Great Meals under 5$

My husband and I have been trying to find ways to cut down on our grocery bill every month without compromising the taste and quality of our daily meals. I found this amazing blog that offers amazing budget-friendly recipes:

Damn Delicious

So far, I have reproduced 2 of her recipes: The Easy 15-minute Lo Mein (above) and The Sweet & Sour Chicken.

Both require little and simple ingredients. These are typically meals that you can find at Asian restaurants for more than double the price.

Also, coming from someone who could only boil water a few months ago, I can guarantee you will love these quick recipes! Super easy for beginners!

Here are some of our tips for $aving

Why shouldn’t you go to the store with an empty stomach?

Because you will purchase snacks and foods that are not on your list. You are hungry. Your natural instinct is to purchase that pre-made meal or that chocolate bar. This extra cost could be easily dismissed if you eat something before you leave your house. I also suggest bringing a water bottle… My husband often is thirsty while grocery shopping and that 3$ water bottle at the store is definitely a NO-NO.

How can you plan simple meals at the least cost possible?

I often look at different food blogs for simple recipes, look at my pantry and judge whether the recipe will yield multiple servings at the lowest cost possible.

The Lo Mein, for instance, made more than 8 servings and it is meatless! Of course, you wouldn’t want to be eating that for days. My husband and I often eat it for supper (x2), then bring it for lunch (x2). We always end up eating something different for supper the next day, but we will always find a way to finish the leftovers before it goes bad.

Our motto is NEVER WASTE FOOD.

I was able to make the Lo Mein with ingredients that we already had in our fridge (Spinach, onions, soy sauce, ginger). That’s the TRICK! ALWAYS plan meals with stuff that you already have, or at least the MAJORITY of the ingredients.

Low mein basically consists of vegetables with chinese noodles. The sauce is soya sauce, ginger, sugar and Sriracha sauce.

Whatever vegetables you have in your fridge + Chinese noodles. SIMPLE. Our spinach, onions, green/red peppers were about to go bad, so we just sauté them and VOILA there we have it – Lo Mein.

Then, if you look at my Turkey salad above, I used a leftover burger my husband grilled on the weekend and added it to leftovers green/red peppers, onions. The only thing we had to purchase was the 0.99$ green salad (good for 2 servings!).

Lastly, we had lean steak last Friday, which cost us about 6$ for 2 lbs at our local asian market. This gave us at least 8 servings. We ate it with one cup of rice each and my husband brought a lot for his lunch.

Easy Bistek Tagalog

This recipe was taken from Panlasang Pinoy, one of the best Filipino cuisine blogs that I found on the Internet. He also offers cooking lesson via youtube, which is great since I am definitely a beginner!

It requires minimal ingredients – onions, soy sauce, garlic, lemon, which are ingredients that most have already in their pantry/fridge. We just doubled the marinade because we had twice the amount of beef.

All in all, we often spend less than 300$ on food at the grocery store because we follow these simple rules.

REMEMBER!

• Use items you already have in your pantry OR use ingredients that can be incorporated to different dishes.
• DO NOT waste food.

Enjoy,

Elle ❤