10 Cheap Dinners for When Money s Tight (Feeds the Whole Family

There's a weekend every month where the money's gone and the days aren't. You know the one. You open the fridge and it's three kinds of mustard, half an onion, and a jar of pickles floating in cloudy juice. And there's five people in the house who are going to want to eat again tonight, same as they did last night, same as they will tomorrow. So here's 10 dinners. Every one of them feeds a whole family. Every one of them I've put on my own table more times than I can count. On weeks where the checking account had a number in it that made me laugh out loud. Nothing fancy. Nothing that needs a special pan or an ingredient you have to hunt for. And number one turns one chicken into three suppers. That's the one I'd fight for. Number 10, the baked potato supper. A five-pound bag of potatoes runs about four dollars where I shop. That's 10 good-sized potatoes. Scrub them, poke them with a fork, rub a little oil and salt on the skins, and put them straight on the oven rack at 400 for an hour, not wrapped in foil. Foil steams them and you get a wet potato with a soggy skin and then people tell me they don't like baked potatoes. You don't like steamed potatoes. Nobody does. Then you put out whatever's in the fridge and let people build their own. Butter, shredded cheese, the last of the sour cream, chopped green onion, a can of chili if you've got one. One can of chili spread across six potatoes feeds six people, where that same can by itself feeds one and a half. That's the whole trick of it and you'll hear me say it about nine more times before we're done. The potato is dinner. The good stuff on top is the seasoning. Most folks have that backwards and the backwards way is what's expensive. Number nine, eggs for supper. I don't know who decided eggs were only allowed before 10 in the morning but that rule has cost families a lot of money. Here's how I do it. Dice up four or five potatoes, small small, because they cook faster and you're hungry. Into a big skillet with oil, medium heat, lid on for 10 minutes so they soften, then lid off and let them brown. Add a chopped onion part way through. When the potatoes are crisp at the edges, crack eight eggs right over the top of everything, break the yolks, stir it all together, salt and pepper, and pull it off the heat while it still looks a little wet because it keeps cooking in the pan. Feeds five. Costs maybe three dollars. Eggs have come back down some this year, thank goodness, and a dozen is still the cheapest protein in that whole store by a wide margin. Serve it with toast and don't apologize for it. My kids ask for this on purpose. Number eight, cabbage and sausage. Cabbage is the most underestimated vegetable in America. A head of it weighs three pounds and costs about two dollars and I have never once seen anybody excited about it in the checkout line. One pound of smoked sausage, sliced into coins, brown those in a big skillet first, all by themselves, and let the fat come out. That fat is the whole flavor of the dish, do not drain it. Take the sausage out, throw in one whole head of cabbage cut into ribbons plus one sliced onion and cook it down in that fat. It'll look like way too much cabbage for the pan. Give it 10 minutes and it'll be half the size. Salt, pepper, a splash of vinegar at the end to wake it up. Sausage back in, done. That's one pound of meat feeding six people and everybody gets meat in every bite. Over rice or with bread, that's a real supper for under five dollars. By the way, methods like this one, the way to build a plate so a pound of meat feeds six, I've got a whole book of them. Every trick I use to run this house on next to nothing, written down in one place. It's on my website, the link's right below this video, go grab it if you want it, I won't bring it up again. Number seven, beans and cornbread. A pound of dried beans is about a dollar seventy and it is the single cheapest hot meal in the American grocery store. Nobody advertises it, there's no commercial for a bag of pintos. Sort them on a plate first, you're looking for little rocks, and yes there are still little rocks, and yes somebody will crack a tooth if you skip it. Cover them with water and leave them overnight on the counter. In the morning, dump that water, cover with fresh water two inches over the top, and let them go on low for two or three hours with a chopped onion, a few cloves of garlic, and a piece of pork if you've got one, a ham bone, some bacon ends, whatever's in the freezer. Here's the part people get wrong, don't salt them at the start, salt at the very end, once they're soft. And don't add anything sour, no tomatoes, no vinegar, until they're already tender, or they'll stay hard on you for hours and you'll swear the beans were bad. The beans were fine, the tomatoes were early, cornbread alongside, made in a hot skillet, cornmeal, an egg, some milk, a little baking powder, salt, and hot grease in the pan before the batter goes in, that's what gives you the crust. That whole supper, pot of beans, and a pan of cornbread, comes in around three dollars and feeds six people till they're full, not till they've had a serving, full. And the leftover beans are lunch tomorrow, and if you mash them in a hot skillet, there's different entirely. Number six, rice and lentils with fried onions. Now I'll be straight with you, this one sounds like nothing, rice and lentils. I know, but it's the meal I make when there is genuinely nothing in the house, and it's better than it has any right to be, and the reason is the onions. Cup of rice, cup of brown or green lentils, cook together in about four cups of with salt, 40 minutes, lid on, low. Meanwhile, you take three onions, slice them thin, and cook them in a good bit of oil, slow and long 20 minutes, maybe more until they're dark brown and sweet, and half of them are crispy. Stir the lentils and rice together, pile those onions over the top with all the oil out of the pan, that's maybe a dollar fifty for a pot that feeds five. No meat in it at all, and nobody misses it, because slow browned onions taste like something rich, even when nothing rich has happened. Plain yogurt on the side if you have it. All right, we're halfway, and so far we've spent about fifteen dollars total across five suppers. The five coming up are the ones I lean on hardest, and the last one is the biggest stretch of a dollar I know. Number five, pantry noodles. A box of spaghetti is a dollar. A big can of crushed tomatoes is a dollar and change. That's your floor, and everything past that is whatever you've got. Get your water boiling, and salt it, salt it like you mean it, because that's the only chance you get to season the noodles themselves. While that's going, warm a good glug of oil in a pan with four or five cloves of sliced garlic. Low heat. You want it to go blonde, not brown. Burnt garlic is bitter, and there's no fixing it. Dump the tomatoes in, a pinch of sugar if they taste sharp, salt, and let it simmer while the noodles cook. Then here's the part that turns it from cheap food into good food. Before you drain the noodles, dip out a mug full of that starchy water and pour it into the sauce. That's what makes it cling to the pasta, instead of sliding off into a puddle at the bottom of the bowl. Restaurants have known that forever. It's free. Anything in the fridge goes in. Half a zucchini, a handful of frozen spinach, one sad carrot, grated. A can of tuna, drained, stirred in at the end, don't wrinkle your nose. That's real food, and it's been feeding coastal families for a couple hundred years. Number four, fried rice and what it's actually for. Fried rice is not a recipe. Fried rice is a chore that tastes good. It's the dinner you make on the night before you'd otherwise be throwing things out. Rice from a day or two ago, it has to be cold. Day-old rice. Because fresh rice turns to mush, and then you've got a sad pile of paste. Hot pan, hot oil, whatever vegetables are on their last legs, chopped small, the last two eggs scrambled off to one side of the pan, the rice in, soy sauce, and any bit of leftover meat you've got hiding in a container. That last inch of ham, three pieces of bacon, the chicken off the bones, all of it. Two forkfuls of meat is enough to flavor an entire skillet. Costs you essentially nothing, because you already bought all of it once and were about to pay for it twice by letting it rot. That's the part I want you to hear. The cheapest food in your house is the food you already have and are quietly wasting every week. In the drawer at the bottom, number three, biscuits and gravy. Flour, milk, and a half pound of sausage. That's supper for six, and it's the one that makes people the happiest, which tells you something about how much fancy has to do with anything. Biscuits, two cups of flour, a tablespoon of baking powder, a teaspoon of salt, and a stick of cold butter cut in until it looks like coarse crumbs. Cold butter, not soft. The cold lumps melt in the oven and push the layers apart, and that's the whole difference between a biscuit and a hockey puck. Then about three quarters of a cup of milk, stirred just until it comes together. Handle it as little as you can stand. Pat it out, cut them, bake hot, 450, 12 minutes. Gravy, brown the sausage, and when it's done, sprinkle a few tablespoons of flour right into the pan with all that grease. Stir it around for a full minute. That minute cooks the raw taste out of the flour, and if you skip it, your gravy tastes like paste. Then pour in milk, slow, stirring, and it'll thicken up on you fast. Lots of black pepper, more than you think. No sausage? Bacon grease works. Butter works. It's flour, fat, and milk. It's been feeding hungry people since long before any of us got here. Number two, soup, built all week. This one's less a recipe than a habit, and it saved me more money than any single dish on this list. Keep a bag in your freezer. Every time you cut vegetables, the ends go in that bag. Onion skins, carrot tops, celery bottoms, the tough outside of a leek, mushroom stems, garlic that's got away from you. Every chicken bone, every ham bone, every pork chop bone in the bag. When it's full, dump the whole thing in your biggest pot, cover it with water, and let it sit at a bare simmer for a few hours. Never a hard boil. A hard boil makes broth cloudy and a little bitter. Strain it out. What you've got now is a pot of golden broth that you did not pay one cent for, and it's better than the boxed stuff, which is mostly salt water with a picture of a farm on it. Now build. Potatoes and onion, carrots, a handful of noodles or a cup of rice, whatever vegetable is cheap that week. And if you want to make it a meal that sticks to your ribs, drop dumplings on top, two cups of flour, a tablespoon of baking powder, salt, and enough milk to make a thick sticky batter. Spoon lumps of it right onto the simmering soup, put the lid on, and don't lift it for 15 minutes. Not once. They cook in the steam and every time you peek, you let the steam out and they come out heavy. That's a full pot of soup for two or three dollars, built out of things you were going to throw away. And number one, one chicken, three dinners. A whole chicken runs around two dollars a pound right now, so call it nine or ten dollars for a good-sized bird. That sounds like a lot on a tight week. It isn't, because you're not buying one dinner, you're buying three. Night one, roast it. Dry the skin off with a paper towel, wet skin steams and goes rubbery. Salted heavy, all over, inside too. Set it on top of a pan of quartered potatoes, carrots, and onion chunks, so all the fat drips down onto them while it cooks. That's the whole recipe. 425 for about an hour and 15 until the juice runs clear when you poke the thigh. Rest it 20 minutes before you cut it, or all the juice runs out onto the board instead of staying in the meat. Everybody gets a piece. The vegetables underneath will be the best thing on the plate. Night two, you pick that carcass clean. Every scrap. There's more meat on there than you think down in the back, along the underside, and those two little oysters of dark meat right above the thighs that most people throw straight in the trash. You'll get two good cups off a bird that looked finished. That goes into pot pie or over biscuits with gravy or into a casserole with rice. Night three, the bones go in the pot. Water, an onion, whatever's in the freezer bag, three hours low. Strain it, add noodles and vegetables, put the last shreds of chicken in, and there's your soup. Three dinners. One $10 bird. Comes out to under a dollar a person, a plate, and every one of them tastes like you cooked. Now here's the part I want to leave you with. Look at what's actually on this list. Potatoes, beans, rice, flour, eggs, cabbage, onions, a bag of bones, and then look at where all of that sits in the store. Outside edges, bottom shelves, no packaging worth mentioning, no display, no coupon in the mailer. That's not an accident. There is no money in a bag of dried beans. Nobody's got an advertising budget for an onion. The money is in the middle aisles and what's being sold to you there is not food. It's the 15 minutes you're too tired to spend. The frozen skillet meal. The box dinner where you add the meat. The meal kit that shows up at your door with an onion in a plastic bag already chopped for more than that whole pot of beans cost. You're paying eight, ten, twelve dollars for one dinner and it feeds four people almost so somebody's still hungry at nine o'clock. They know exactly who buys those. It's the tired ones. It's the ones working two jobs who don't have a mother nearby to tell them a chicken is three dinners and the tireder you are the more you pay per bite. Here's the thing they'd rather you not work out. Every one of the 10 dinners I just gave you takes less real hands-on time than driving to get takeout. The beans cook themselves. The chicken cooks itself. You're in the kitchen 20 minutes tops. So here's your one thing to do tonight. Before you go to bed put a pound of beans in a bowl of water on the counter. That's it. That's the whole task. Tomorrow you'll be two hours of doing nothing away from a supper that feeds your whole family for three dollars and you'll have started the freezer bag with the onion skins. Now tell me in the comments what's the meal your family ate at the end of the month when the money was thin. Every house has one. Mine was potato soup and my mother could make it out of practically air. I want to hear yours because I steal these ideas from you all the time and I'm not ashamed of it. Next time I'm going to show you how I stock a pantry that makes every one of these dinners possible for about $40 once at the start of the month so the tight week never catches you empty again. I'll see you then.