Your very favorite as-cheap-as-possible recipe

[pegkerr]

I am starting to compile the grocery list for the week, and since we are retrenching, I am looking for rock-bottom price recipes. Nutritional main dish recipes that you actually like. Kid-friendly and easy a particular plus.

I remember one we ate pretty often when I was a kid, a fondue recipe we called "Blushing Bunny." I think I got it from Camp Fire Girls. Why the weird name? I think it is meant as a sort of sideways joke, a tip of the hat to the better known fondue "Welsh Rarebit," which a child might hear as "Welsh Rabbit."

Take a can of Campbell's tomato soup. Do not dilute it. Stir in one egg, well beaten and shredded cheddar cheese (I think we'd put in somewhere between a half cup to a cup or so). Heat gently until hot and thickened. Serve by pouring over toast and eat immediately. I think this serves 2-3, depending on whether you are serving kids or adults.

Like I said, I remember loving this one as a kid, but when I mentioned this one to Delia, she wrinkled her nose in disgust when I made the mistake of telling her the ingredients list. I know that adding the egg to the soup sounds disgusting, but when it is stirred in and heated up, you really can't tell it's there at all. It just is there to add protein and thicken it, I guess. I might make it anyway and insist that they try it at least. It is certainly dead cheap.

Mom used to serve spam and rice pretty frequently, but I'm not quite tempted to revisit that old memory. Rob remembers dinners of fried boloney when he was growing up, but I don't think he's nostalgic for that one, either.

How about you? My kids are picky, but give me your best shot anyway.

Edited to add: All three hate onions, broccoli and mushrooms. The girls hate potatoes (yes, potatoes!), brown rice, and bell peppers. Delia hates cooked tomatoes, cooked apples and cooked oranges and is very unpredictable about meat. She has tried and rejected a number of meat substitutes--impossible to predict, but she doesn't seem to like tofu-based products very much. She is hit or miss on most other vegetables, but less likely to eat them if they are cooked.

Fiona would eat nothing but carbs (pasta) if I let her. White, of course. I prefer whole wheat pasta, but they are much more reluctant to eat it.

Beans are also unpredictable. Rob will eat lentils, pinto beans and kidney beans (reluctantly); girls will not. The girls adore baked beans, however. Go figure. Rob will eat green beans (even canned!), girls, there is no predicting.

Rob will eat kale reluctantly, girls will not.

Edited to add again: My personal favorite suggestion, among all these comments, is moony's suggestion that I teach the girls basic photosynthesis: "You're hungry? Go stand in the yard for an hour."

Comments

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Thank you for asking the question; my power steering went out last week, and I'm sort of at the 'look at how much money I can save if I stop eating!' point.


Are the girls okay on sweet potatoes? I was a super picky eater as a kid, and I liked them better than regular potatoes.

You can bake 'em, or mash 'em with some butter and brown sugar, or try a very southern, kid-friendly dish:
Bake a bunch of sweet potatoes till tender. Mash with a little butter. Spread a layer in a casserole dish, cover with a thin layer of mini marshmallows, repeat till your dish is full. If your potatoes are still hot from baking, make the last layer marshmallows; you can stick that in the oven for about 20 minutes. Otherwise, cook once for about 20 minutes, add a layer of marshmallows, and stick that in the oven for 12 minutes. It is a little time consuming, but yum.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

The trouble with inexpensive food is that it costs a lot in time. I mean you can make your own baked beans for about 10% of what canned ones cost, but it takes 12 hours soaking and then three hours cooking. Also, it isn't healthy, you pretty much can't do both at the same time.

And cheese is expensive! Tinned food is expensive! I've fed three people on fifteen pounds a week, and those things were just out of reach -- cheese was a rare treat.

Almost everything I cook has onions in it, and so isn't much use.

But how about "2 meals for 4 from one chicken"?

You buy a chicken for about $10. You prod it with a fork, sprinkle salt&pepper and whatever herbs they'll sit still for and roast it for an hour at 200C/400F. When it's nearly done, you tip all the fat it has created into a wok on medium heat, and add finely chopped carrots and whatever other vegetables they'll stand, garlic if that's OK, and 3 ounces of white basmati rice per person. Stir, a lot. Boil a pint of water and add a tablespoon of soy sauce. When the rice starts to show signs of sticking slowly add this water so it can absorb it as it cooks. Meanwhile, the chicken will be done. Cut up all the breast meat, including the skin, and add it to the wok. Refrigerate the rest of the chicken. When the rice looks like rice, and all the liquid has been absorbed, serve, calling it risotto. You're basically eating a pile of rice with some bits of meat and veg, but it's surprisingly tasty and filling, and as it has cheap root vegetables and rice, which is essentially free when bought in bulk, you can consider that the whole meal for four cost about $6.50.

The next morning, take the rest of the chicken and put it in a large saucepan. Cover it with water. Add an ounce of pearl barley per person and some salt, and bring to the boil. Add carrots, rutabaga and whatever else in the way of cheap root vegetables they'll sit still for, also herbs. Simmer at a low boil for an hour and a half. You can not do this in a microwave, you need a saucepan and time. When it has cooled, remove the bones if your family are picky about bones in their food like mine. (If I'm eating it myself, I just spit the bones out as I go.) Half an hour before you want to eat, heat it up again and when it's boiling, add macaroni-type pasta and let that cook in the liquid. Call it chicken stew. This also can be considered $6.50, or $7.50 if you serve it with bread... or you can make soda bread to go with it, and you can call it $6.75. (Will they eat soda bread? Want a recipe?)

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

That's true, I realized afterwards that I spend more on cheese than I do on meat.

And the time/money tradeoffs are significant. So the more you keep everyone informed (and involved?) about the goals, in the non-stressful times, maybe the fewer complaints you will be dealing with when push comes to shove. Like maybe it's important to spend a little more on prepared food on the nights you're stretched thin, or maybe your priority is that on a night you can have family dinner with no karate, you can serve something familiar and popular.

Definitely it's not a time for trying to expand eating horizons of people who are resistant, or to be spending time/money making anything expensive or fancy for everyone because you want to eat it yourself and you hope they might like it. But that doesn't mean depriving yourself of foodie delight - when you have time, you can make a filling dinner of ordinary stuff with a couple of servings of something more challenging on the side, eat one yourself, and look forward to taking the other one for lunch if no-one else expresses an interest. Pasta tossed with oil and parmesan, baby carrots, and a few garlic shrimp for example.

One of my food budget customs (as a not picky adult, previously feeding voracious teenagers) is that I never try to economize on vegetables. Because even the out-of-season fresh ones aren't very expensive compared to cheese and meat and frozen lasagna and take-out lunch, and the more likely I am to eat vegetables, the better.

[ladyvorkosigan.livejournal.com]

If you can get a good deal on chicken thighs (or whatever kind of chicken - they were recently on sale at my local grocery store) where you are, this worked well for me the other day. I threw it in a shallow glass pan in the oven with some chicken stock, sliced apples, onions, and some whole cloves of garlic, and cooked at 450 for forty-five minutes to an hour. Served with potatoes (or anything), it was pretty filling, and the apples really jazzed it up.

[qwyneth.livejournal.com]

Hm. Will your kids eat zucchini? What about if you disguise it in chili, jambalaya, or spaghetti? It would be a good addition to your victory garden as a single plant produces like mad, and I've found that it adds well to just about anything.

Also, we've been experimenting with egg drop soup lately. Add a bit of soy sauce and maybe sesame oil to some chicken broth, bring to a boil, then stir in some raw egg right before serving. You can also bulk it out with frozen veggies pretty easily. You can definitely see the egg, but it's fully cooked and the strands are firm. It's a little bland, but your kids like that, right?

I'd recommend going for lots of rice, beans, and pasta, but I see other people already seem to have that covered. ;)

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

Egg drop sounds about the same as Spanish garlic soup, which my roommate was addicted to. Water/broth, garlic, stale bread, and an egg if any were available. It's amazing the foods people will invent when there's nothing else to eat.

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

I don't know how much you've experimented with the tofu, but it might be worth a little--there's a lot of different textures and some people are as much texture oriented as flavor--even though I currently adore tofu, I'd rather go hungry than eat silken, for example, because i can't stand the texture. I eat firm or extra firm, and usually a local organic type which uses lemon juice as the coagulant, so it starts out faintly lemon flavored. If I need a quick protein fix these days, I marinate it with more lemon juice (which also helps pulls water out of it, so it gets even firmer), salt, pepper, and olive oil, before dumping the whole mix in a skillet and frying it up until it's chewy/firm and golden brown.

I'm making spaghetti for 20 this weekend, so I'll get to see just how much trouble this recipe is for more than one, but I can eat more than a half pound of tofu at a time. :)

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

Pizza tortillas. I don't like cooked tomatoes, either, but pizza sauce without chunks of tomato is fine. If that's the case with Delia, too, she may like this.

Use a skillet to brown a tortilla shell, flip, apply pizza sauce, grated cheese and whatever else to taste. Cover until the cheese melts, then serve.

[machineplay.livejournal.com]

Wow. You are in a jam there with those food preferences. You could try things like putting in some TVP with ground beef and such, for pastas, that might get under the radar. Here's some ideas. Good luck!

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Cooked linguine, thinly sliced ham, any palatable veggies, olive oil, garlic, herbs, and cheese.

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Lettuce, any fresh veggies, diced hardboiled egg, julienned ham, grated cheese, homemade 1000 Islands Dressing (mayo, ketchup, relish, lemon juice, sugar). Serve with whole wheat, homemade bread.

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1 tin Campbells Tomato Soup, 1 tin Campbells Bean&Bacon Soup (these are the same beans as in baked beans), 2 tins water, chili & garlic powder to taste, optional tin of kidney beans (try and get it past them :p), simmer until flavours blend. Serve in bowls over corn/tortilla chips and cheddar cheese, topped with more of same. Cheeze Whiz can be substituted as needed.

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Hamburger soup is basically browned hamburger, beef stock (made from cubes), barley, and frozen veggies.

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Baked beans and hotdogs (I used to use the cheap chicken dogs) heated up together (I added a little mustard and bbq sauce), served with toast.

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Spaetzle/spaetzen in any kind of stock with whatever the kids will eat or just with butter and cheese (and crushed croutons):
1.5c flour
.5t baking powder
.75t salt

Beat 2 large eggs, .5c milk/water, add to flour mix to make an elastic batter.

Boil 6c. stock or water, drop small bits of batter or press through a colander to make strands. Simmer until they puff and float. Test a few to start, add more liquid if they are too dense.

I use a double batch of these or a batch of milk dumplings (below) and a can of gravy ($0.59) to make a meal in a pinch. Mixing hot veggies in with and mixing with the hot gravy is nice, too. It is actually very filling and soothing. This is a good way to use up meat scraps.

Milk dumplings are so easy:
(2c flour, 1T baking powder, .75t salt) + (1c milk and 3T butter/margarine heated to simmering)

Mix gently, divide into about 18 rough balls, lay dumplings on surface of simmering stew (or gravy diluted with some water) in a wide pan.

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Parmesan Rice & Pasta Pilaf -- Spark.com

Serves: 6
Serving Size: 2/3 cup each

After the pasta and onion are sautéed, the oil is drained to minimize the fat content of this interesting pilaf.

INGREDIENTS
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 cup finely broken vermicelli, uncooked
2 tablespoons diced onion
1 cup long-grain white rice, uncooked
1-1/4 cups hot chicken stock
1-1/4 cups hot water
1/4 teaspoon ground white pepper
1 bay leaf
2 tablespoons grated parmesan cheese
1 tablespoon fresh parsley, chopped

DIRECTIONS
1. In a large skillet, heat oil. Sauté vermicelli and onion until golden brown, about 2 to 4 minutes over medium-high heat. Drain off oil.
2. Add rice, stock, water, pepper, and bay leaf. Cover and simmer 15-20 minutes. Fluff with fork. Cover and let stand 5-20 minutes. Remove bay leaf.
3. Sprinkle with cheese and serve immediately.

NUTRITION INFO
Calories: 165
Fat: 6 g
Carbohydrates: 13 g
Protein: 14 g

CHANGES I MAKE FOR A FULL MEAL:
- double everything but the olive oil.
- instead of vermicelli, use whole wheat spaghettini
- basmati rice
- ignore white pepper and bayleaf business
- measure water into the kettle and boil
- put sauted noodles and onions and oil and rice and a crumbled veggiebroth cube in a big casserole dish that has a cover
- pour boiling water over, stir well, cover and put in 400 degree oven
- takes about 45 minutes or so
- also put in peeled/wedge-cut sweet potatoes sprayed with canola oil and tossed with chili, pepper, salt, sugar, and garlic powder
- sprinkle pilaf with low fat parmesian and grated skim milk mozzerella or tofu cheese if feeling vegan

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

These are terrific suggestions. Thanks!

[machineplay.livejournal.com]

You're welcome. Here's a link to the chocolate muffins I'm making right now. http://machineplay.livejournal.com/1271033.html I can make several batches of these and freeze them, and they warm up in 20 seconds in the microwave. One of the things I always worried about was my daughter feeling deprived and a few of these are a fast way to make a kid feel very un-deprived. *g*

These Butterscotch Squares do use butter, which isn't cheap, I know, but I've never done them with margarine. They might well work okay. The thing about them is that they're just so easy to make and are a wonderful snack for kids:

2 cups oatmeal
1/2 tsp. salt
3/4 tsp. baking powder
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup melted butter
1/2 tsp. vanilla

Mix oats, baking powder and salt in a bowl. Add sugar and mix. Add vanilla and melted butter. Mix well. Spread thinly in two 8" pans or 1 large pan. Bake at 300° for 20 minutes. Let stand 5 minutes. Cut in squares. Allow to cool before removing from pan. Makes 18 to 24.


I don't know how old your kids are, mine is 13, and I'm teaching her to make pasta - fresh egg pasta with cheese and veggies is a meal on its own - and bread. The bread is something really simple and filling and since you're short on side dishes with the kids not eating potatoes, it might be a good thing to try.

Soft whole wheat flour is really nice and you can get some decent nutrition into them. A kid who won't eat store-bought whole wheat will almost always plough through fresh whole wheat right out of the oven, covered in margarine and jam. My grandma on my dad's side was a home ec teacher who raised six kids on almost nothing (my dad and his brothers had fistfights over the last potato - that kind of poor) and she was a big believer in letting the kids cram themselves full of fresh bread, especially when they made it themselves.

We have been really broke before and a friend and I used to split huge bulk bags of whole wheat flour and store them in Rubbermaid bins. I used to rely on biscuits, yeast bread, or soda bread to fill out almost every bloody meal. I didn't make bread for over a year after we got out of being that broke. *laugh* Randomly, you might find a pasta crank on Freecycle. It's a metal beast with rollers and cutters and my daughter says "It's like playing Playdough, only with food!"

Finally, I know your kids are super-picky, but it might be worth letting them grow some stuff if you have room. My brother wouldn't eat chard at the table, but he'd eat it out of 'his' garden, and we used to grow our own carrots and beans and peas. Every neighbor had a garden when I was a kid and we'd share between houses, what we had too much of. A kid might not eat peas at the table but eating them right off Mr. Christie's back fence was something else. *g*

Good luck. :)

[sraun]

Have you seen my Chicken Glop recipe?

Boil Pasta

In a separate pan, combine:
1 can tomato sauce
1 can diced tomatoes
Herbs & Spices
Protein
Vegetables

In our case, Protein is usually a cup of frozen cubed chicken - we buy boneless chicken in bulk, cook it, cool it, cube it, and freeze it in one cup quantities.

Vegetables is whatever seems tempting at the time - frozen spinach, mushrooms, black olives and green peppers are the most commonly used.

Herbs & Spices is another 'whatever I feel like' - there's usually some chopped garlic or garlic powder, cumin, a small dash of nutmeg or allspice, maybe some red pepper flakes, usually some selection of the stuff you'd find in a typical Italian Seasoning blend.

It's really 'start with the two cans of tomato stuff and add whatever's available / looks good at the time'. If you watch for them, you can get the cans on sale cheap.

[machineplay.livejournal.com]

I second the freezing cooked meat idea. I stopped ordering out once I started storing cooked, frozen diced chicken and ground beef in the freezer. There was just no excuse when a bag of chicken, a tin of gravy, a few cups of frozen veggies, and a batch of biscuits was dinner in 20 minutes.

Your 'glop' sounds a lot like my 'instant chicken cacciatore'. *g*

[handworn.livejournal.com]

This recipe came to us from Nova Scotia. One of these, reheated in the microwave 'til it sizzles, makes a marvelous winter breakfast with coffee.

Clara's Scotch Oat Cakes

Combine:
3 cups flour
3 cups rolled oats
1 cup white sugar
2 cups lard or shortening (cut this in)
2 tsp salt
1/4 cup cold water (if too stiff, use 1/3 cup)

Roll out (we actually just mush it down, filling an entire oblong cookie sheet-- the kind with sides), cut in squares. Bake at 375 degrees until golden brown at the edges (10 minutes or so).

[porcinea.livejournal.com]

I dunno about nutritious, but definitely cheap -- brown some hamburger meat (not the good stuff), melt in a box of Velveeta. Equalish amounts of meat and cheese. Stir in some salsa if you feel like it. Eat with chips.

[jenny-islander.livejournal.com]

Depending on how far back you have to retrench . . . it may be time to tell the kids to eat it or go hungry. Allergies are one thing. Food preferences are dispensible. OTOH, if your kids actually gag when they try to eat something, you just have to let it go unless it's that or starve.

That said, here are my favorite El Cheapo crockpot dishes.

1. Highly seasoned tomato sauce + cooked or drained rinsed canned chickpeas + 5 hours on Low = Chickpeas for Carnivores (because my husband, who thinks that meatless meals are an abomination, asked for it again). Meanwhile, cook some pasta (save the cooking water for soup). Pass the Parmesan if you have any; the pre-grated stuff often goes on sale super cheap and it's a good way to add flavor to a dish.

2. Dried pinto beans + plenty of cumin and chili powder + just enough water to keep the beans from scorching + 5-7 hours on Low = Bowl O'Pintos. If you can afford to run the oven, make cornbread to serve with these. (Be careful about the water. If you add too much, the beans won't be spicy.)

3. 1 ham hock (cheap, cheap, cheap!) + dried black-eyed peas + black pepper + water to cover + 5-7 hours on Low = Soul Food. Take the ham hock out, cool, chop the meat, and put it back into the cooker before serving. This would also taste good with cornbread.

For breakfast, instead of bacon or sausage (both expensive and fatty), consider buying beef heart. Get one that has already been cut into two or three hunks. Wash well, remove any veiny/valvy bits, fat, or clots, and cut into sticks about an inch thick. Season lightly with pepper, then brown in a pan with a bit of oil until cooked through or fry in butter next to the eggs. This is tender, delicious, lean meat. Don't tell your carnivorous family members what it is and they will gobble it up!