Meals on a Budget: A few of my tricks

I'm in no way saying I wrote the book on planning meals on a budget.  Remember the budget we're talking about here, less than $1.09 per meal per person.  Jack in the Box sells 2 tacos for $0.99 and Taco Bell sells better tacos for $0.60 each, and they're making a profit off that, so maybe Jack in the Box and Taco Bell should get together and write the book on meals on a budget.

Here I thought I'd compile some of my thoughts, tips, and tricks for how to cut costs without cutting flavor if you're a normal person (like me!) and not a mega-corporation.  I'll do more complete follow-up posts going into the details of each of these items and how to use them to your full advantage in future posts.

1. Buy in bulk.  ...when you should.  This is tricky, because it is rarely good to buy fresh strawberries on 25 lb scales, while it is nearly always good to buy rice in this manner.  There are exceptions, and I'll go through that in the post on "Buying in Bulk."
2. Shop around.  This is probably the best advice I could give you, if you take it to heart and do it correctly.  More info on "how to do it right" will follow.
3. Waste not, want not.  To really pull off the low-cost, high-flavor meal plan, you will want to rethink what is "waste" and what is food.  So you've just roasted a whole chicken and all that is left after you've picked over it for all the meat, the bones are trash, right?  WRONG!  They're the base for an excellent chicken broth that will have a depth of flavor you can't get out of a can or a box and will have a wonderfully satisfying thick mouthfeel to it.  I'll share more on this topic in the post on this.
4. Buy in season.  This pertains to anything with a growing season and limited shelf life, therefore fresh produce.  Some things in the produce isle keep so well they almost don't qualify for this, like onions, Russet potatoes, garlic, etc..  Other things have a "boom" season where they suddenly are really cheap for a few weeks, like corn.  The only way you'll be able to work very many fresh fruits and vegetables into this budget is to keep an eye on the season and associated deals.  Some things are never in season where you are, and these things are probably best avoided except for special occasions.  More details in the post on this.
5. Learn new skills.  If you've never grown a windowsill or backyard garden, canned surplus garden produce, made your own bread, beer, or cheese, you'll find that these skills can provide some R&R while also contributing great flavor without costing you much in terms of dollars.  Of course, if you're a total novice in the kitchen, just learning to butcher your own whole chicken or cook dry beans will save you tons of money, so realistically evaluate where you are in your development and please try not to go from barely being able to boil an egg to trying to make cheese in one day.  A large portion of this blog is dedicated to learning new skills, so I'm not going to do a single post on how valuable this can be.
6. Improvise.  You probably already know how to do this outside the kitchen....  but do you know how to do it within the confines of your kitchen?  There are many little substitutions and short-cuts you can take to make your life easier.  Let's say a recipe calls for 2 Tbsp of milk, but you have none on hand.  Did you know you can buy powdered milk that sits on a shelf for a year or more and reconstitute whenever you need milk?  It doesn't taste that good to drink, but it works just the same in recipes.  If it calls for honey, you can substitute 1:1 with brown sugar if you don't mind the change in flavor.  It asks for buttermilk?  You can coagulate normal milk with some lemon or lime juice, or even white vinegar.  Cream?  You can sometimes get away with skim milk and butter.  I don't know if I'll do an entire post on this, it's kind of something that I wouldn't think of unless I'd been in the, "Oh no, the recipe needs this right now and I don't have it, what do I do?!" situation.  I'll probably work this in with recipes as I go.
7. Take advantage of "free" food.  Like wild dandelion greens in your yard, wild berries, a friend's uber-productive grapefruit tree or pepper plants, a relative's sudden boon year of pecans, etc..  (If you plant a garden, you'll also find one thing you planted is producing so much that you can't keep up with the harvest, so do, please, return the favor.)  I don't mean root through your neighbor's garbage.  I have a multitude of stories on this, but unless I remember something particularly memorable, I'll probably incorporate those stories into other posts.
8. HAVE FUN!!  Let your kitchen be the one place in your house where no one ever argues.  Let it be a place where once you step across the threshold, you leave everything else behind and only have fun and food.  If you go to an ethnic market and see some odd fruit or vegetable on sale for less than a dollar a pound (and it looks like most of that weight is not rind or seed) that you've never seen before, BUY IT.  Take it home, look it up on the internet, find out how to prepare it, and enjoy the adventure.  Celebrate in how hard-core you are, and celebrate how you made something so excellent that your entire family is asking for seconds out of kitchen scraps a dollar's worth of dry ingredients.  Be proud of yourself, and for the first few weeks of this experiment put two slices of regular, store-bought toast next to every person, and monitor the ratio of toast-to-meal eaten.  When you get two full slices of toast and an empty plate back, that's when you know you're doing it right.

Well, that's all the "majors" I can think of tonight.  There are a ton of subtleties, but it's hard to do a good post on "here are the main things to do" that also includes when buying 25 lbs of fresh strawberries actually makes sense.

Stay hungry, my friends!