Discover easy American recipes, budget-friendly meals, and simple dishes made with everyday grocery staples.
Eating cheaply Sauces means eating the same things. Rice, beans, potatoes, eggs, cabbage, pasta. That is not a flaw in budget cooking, it is how budget cooking works: a small number of staples, bought in quantity, cooked repeatedly.The thing that makes it survivable is sauce. A sauce costs cents, takes minutes, and turns the same…
Most cheap dinner ideas articles are lists of things to shop for. That is useful on a Saturday and useless at six o’clock on a Tuesday, when the actual question is not what should I cook but what can I cook with this. So this one runs the other way. Open a cupboard, find the…
Meatloaf has a reputation problem in two directions at once. People who dislike it think of something dry and grey from a school cafeteria. People who like it often assume the breadcrumbs are there to make a pound of beef go further, which is cheapening the dish and which they tolerate because it is cheap….
A pantry pasta sauce is one you can make at eight in the evening with nothing fresh in the house. No shopping, no planning, no chopping anything that came out of a fridge. There are more of these than most people know. Here are five, each costed per serving, each buildable from a cupboard that…
Every cheap pasta recipe on the internet is some version of this one, and most of them get two things wrong that cost nothing to fix. Four ingredients, fifteen minutes, 95 cents a serving. It is the dish I put on Wednesday in the weekly meal plan, and it is the one you should be…
This is the cheapest dinner on this site and it is not close. Eighty cents a serving, about 4.7 cents per gram of protein, and it uses two ingredients that keep in a cupboard for years. It is also the meal I referenced in the weekly plan without ever publishing the recipe, which was an…
When I put all my recipes in one table, the thing that jumped out was not a price. It was that none of them had meaningful vegetables except the soup. I wrote at the time that building meals to optimize two measurable columns is how you end up with a nutritionally stupid meal plan, and…
I have spent months on this site arguing that you can eat well for very little money. Flour, eggs, bone-in chicken, lentils, potatoes. The arithmetic holds. But there is a gap between the arithmetic and the plate, and I want to name it, because it is the thing that makes people give up on cooking…
When I ranked eight grocery staples by cost per calorie, flour won by a distance. Thirty-three cents per thousand calories, cheapest thing in the store, beating potatoes and bread and everything with a face. The obvious follow-up question is what happens if you turn the cheap thing into the expensive thing yourself. Store bread runs…
Breakfast cereal is where shrinkflation hit hardest, which is a little ironic given how much of the shelf it takes up. When the GAO looked at product downsizing, cereal was one of the categories where it showed up most, and the boxes that got smaller turned out to be the ones people actually buy. Rolled…
