Fine Dining on a Budget
InfoLink - Fri Oct 26, 2012I like to eat. I really like to eat. I have three boards on Pinterest devoted to food alone (Husband Approved Food, I <3 New Recipes, and I <3 Dessert) as well as another one entitled “Fancy Drinks”. However, if you’re anything like me, your budget is a little more Kraft Dinner and a little less Steak Dinner. What’s a starving student to do?
While the cheap pizza at our friendly neighborhood Dominos may sound appealing, especially when you’re buried up to your eyebrows in homework and readings, don’t do it. Just don’t. Or, if you have to give into the temptation, just limit the amount of times in a month you do it. Otherwise your pocketbook may be relatively safe but your waistline may be heading in an undesirable direction.
Fortunately, this is a good time to be a starving student. Gone are the days where you have to amass a full bookshelf of cookbooks for a few good recipes. Now, we have the INTERNET! Seriously, I learned how to cook from the internet. Mostly so I could feed myself, but also so I could feed a boy who I was trying to impress. (Hey, it worked! See the title of one of my Pinterest Boards above…). There are literally millions of recipes out there. Some good, some terrible, and most are fairly decent. You can find whatever kind of recipe you want on one of the thousands of Food blogs out there.
A few of my favourites are:
a blog dedicated to college and young adult cooking. They’ve also got a good pantry guide, which can be invaluable when you’ve moved out of Mom and Dad’s and you realize flour doesn’t just magically appear. They also have premade menus, and handy how-tos when you realize you don’t know how to how to use a crockpot.
a blog dedicated to South Beach Diet cooking. While I don’t follow South Beach myself, she posts some recipes that are literally sautéed vegetables with salt and pepper on them. Not exactly rocket science, but when you’re brand new to cooking, the step-by-step instructions and the inspiration for dishes help a lot!
This girl has priced out exactly what each recipe costs. Now granted, she lives in the USA and food is cheaper there, but still, it gives you an idea of what your meals cost.
Another source for recipes is the almighty www.allrecipes.com, which has thousands of recipes for everything, along with a rating system so you know if they’re good recipes or not.
Ok, you’ve got a recipe. Now check the ingredients. Try and stay away from specialty items as they can be expensive, and could expire before you use them all. Grains like pasta, rice, and quinoa tend to be great cheap fillers. They will help stretch your meal and bring down the cost, while still ensuring that you won’t go hungry. Try to stick to whole wheat pastas and brown rice for the higher nutritional value, although, I know some of you will ignore me on this and that’s OK too. Vegetables and fruits can fall on the more expensive side; so try to eat in season (to find out what’s in season when, click on this handy dandy little chart). Another way to save money on veggies is to buy in bulk, although, if you spend more money to buy more, but don’t eat it all, you’re actually losing money, so either share with your roommate or find a way to make it last (by freezing, etc). You probably don’t need me to tell you this, but you need fruits and vegetables, so bite the bullet and add their cost to your budget.
The most significant cost to your meal is usually going to be meat. As a starving student, you’re going to want to find recipes that de-emphasize the amount of meat in relation to your other, cheaper foods, like grains and vegetables. Many soups are great for this, as well as casseroles. Also, going meatless once or twice a week is also a good way to stop 90% of your budget going towards 20% of what you eat. If you do go meatless, (or if you’re a vegetarian) make sure you get your needed protein from other sources. Legumes, like chickpeas and black beans are both cheap and delicious, if prepared the right way, and they can bulk up a meal so that you don’t miss the meat as much. Trust me, I’ve fed my carnivore husband bean-based meals and he loves them just as much as other meals with meat as the leading star. Other good sources of protein include eggs and most grains.
(And yes, that is a bean dressed up in a cow costume.)
Now your final, and most important step. Plan your meals. Sit down before grocery shopping so that you at least have some idea of what foods you need to make the meals you want to make. Then you won’t end up eating croutons, chocolate pudding, a scoop of peanut butter and a banana for dinner one night. (That may be one of my actual meals… yes my friends were disgusted.) Try and look over your plan so that you are using bulk ingredients multiple times in the week to use them up. There’s nothing worse than buying a bunch of spinach for one recipe, and watching the rest wilt away.
My favourite meal-planning tool is www.ziplist.com. Ziplist has a button for your browser, much like Pinterest, and will let you save a recipe from anywhere on the interwebs. It not only saves the link and picture, but also grabs the ingredient list, so that you can easily add those ingredients to a meal plan and then a shopping list that can sync with your iPhone or Android. No, I’m not being paid to advertise them, I just use the website ALL THE TIME.
Cooking for yourself can be a daunting task, especially with a small budget, but with a little help from these resources you can do it. I believe in you.
