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| Yogurt, blueberries and almonds - 50 cents |
Aldi has 2-packs of tomatoes for 89 cents, but I don’t know
how big those tomatoes are. Blueberries are 99 cents a pint. Strawberries are
$1.49 per pound. Regular (73% lean) ground beef is $10.99 for a 5-pound chub,
or $2.20 per pound. “Super Dog” hot dogs are $5.99 for a 5-pound package, or
$1.20 per pound. Barbecue sauces are 99 cents for 18 ounces. Yellow mustard is
69 cents for 20 ounces. Pickle relish is $1.29 for 16 ounces. Salad dressings
are $1.39 for 16 ounces.
Kroger has hot dog and hamburger buns for $1.00 for a
package of 8 buns. Milk is two gallons for $5.00, or $2.50 per gallon, limit of
two, and only through Sunday the 15th. Cheese is $3.79 for 12- to
16-ounce packages, which is a good price for the 16 ounce packages. Cottage
cheese is two pints for $3.00, or $1.50 per pint, or 16 ounces. That’s $2.25
for 24 ounces, which is the size carton I usually of cottage cheese coming in.
Ice cream is $1.88 for 48 ounces, or about six ups, but only through Sunday the
15th. Boneless chicken thighs are $1.99 per pound. Raspberries are
97 cents for 6 ounces, or about a cup. Green beans are 99 cents a pound.
Cucumbers are two for $1.00, or 50 cents each. Corn on the cob is 10 ears for
$3.00, or 30 cents an ear.
There are some pretty good prices here, but I’m having
trouble putting them together into menus. I’ll be mostly working with the
ground beef for $2.20 in the 5-pound chubs.
A bit of background material, since we’re dealing with a
5-pound chub of ground beef here, and have to keep to around a quarter to a third
of pound per person per meal in order to keep the cost of the meal down.
First, a pound of 73% lean ground beef should yield about a
cup and a half of cooked meat, assuming that the fat and juices have been
drained off and nothing (onions, etc.) has been added. (Thanks to onceamonthmeals.com
for this info!)
Second, a five pound chub of ground beef is a lot! And since
we need to keep it to about a quarter to a third of a pound per person to keep
the cost down to where we want it, it will last for several meals. So what do
you do with it? Here are some ways to cook large quantities of ground beef (or
ground turkey) without spending hours over a hot skillet – in the CROCK POT, in
the OVEN, and in WATER. Of course, you can divide the ground beef into 1- or
2-pound packages before it’s cooked, too, but it’s handy to have the cooked
meat on hand when you’re running late or you don’t feel like cooking it. Or you
can make a whole bunch of hamburger patties, spread them on a cookie sheet to
freeze, then stack them in a freezer bag with waxed paper between the patties
and freeze them. The waxed paper makes it easier to separate them later, and
freezing them first makes them stack flat, which also makes it easier to
separate them.
But now to some recipes and menus.
Let’s start with your basic grilled hamburgers. If you make
them a quarter of a pound each (do you remember when Quarter Pounders came out
and everyone thought they were huge?), the patty itself will cost 55 cents
each. I assume you’ll want a bun around that, for about 15 cents, plus another
10 cents or so for the pickles, ketchup, mustard, onion, and lettuce. That
brings us to 80 cents for the hamburgers, and another 10 to 20 cents if you
want some fresh tomato in it. Let’s skip the tomato, shall we? Unless you can
slice it paper thin like they do at the fast food joints. An ear of GRILLED CORN ON THE COB for 30 cents,
some COLESLAW or LAUREL’S COLESLAW for 20 cents, and
fresh pineapple (about a fifth of a pineapple per person), and it comes to right
at $1.50 per person. Or you can have tomato on your burger and skip the
pineapple. Or skip the bun and have both the tomato and the pineapple.
My aunt’s friend, Toni, was a great cook. She was also a recipe
collector. I think she had even more cookbooks than I do, and that’s saying
something! Toni also had a drawer full of recipes she had clipped from the
paper, from magazines, from fliers, from friends, and from just about anyone
who published, printed or shared recipes. When she died, I was allowed to take
whatever recipes I wanted from her drawer. CABBAGE GOULASH is one of the recipes I took from her drawer. I have no idea where
she got it. It’s good, though, and so I’m sharing it with you. Using all ground
beef instead of half sausage, it comes to just about exactly $6.00, and you get
four big servings. That doesn’t leave any room for something to go with it,
though, so we’ll have to go over $1.50 per serving. Some carrot sticks would be
good with it and wouldn’t cost very much. Be sure to get carrots and cut them
into sticks yourself. The “baby carrots” usually cost more than twice as much
and, for some reason, seem to disappear faster.
The secret to budget meals built around ground beef is, of
course, to add lots of cheaper ingredients to get the bulk you want without the
cost of the ground beef. HAMBURGER QUICHE uses eggs, cheese and milk as those extra ingredients. If I were
making it, I’d use whipping cream instead of milk, and I’ll give the cost both
ways. Using milk, a whole quiche would be about $3.25. With whipping cream, it
would be about $3.65. Let’s assume you’re using milk. The quiche would be a
great breakfast on its own (and well within the $1.00 per person that I assume,
though well over the budget breakfast of 50 cents per person), but it’s not
enough for supper. You could serve ice cream and fresh raspberries (one cup of
ice cream and a fourth of a package, or a fourth of a cup, of raspberries per
person) for another $2.25, which would bring the total to $5.90, or just under
$1.50 per person. Or you could make your own YOGURT and serve that with the
raspberries for $1.70, and have coleslaw, too, for a total of $6.15, which is
just slightly more than $1.50 per person. The raspberries are the expensive
part of these options, at 97 cents a carton, so you might want to skip them
altogether. I’ve included them because that’s a great price and it’s good to
splurge occasionally. Blueberries are 99 cents a pint, so you could have half a
cup of them instead of the quarter of a cup of raspberries. Without the
raspberries, you could have plain ice cream for dessert (a splurge, but the
quiche is pretty light and you might have complaints from the rest of the
family about having eggs for supper) and sliced tomatoes to go with the quiche.
Arrange the tomatoes nicely on a lettuce leaf and the plate will look a lot fuller.
A pound of tomatoes, divided among four of you, will keep the cost to just
under $6.00, or under $1.50 per person.
Have you had a chance to attend one of the DOMESTIC DIVA’s
demonstrations at the Hub? She demonstrates ways to make cheap, healthy food on
Fridays, from noon to about 1:30 or 2:00. Check them out if you have a chance. Her demo of YOGURT making was a big hit a few weeks ago.
Budget Breakfast –
Breakfast for 50 Cents per Person
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