika should do), saffron, red wine vinegar (which we decided to substitute for the sherry vinegar), cumin, salt, and pepper – all of these items can be reasonably expected to be found in the cupboard of a person who cooks regularly.

I then purchased half a pound of spinach for $1.66, a pound of dried garbanzo beans for $1.99, and a garlic bulb for $0.30, finishing out the recipe for a total cost (to us) of $3.95.

I then put the beans to soak overnight with just a tiny pinch of “bicarbonate of soda” … which is a five-dollar term for plain old baking soda. I made the conscious decision to use all the beans in the soup and increase the other ingredients by roughly 50% in order to make plenty of the stew so it could be enjoyed for lunch the following day.

I then set the beans on to boil in a small pot for two hours, adding a cup of water every ten minutes or so. Trust me, if you try this at home, it won’t take this much work – see my conclusions below.

With the beans well in hand, I pulled out the other ingredients and set to work. First, I peeled out the cloves, then I decided I should probably take a picture of the ingredients I used…

I then took 1/3 cup of the oil, tossed in the garlic cloves, and began to brown the cloves over medium heat. This part smelled fantastic – my mouth was watering.

When the garlic cloves were fairly brown, I took out the cloves, then put a piece of bread into the hot olive oil, flipping it after twenty seconds and removing it after twenty more, then repeating it with a second piece. If you waited much longer, the bread started to burn.

I then took the bread and the cloves and smashed them into oblivion. We own a mortar and pestle, but I couldn’t locate it, so I improvised with a spoon, a bowl, and some extra time. Here’s the “mash” I wound up with.

I put the spinach in with the chickpeas and let that cook together for five minutes. Meanwhile, I put the saffron and red wine vinegar in with the still-hot garlicky olive oil, then, confused as to what to do with the cumin, tossed that in there as well. I stirred this up a bit, then added the saffron/vinegar/olive oil/cumin mix straight into the chickpeas, then dumped in the obliterated bread and garlic and stirred, letting it boil for five minutes more. Here’s what it looked like, near the end.

As with many soups and stews, a hearty bread on the side is a good idea. We picked up this loaf for a dollar on sale rather than making our own and had it on the side.

And then, the meal is served!

We had enough stew for all four of us as well as lunch for all four of us the following day with still a fair amount left over. If I were to do it again, I’d make less soup.

Did we like it? I liked it quite a bit and thought it was just right. My wife wasn’t sure at first, added significantly more salt, stirred her bowl, and then seemed to like it quite a bit, having a small second bowl. The children didn’t like it nearly as much, though they both enjoyed the bread.

Our total cost (ignoring fractional items we had on hand): $4.95. Our cost per meal: $0.62. Not bad. But we can do better – and we can certainly make it less involved.

Changes I Would Make to Save Cost and Time
First of all, I’d buy two cans of garbanzo beans instead of soaking and boiling the beans. The dry beans are cheaper and they are nominally better for you than canned, but for most working families, the distinction isn’t enough to make the effort worth it in this case.

Second, I’d cut the saffron. Saffron is easily the most expensive item in the dish and you’re only using a pinch of it. Although it does add a nice, subtle flavor, I think it can be dropped without too much concern.

Third, I’d substitute garlic powder for the cloves. Although you miss the caramelization of the cloves, you also save the work of peeling the cloves, cooking the cloves, and smashing the cloves.

Fourth, I’d use bread crumbs instead of “cooking” the bread and smashing it. Obviously, this change is for similar reasons as stated above.

These changes modify the recipe quite a bit, but it also reduces the cost and vastly reduces the time. Here’s the new recipe, as I’d do it:

Trent’s Moorish Chickpea and Spinach Stew

2 cans garbanzo beans/chickpeas
Garlic powder equivalent to six cloves
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
3/4 cup bread crumbs
2 tablespoons paprika
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon cumin
1/2 pound spinach, washed and cleaned
Salt and pepper to taste

Rinse the chickpeas thoroughly, then put them in a pan, add 1 1/2 cups of water, and bring it to a boil. In another pan, bring the olive oil to a boil, then remove from heat for two minutes. While stirring the olive oil, add the paprika, the cumin, the red wine vinegar, then the bread crumbs (slowly). Set this aside. When the beans are boiling, add the spinach and allow it to boil for five minutes, stirring a bit. Add in the olive oil mixture, stir, then allow it to boil for another five minutes. Serve, preferably with bread. This should be enough for at least three meals.

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Episode Notes
Here are some additional notes that go alongside the comments in the podcast. Approximate times for the corresponding links and notes are listed.

0:00 – The theme song is a public domain recording of a Camper van Beethoven concert on October 25, 1986. Listen to the concert in its entirety.
0:29 – Some background reading – tactics for making healthy, simple, and cheap meals for you and your family.
1:57 – You’re not “frugal” if you don’t buy the cheapest thing, right?
3:11 – Read my review of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food for more on finding real value in food.
5:58 – and that’s the way … we be-came … The Brady Bunch!
7:20 – Here are six examples of simple main dishes based on such staple ingredients.
7:52 – A detailed guide to the art of the marinade.
8:06 – The basics of kitchen spices
9:03 – Is a deep freezer worth it? Yes!
10:11 – This is a great strategy for saving time and money – we do it with more than just chicken breasts.
10:23 – Slow cookers rule! Here are five great recipes for it … and five more.
13:30 Bulk buying can save a ton of money – more than you might think – if you do it right.
13:55 – Here are nine great ways to re-use leftovers in the same vein.
14:12 – … and how to make straight-up leftovers more tasty.
15:54 – Additional details on the “flexible casserole” including a version similar to what I talk about here.
17:11 – Just make your own cream sauce – as healthy as you want it.
19:11 – The neighborhood cooperative concept – or even just cooperating with a neighbor or two – can save you tons of money.
20:01 – Here’s a great way to start planning your meals.
21:40 – A preview of next week’s topic.

One thing I’d like to do in a future episode is have an audio reader’s mailbag. If you have a microphone on your computer and can record an MP3 of a simple, short question you might have on personal finance, careers, pop culture, or anything else you’d like me to answer, record it as an MP3 and send it to me. Keep the total recording under 15 seconds, please. Also, if you use Skype, feel free to ask your question that way – my username is trenttsd.

Comments and suggestions welcome.

As we shop, we make tons and tons of little decisions along the way. Those decisions, on their own, seem inconsequential.

Should we buy the bulk can of diced tomatoes or the smaller can?
These tortillas feel softer, but they’re way more expensive – is it worth it?
The free range whole chickens are on sale! Should we stock up?

A choice one way or another here might save us a dollar or cause us to spend a dollar more. In the eyes of many people, it’s an inconsequential decision – just make it and keep going. One dollar doesn’t make a huge difference, right?

The problem is that each little buying decision you make is deeply tied to other buying decisions, whether consciously or not.

How so, you might ask?

All of our buying decisions are based on a set of principles in our head, ones that are often so well-grounded that they don’t even pop up in conscious thought.

Here’s a thought experiment to help you see what I mean. Imagine a product you would never buy in a grocery store – pork rinds, maybe, or perhaps insanely potent hot sauce. Now, what about that product would cause you to not buy it? You’re likely to pop up an immediate simple answer – I don’t like the taste or it’s unhealthy – but on other purchases, you’re quite willing to overlook that principle for other reasons.

In truth, when we make a decision to buy in the grocery store, we’re trying to reduce a big set of principles and inputs down to one split-second decision. And often we feel we’re completely justified in that decision – and we move on with life.

It is very easy to tease apart each little buying decision, tell yourself that it doesn’t really matter that much and that it’s okay to splurge, and then essentially ignore your final tally when you get to the checkout because each decision was justified in your mind. Doing that, though, is a game that will, time and time again, put your wallet in the hurt locker.

So, what can you do to overcome this problem?

The easy methods are the shopping list and the meal plan. Making a shopping list in advance of your visit to the grocery store simply serves to reduce the number of decisions you have to make. This, of course, leads you to making fewer bad decisions.

But that’s just the start. Once you’re in the store with your shopping list in hand, commit to three more things.

First, simply do not put anything in your cart that’s not on your list. Your list, if it’s thought out at all, should have everything you need for your meals for the next week. If you see something you feel like you need or deserve, jot it on the back of the list for next time.

Second, mark any items that you’re not simply searching for the cheapest version of. On our list, I like to put a little X by any item that I don’t intend to just buy the cheapest version of. For example, with diced tomatoes, the various brands and cans are identical in terms of ingredients, so we usually just get the cheapest version. This, again, reduces the number of opportunities for poor impulse decisions in the store.

Third, if you have specific brands in mind (because of coupons or because of previous buying experiences), put those on your list, too, along with the size. For example, we usually have a big stack of coupons for V8 Fusion (100% juice, half fruit and half vegetable). So, instead of just writing “fruit juice x 3,” I’ll write “46 oz. V8 Fusion x 3″ on the list. In other words, if you make the list more specific, you further reduce the number of potential impulse decisions in the store.

Using all of these techniques, you’ll end up making just a handful of in-the-moment choices in the grocery store – and with fewer potential decisions, you have fewer chances to make poor ones. The end result? A cart full of items that you actually want and a much smaller grocery bill.

One big complaint I often hear with such bulk food buying is that it’s boring. One older email from Jennifer sums this feeling up quite succinctly:

Buying food in such bulk quantities seems incredibly boring to me. What can possibly be tasty or exciting about having chops for the twentieth time this year?

I agree with Jennifer on one level – having the same old boring chops or chicken breasts every week for months would get quite old. I would certainly get tired of it, anyway.

The trick is to know how to jazz up these entrees, making them into something much more interesting – and with much more variety – for just pennies. Around here, most of our entrees find themselves undergoing some sort of preparation which will widely vary the flavor.

About Marinating Meat
The purpose of marinating meat is twofold. First, it serves to tenderize the meat – that’s why most marinade recipes include some sort of acid (vinegar and fruit juice are common ones). Simply soaking a meat in such a solution makes the meat softer – easier to cut and easier to chew. It also causes the meat to absorb some of the liquid, often making it moister.

Second (and perhaps more important), marinades imbue meat with additional flavors. During the process of softening the meat, the meat absorbs some of the liquid around it. If that liquid includes a variety of flavors, those flavors are absorbed into the meat itself.

Given the nearly infinite things one can use as a marinade, there’s a nearly infinite variety of flavors you can imbue your meat with.

What if you’re vegetarian? Almost any tough vegetable can be marinated. Zucchini, cucumbers, squash, and eggplant all turn out very well when marinated. In fact, I often use such tougher vegetables as a side dish.

About marinate versus marinade: marinate usually refers to the process of soaking the meat, while marinade refers to the liquid solution in which the meat is soaked.

Trent’s Ten Favorite Homemade “Nickel” Marinades
Here are ten homemade marinades that cost just pennies and can each really improve the flavor of your food. Using these marinades can transform an ordinary cut of meat in ten drastically different ways, from spicy to sweet, from sharp to subtle, from Mediterranean to Asian. Just mix the ingredients together, put the mixture on the meat in a bowl, and let it soak according to the times below – when it’s done, cook the meat as you normally would and enjoy some distinctive and delicious flavors!

Simple Marinade 1/2 cup lemon juice, 2 tablespoons olive oil, 1 teaspoon oregano, pinch of salt, pinch of pepper

Flexible Marinade 1 cup any kind of fruit juice you have on hand, 1 teaspoon garlic powder, 1 teaspoon black pepper, 1/2 teaspoon salt

Apple Marinade 1/2 cup apple juice, 1/4 cup soy sauce, 1/4 cup honey, 2 tablespoons lemon juice, 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder, 1/4 teaspoon mustard, 1/4 teaspoon ginger (this is fairly low acid marinade, so leave it on for twice as long as listed below)

Asian Marinade 1/2 cup soy sauce, 1/2 cup balsamic vinegar, 1/2 cup chunky peanut butter, 1/3 cup cilantro, 1/4 cup lemon juice, 2 tablespoons honey, 1 tablespoon ginger, 2 cloves garlic or 2 teaspoons garlic powder, 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Balsamic Marinade 3/4 cup balsamic vinegar, 1/2 cup olive oil, 2 teaspoons brown sugar, 1/4 cup minced onion, 3/4 teaspoon black pepper

Donkey Marinade 2/3 cup lemon juice, 1/3 cup olive oil, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon pepper, 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce, 1 teaspoon mustard, 1 teaspoon garlic powder

Lime Marinade 1/2 cup lime juice, 1/4 cup oil, 1 teaspoon tarragon, 1 teaspoon onion salt, 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

Mediterranean Marinade 1 1/2 cups olive oil, 1 cup lemon juice, 1/2 cup red wine vinegar, 3 tablespoons oregano, 2 tablespoons garlic powder, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon ground black pepper

Sneaky Marinade 3/4 cup orange juice, 4 teaspoons olive oil, 1/2 teaspoon anise, 1/2 teaspoon ground pepper, 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, 2 teaspoons tarragon

Spicy Marinade 1/2 cup lemon juice, 1/3 cup vegetable oil, 1 tablespoon onion, 1 tablespoon garlic powder, 1 tablespoon sugar, 2 teaspoons red pepper flakes, 1 teaspoon thyme, 1/4 teaspoon oregano

Teriyaki Marinade 1/4 cup vegetable oil, 1/4 cup brown sugar, 3 oz. soy sauce, 1 clove garlic or one teaspoon garlic powder, and 1/2 cup pineapple juice (this is fairly low acid marinade, so leave it on for twice as long as listed below)

(Oops… did I include eleven marinades?)

How Long Should I Marinate?
If you marniate a meat too long, the meat will become soft and mushy from the effects of the natural acids in the marinade. If you don’t leave it on long enough, the meat won’t gain enough extra flavor. Here are some starting numbers to use – obviously, times may vary depending on the size of your meat, but these should get you in the ballpark.

Beef roasts 2 hours
Beef large steaks 1 hour
Beef small steaks 40 minutes
Chicken with bones 1 hour
Chicken without bones 40 minutes
Fish 30 minutes
Lamb chops 40 minutes
Pork chops and tenderloin 40 minutes
Pork roasts 2 hours
Shrimp 15 minutes

Additional Tips
First of all, don’t toss the marinade when you’re finished soaking the meat! I like to pour the leftover marinade directly on the entree just as it goes on the grill or into the skillet. This packs an additional punch of flavor. However, do not save the marinade and use it later in the cooking process – a marinade must be cooked just like the meat is, and if it is not, you run the risk of ingesting unhealthy proteins.

Another use for the marinades: they make great mix-ins for burgers. Make up a batch of your favorite, then add it directly to ground beef or ground turkey, roughly 1/2 cup per pound of meat. It can really change the dynamic of the burger!

Another tactic I like to use to try new marinades to ask for marinades and sauces for Christmas gifts, particularly those from local companies. We go to several gift exchanges around Christmastime and a few bottles of marinade and sauce make for a great, easy-to-select gift. Combined with the inexpensive bulk meats in our freezer, these sauces and marinades can create a true flavor explosion – much better than some gift you’re anxious to return as soon as you leave.

Good luck!