Need help with a 2 week menu.

[wolfy-hound]

You can usually eat cheaper on a home cooked from scratch than eating out (a meal, not burger/fries) or buying frozen dinners.

Tips from me are buy dry pastas on sale(10 boxes for $10), buy LARGE bags of rice(get a electric rice steamer for fast and easy rice cooking), and buy bags of potatoes. Not much is better than home made mashed potatoes.

I buy beef in large cheap roasts and cut it up myself into steak pieces, stew meat sized parts or smaller roasts. Watch for sales, I just got a large bone-in roast for $1.69/lb... cheaper than the cheap ground burger meat! Yes, it had bones, but I cut into manageable chunks and fit it into the crockpot with a bunch of cut up potatos, carrots, onion and whatever veggies you like(frozen are cheap, canned on sale). Serve that over rice to make it go way further than eating it by itself.

Don't forget EGGS EGGS EGGS. Eggs are great protein and fairly cheap. Add them to salad, make omelets one night, make quiche... gotta love eggs. Also, dry beans... cook them in your crockpot all day with a little leftover ham pieces and then serve over rice. If you make your own batter from scratch(it's super easy) you can have pancakes or waffles for dinner... do a "breakfast for dinner" one night.

You can have a really good meal with cooked dry pasta(try different shapes for novelty in textures) with a little butter, whatever frozen(warmed) or canned vegetables were on sale and a dusting of parm cheese. Add in things like olives, tomatoes, etc to add variety and fancyness.

Remember you can add salad to any of this. The key to spending less is to NOT get pre-prepared food. A 10 lb bag of potatoes will cost you $3-5. A box of flake mashed potatoes cost about $3. You can see how much further the raw taters go compared, and they are more versatile. That's how it is normally. The less that's done to it... the less it's going to cost you.

(and I make KILLER meatballs from scratch. I cook up hundreds of them in the oven on a sunday or day off, freeze them in small batches and have them as sandwichs, in sketti, or however I like.. NOTHING beats a homemade meatball!)