Stretching That Food Dollar...

Well my food stretching is usually done with chopped meat which is my boyfriends favorite. I buy a double package of meat. I spilt it in 1/2. I will make 1/2 into a meat loaf. The other half we will have hambergers, hamberhelper, sloppy joes. Then when the meat loaf is left over and we're sick of it I will sometimes turn that into meat sauce for spaghetti and meat sauce so that none of it goes to waste. I am doing the same sort of thing with the london broil I made this past weekend. My boyfriend had 2 meals of it and tomorrow I will make some frozen veggies with rice, add the meat with some terriaki sauce in a stir fry. Again, no wasted meat.

I am using more beans and rice these days. We love potatoes but they have gotten pretty high. i like to make chicken thighs with cooked rice and put some cream of mushroom soup over it. I'm the only one that eats veggies so I just get them frozen. I don't get the ones with the sauces though and I get the store brand. I usually shop at Aldie's. They are really cheap. I made a big pot of chili yesterday and we will eat on that for a bout 3 or 4 days. Tomorrow I will make some corn bread to go with it. I also make what my granddaughter call buttons in chicken broth. It is like dumplings and noodle crossed. add some potatoes and we have a meal for several days.

i've become really good at making something to eat out of nothing it always seems to amaze my hubby. he'll look in the fridge and say we need to go shopping and then next thing you know i'm whipping something up that would be enough to feed an army

We're not particularly good at the food stretching thing, and we eat a lot of the convenient food as well. I do make a few things partially from scratch, though pretty much everything I cook involves some prepared foods. The best way we are able to stretch our food dollars are to buy a lot of store brand stuff. It may not be as good as the name brand stuff, but with a well stocked spice cabinet, it can be edible, and sometimes even tasty. :)

There are quite a few food stretching ideas out there. The first and most obvious is- Cook it yourself at Home. Also be very careful what you buy with your food dollar. Read the labels. Never buy anything previously cooked. Each time the food is cooked some nutrients are leached out and Lost. One of the worst deals in cooked food is Breakfast Cereal. Ready to eat Breakfast Cereal has very little food value, and for this reason is an expensive food. Natural Oat Meal makes a Great tasting and nutritious Breakfast. Don't buy the Quick-cooking, get the Old-Fashioned Quaker Oatmeal and cook it for Breakfast. Get recipes for most anything on the Net, and learn to Cook!

It might benefit you to go to your local library and check out a few books on cooking. With the millions of books published out there, I'm sure there are at least a few that center around cooking delicious meals while on a budget. That said, I wish I could help, but as I live at home I rarely do the cooking for the household, so I don't have many other ideas to share. Best of luck to you, though!

We always have corn bread, beans and rice int he house. Locally, you can get beans .99 a lb (if you buy them loose), sausage goes on sale for .99 lb (green onion, Italian, Cajun, etc all home made!), corn bread is a quarter. YOu make a pot of bean with 1lb of sausage, do corn bread one day and salad the next. For three of us we get 2 dinners out of it. Other meat stretching ideas: meatloaf, soup (you could do this easy with your left over chicken; use it for meat in the soup and the bones to make broth), lasagna.

We don't buy prepackaged food at my house. We cook everything from scratch. It also helps provide compost for our compost pile, so we can later put it on our garden to grow our own veggies. we raise our own meat, so we don't have to buy that at the store. We raise our own eggs, and grow our own fruits and veggies. So our grocery bill is down to the things we don't have on the farm - milk, cheese, flours, butter, and anything we can't grow in our climate that we still want to eat.

A few good meal ideas are baked or broiled chicken and rice. It's filling and it streches. Also you can never go wrong with Hamburger helper or tuna helper meals. Sure it's not from scratch but it requires very little and produces a whole lot. I've also figured out that shopping in bulk helps a whole lot too. I tend to shop at wholesale warehouses instead of gorcery stores. You can also find really easy recipes on-line for 10-30 min meals. Happy cooking.

I have been using less meat lately. I still cook meat with almost every meal, but there is less meat and more rice, pasta, beans, and veggies. Casseroles are a really good way of stretching food. Right now I have a lot of rice, beans, pasta, canned veggies, canned condensed soups, tuna, and cereal. I always have some fresh fruit and veggies too.

There will be more of a strain coming for the grocery store prices. Watching the news to day and they stated that it will still be going up on some products. That was something that I didn't really want to hear but that is what abc news was talking about before I left that house. I just hope that things will get better soon. I do know how to make a few things from scratch. But there are still things that I would love to learn how to do. Making bread and cakes from scratch I would really like to do but right now I'm just getting by with the simple things. I also cook leg quarter and I like to season them and then cook on the Georger Foreman grill or either just bake them. They come out good both ways.

We always have plenty of mince and sausages in the freezer. Also, we have baked beans in the cupboard. I have a simple dish that uses sausages and baked beens, so if I have to cook (hubby does it usually), then I will use those. We are finding that while we are spending a little more on food at the moment, we are still not spending as much as a 5 person family, and there are 6 in mine.

I've noticed that no matter what I do, I can't spend less than $200 a week at the grocery store. At best I can do $150, but that usually means I've forgotten something. I recently went through a phase where I was doing everything homemade. Including bread! That really didn't seem to help because instead of spending $2 on bread each week I was spending about $10 on flour, sugar, butter, etc. What I will usually do is shop at the wholesale club each week. I will buy my meats and drinks there because they are much cheaper, plus I get so much more. I feed a family of 7, so buying meat in bulk really helps. Each package of meat I buy will usually get us 2 or 3 dinners, so instead of buying 7 different meats a week (one per day) I can just get 2 or 3 a week and come up with different ways to prepare them. Preparing home cooked food is easy! If you have a slow cooker you can do almost anything from scratch. Toss a pot roast in the slow cooker, add veggies like potatos, onions, carrots, celery. Add a cup of water and some salt and pepper and voila, 8 hours later you'll have dinner. I'm really big on flavor, so I will usually buy some Mccormick seasonings. They make a good one for pot roast in the slow cooker. You could also add a can of soup, for instance pork chops with cream of mushroom soup. Add some stuffing and a bit of water too and you've got almost a full meal. You want anymore ideas, just let me know, I've got tons!

I just make big meals and then put the rest in Tupperware, it lasts a few nights at least. I also make a big pot of chicken soup or chili, chili is awesome because you can eat it different ways and there's a bunch of it that will last a few days. chili mac chili spaghetti (just use the chili as sauce) chili dogs those are dishes i use with the left over chili. I also get canned foods, boxed dinners, and snakes and the dollar store to save money, because usually after that there isn't much else we need from the grocery store.

Twoey you wrote to sedel That your meatloaf is always so greasy. Try using ground turkey or a better grad of hamburger to get a less greasy meatloaf. For meat loaf I use the 90% lean hamburger or ground round

I don't do the cooking, my husband does. He does miraculous things with only a little money. One thing that I can attest to, whether I am with him and we eat together, or whether I'm in Canada and I have to rely on my own way of geting food (I oudln't cook my way out of a tin can so I tend to eat ou a lot) when enterting a store we make sure NOT to buy any more than we planed o buy when we went in there. No use spending a truck load of money on stu that we really don't need.

Im the cook around here.....and i HATE it. My husband wont pick up a pot or pan though, so I have no choice. With groceries getting so high, I discovered a store called ALDI..at first i didnt like it because its mostly generic brand, you have to either buy your own bags, or bring your own, and you have to pay a quarter to get a basket--but you get it back when you return it. So, I started bringing my stash of walmart bags with me and I discovered that even though its off brand stuff (some of its not) most of the packaging is very similiar to the regular brand, so i figure they are made in the same place. Ive saved money by shopping there and buying what I can there and then if they dont have something I need (like fresh veggies/fruit and certain meat) ill pick that up at walmart. Aldi has a gallon of milk for under $3! Anyway, thats how I save..im not very good at stretching food, but I try with making a menu.

I shop at Aldi's. Nothing stretches a dollar like that store.

Rice is the one thing we always have on hand, it stretches the food servings. BEing from Louisiana the last 17 years it is on the table at every meal. We eat a lot of stews like shrimp stew, chicken stew, one thing about it about anything will make a stew, thicken the gravy and put it over rice. We have chicken legs and thighs always, there is baked, fried, boiled, barbequed, we always have beans, goes over the rice, plenty of can vegetables, make vegetable soup. Corn bread, all kinds of seasonings, a little seasoning can change the whole taste of certain things. Onions, bell peppers, garlic, we use these at the start of every thing, makes a roux which is what makes the gravy. I think if you would get a cookbook and use it you could find all kinds of recipes better yet just try googling it on here to look for food that stretches the budget.

With pricesthe way that they are it is getting harder to find ways to stretch the food dollar. I have quit buying potatoes since they are so expensive and I try to replace them some with macaroni and stuff like that. I wish I had some tips for you but I really don't.