Each week, I’ll present a low-cost meal (or a meal that demonstrates a lot of options for cutting costs) that my family eats for dinner and enjoys. Many of the recipes will be vegan or vegetarian, with options to add other ingredients for non-vegetarians. In the past, I’ve created a lot of photo-heavy posts about

This past week, we spent quite a bit of time visiting Sarah’s parents. Her mother kindly bought several items that I would be able to eat or drink throughout the week in advance of our visit (yes, I actually like my mother in law!). One of the things she picked up for me was a

A few weeks ago, I made an offhand mention that I had switched to a plant-based diet due to medical concerns. Over the next week, I received a lot of questions about it. Why? What was it like? How was it working? Was it saving us money? Was it having positive health effects? I considered

You’ve just finished prepping a meal. You have a bunch of leftover vegetable scraps – onion pieces, a bit of chopped tomato, some extra pepper, the end of a zucchini, a single garlic clove, whatever. Or, maybe you had a whole rotisserie chicken or a roast and find yourself with some leftover bones with a

A long time ago (summer 2007, in fact), I wrote about once-a-month cooking, in which a person basically spends one solid day once every four weeks or so preparing food for home use so that meal prep later on is much easier. A quick note: I’ve never actually done this before, but I have done

A simple picture will probably explain things better than any introductory description could. The jar on the left, obviously, is a “Rainbow Brownie” mix, to which you add just a couple liquid ingredients, pour into a pan, and bake at 350 F for 30 minutes. The one on the right is a soup mix, to

A few days ago on Facebook, I asked the fans of The Simple Dollar what their favorite dirt cheap meal was. The responses poured in, so I decided to pull out 20 of my favorites and share them with you. Sticky rice, peas, and soy sauce (shared by Leslie) is pretty simple and not altogether

I often brew homemade beer. It’s an enjoyable hobby that allows me to sometimes use items from my garden and gets me deeply in touch with the natural process of making a homecrafted beer. I have complete control over the ingredients and can make whatever variation seems good to me with whatever ingredients seem flavorful

This isn’t a blockbuster post, just a simple story that illustrates how frugality runs through many aspects of our life. When I was young, my father always had a giant garden. One vegetable that he always grew every year was cucumbers. They always seemed very easy to grow compared to the other vegetables in the

Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance book or other book of interest. I didn’t expect that I would like this book. A few weeks ago, I got an email from Vickie Smith, the wife of John Smith (the author of Confessions of a Butcher). She had stumbled across The Simple Dollar and

I’ll start off with what everyone will probably want to use this post for in the future – an index of all of the “Summer Meal Series” posts, as well as last summer’s “How Low Can You Go” meal series and a few other meal posts before that. The Recipe Collection Here are all of

This summer, I’m going to be posting a series of fifteen low-cost, tasty, and easy-to-prepare meals that are literally straight from my own kitchen. We’ve reached the end of this series, my friend, and so I decided to finish it off with a dish that bridges right into fall meals quite well. It also takes

This summer, I’m going to be posting a series of fifteen low-cost, tasty, and easy-to-prepare meals that are literally straight from my own kitchen. One of the fun things about the end of summer and the start of fall is that, if you have a garden, lots of vegetables are starting to come in. Depending

This summer, I’m going to be posting a series of fifteen low-cost, tasty, and easy-to-prepare meals that are literally straight from my own kitchen. First, right off the bat, I apologize for the strong green color of the meal in this post. Ratatouille is typically pretty colorful, but the vegetables we chose for this particular

This summer, I’m going to be posting a series of fifteen low-cost, tasty, and easy-to-prepare meals that are literally straight from my own kitchen. One of the biggest challenges I have with writing recipe posts is the fact that Sarah and I often “riff” on recipes. In other words, we’ll take a recipe we found

Several readers have written to me requesting information on saving seeds from their garden, which is an awesome frugal practice. Fall is just starting to tiptoe into the picture here in Iowa, and for us that means that the gardening season is starting to wind up. This year was actually a very uneven year for

This summer, I’m going to be posting a series of fifteen low-cost, tasty, and easy-to-prepare meals that are literally straight from my own kitchen. Most of the meals I’ve shown so far in this series are perfect dinners. But what about the humble mid-day meal, where you just want something smaller and lighter – and

In my opinion, the single best bargain in a grocery store is the one pound bag of dried beans. The amount of nutrition and protein that can be had from a pound of dried beans is amazing, plus the flavor of the beans far surpasses the flavor of canned beans. I use beans of various

This summer, I’m going to be posting a series of fifteen low-cost, tasty, and easy-to-prepare meals that are literally straight from my own kitchen. One of the best parts of summer is when fresh tomatoes start coming in from the garden. This past week has seen the first of our tomatoes and we were eager