Cooking Under a Budget-An Exploration

I've been doing a lot of cooking as of late and not much blogging about it. Tonight was a humble attempt at cooking quickly and cheaply on the fly. I ended up making sloppy joes and instant mashed potatoes last minute because I was feeling lazy and didn't want to spend more than 15 minutes in the kitchen but didn't want to just throw something in the oven and forget about it. Thankfully, I had a can of Manwhich Sloppy Joe mix.

Okay, it's not the most glamorous meal in the world but the local grocery store was running a sale this weekend and I had some frozen ground beef in the back of the freezer for a 'lazy day" along with a can of mystery Manwich in the boyfriend's cupboard sitting forever. All I needed was the bread buns on sale for a ridiculous 80-ish cents and I was good to go. Altogether, the whole meal of sloppy joes and mashed potatoes prolly cost about 5-6 bucks with all the necessary components.

The main part of the meal got me thinking after I talked with a friend concerning better frugality and creativity in our everyday spending habits. My buddy works a lot of hours just to make ends meet and so to cut his budget, he buys and cooks in bulk to eat throughout the week but hearing his complaint on the common fallback meal of mushy lentils, beans, and ground beef mixture rationed over a whole week, it caused me to wonder if there was a better way or at least one with more variety? For my cheap meal tonight, I bought the lean beef on sale at 3.12 for a pound and the can was roughly 80 cents as well as the 8-pack of buns so altogether about 59 cents per sandwich. Can I make more meals as cheap as this if not cheaper and still taste delicious and perhaps...even look a touch amazing and without having to resort to instant canned/boxed food?

An even greater challenge to the idea of budget meals is that the easy answer of just making a large quantity of said meal for leftovers is almost out of the question because:

1. It's just my boyfriend and me to eat the meal and its leftovers.
2. The boyfriend has a low tolerance for leftovers past the second day unless I want to be a piglet and I cannot eat ALL the leftovers myself before they go bad. In the least, have an option to make the leftovers less recognizable as leftovers?
3. It must be relatively quick and easy to make because again, I'm making enough for two people with perhaps 1-2 days of leftovers so taking several hours to cook a relatively small amount seems counter-intuitive to the end goal making no matter how cheaply to cook it a moot point if the time invested outweighs the cost of convenience or at least my patience.

I figure the best way to accomplish then these series of requirements is to most definitely cook with foods on sale and in season and given the cheapest foods are bought in bulk and should mostly be main-stay foods that will have multiple uses rather than solo ingredients used only once. Some foods like eggs, milk, butter, dry pasta, and spices are easy to keep on hand with multiple uses but perishable items like fruits and vegetables will take some extra planning to ensure I make the purchase worthwhile and usable over the week. Likewise, specialty foods like feta cheeses or even some types of meats and the like must most definitely require some forethought in having a later purpose if there is more than enough for cooking for one type of meal. An example are vegetables that can be put in one dish today and perhaps a frittata or a stirfry the next?

Some of my favorite vegetables to keep on hand for this reason are actually onions and garlic. They last a long time in the fridge and are pretty quick to cut up and add flavor and substance to most dishes. Even I am inclined to chop up an onion and some cloves of garlic to toss with some dried herbs into a regular grocery-bought jar of spaghetti sauce just to give it an extra special kick.

I'll give this some more thought and think more on how to cook creatively under a set budget.