Introduction

Especially in these times of financial stress, it's nice to know how to make cheap, good food. My wife and I give ourselves a weekly grocery budget of $60, within which we have to come up with 42 meals -- breakfast, lunch, and dinner for both of us. (Really this is more of a grocery store budget, because with this $240 a month we also have to get light bulbs, plastic wrap, garbage bags, paper towels, etc. etc.) My wife doesn't mind ramen, but I can't stand it, and neither of us will touch spam. And nobody wants to eat soup every day.

So the question is, can you make good food with fresh, local ingredients on a budget? Unfortunately, the answer is no. A green pepper costs $1. The cheapest meat out there still costs $3/lb., and that's for ground beef in a tube that's 27% fat. But that's not to say you can't have good things once in a while, and make do for the other meals. This blog is about how to do just that.

I'll post recipes that we make here (and where we got them), both in the original versions and however we actually ended up making the dish. I'll also post methods and equipment we use to make them, as well as photos whenever possible. I make all of our bread products (sandwich bread, baguettes, bagels, crackers), so probably several posts in the first month or so will be about bread.

The two key things that I believe are important to remember with eating on a budget are:

(1) Most things are cheaper if made at home.
(2) Not everything is cheaper if made at home.
Those are the two maxims we live by.

For instance, cereal (hot or cold) is one of the cheapest breakfast items, and one which is far more expensive to make yourself. I generally go with cold cereal that's between 10 and 30 cents an ounce, while my wife mostly eats store-brand oatmeal. Between the two of us, that's never more than $10 a week on breakfast, less if we have anything left over from the previous week.

I'll wrap up this intro post with one final tip about recipe sizes. Recipes which make only 2 or 3 servings are almost always much more expensive per serving that those which make more. Recipes which make a bunch of servings are great and often cheap, but when I eat things every night, I tend to get very tired of them and avoid them like the plague, which is a great way to ruin cheap dishes. We usually shoot for dishes that we'll eat for 2-3 nights, so around 2-3 dinners per week.

That's all for now, I'll post the first recipe this weekend.