Saturday, March 3, 2012

EATING ON A BUDGET

Well, we've been quite poor this past month -not too sure why it's any different from any other month, but it has been a struggle. (not having credit in the US is good and bad!).
So, I've had to come up with some very cheap meals to get us buy and it's been both challenging and fun. I've learned to stretch food and instead of having leftovers (which I don't love), I've learned to create new meals out of leftovers.  It's amazing how many meals you can plan on $30/week!

It's also helped me make more things from scratch as that's always the cheapest.
We even started eating ground turkey (much to Jared's dismay - I think he secretly likes it). If I had to eat ground beef because it's cheap - then we had to switch to turkey. I just don't love ground beef.

I bought 2 lbs of lean ground turkey, 1 bag of frozen chicken breast and some veggies and we had:
burritos, taco salad, salsa chicken, cabbage rolls, sweet potato burgers and chicken quesadillas.
From scratch I made tortillas, cabbage rolls, perogies and buns.
We cut corn tortillas into strips and baked them for our taco salad.
 
I had leftover turkey mixture from the cabbage rolls because I didn't buy a large enough cabbage, so I just added some Worcestershire sauce to the mix, made them into patties and froze them to use as turkey burgers next week. We'll see how that turns out! I also made so many perogies and froze them, now we have enough to last us for a long time. They were so easy to make and so much cheaper -  especially here in the states - I've only found one brand of them, a small box of 8 or so!
I had leftover dough so I filled some perogies with apples, sugar, butter and cinnamon to make some dessert perogies - some to eat now and some to freeze for later.

I baked the apple pie perogies and they were good but not very sweet. Could have used a little sugar in the dough or an egg wash on top before baking.

1 comment:

Shannon said...

I do this a lot- plan meals for $30/month. My newest favourite one (I totally think switching out the ground beef for turkey would work here, too) is this recipe:
http://wightrecipes.blogspot.com/2012/03/cheap-easy-fake-out-korean-beef.html