Dinner in a Pinch ~ What to do with these 5 ingredients?

July 16th, 2009

This has been a weird week or two ~ our schedules have been totally whacked out and the one night Ryan was home I had no idea what to cook for dinner.

I really wanted to get in the car and go out to eat ~ but we’re working on eating at home so I went in the kitchen and dug around.

Here’s what I found:

hamburger (bought on sale a couple weeks ago)
pasta (was looking for elbow ~ but we only had small shells)
tomatoes (diced in a can)
frozen corn (big bag $1 on sale)
an onion

I also had some homemade gourmet Garlic basil seasoning in the cupboard too. (if you don’t have Homemade Gourmet spices you can just use garlic and basil to season the dish

Here’s what I did:

Threw the shells in boiling water while I fixed the rest.

Browned 1/2lb of the hamburger and put the rest back in the freezer. (Normally would have used the whole pound, but it was just as good with half and we saved half the money)

Chopped up the onion and threw it in.

Added a spoonful of chopped garlic.

Added a can of diced tomatoes.

Added a cup or so of frozen corn.

When the pasta was done I mixed it all up in a bowl and served it up.

How’d it turn out?

Quite good actually. Even hubby asked ~ was this a recipe or did you just make it up? When I get that question I have to ask because he could either hate it or love it. This time he loved it.

I also quartered some cucumbers which we have plenty of from the garden.

When I added it up I think this meal came in right at $4.00. The thing is it ended up being more than enough for two meals ~ we had it again the next night (and it was better the second time around). So each dinner cost about $2.00.

Pretty exciting.

I have to say ~ I have never in my life thought about cooking dinner like this. I have to thank $5 Dinners for getting my brain going this way ~ it’s almost a game now! I’m having a lot of fun putting together dinner for less than $5!

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Menu Planning Monday 6/29

June 29th, 2009

Here it is, Monday again. I want to thank everyone who’s been helping me decrease my grocery bill. We had a blast at the store yesterday. We ended up saving over 85 dollars on groceries. Our bill was around $136 but we ended up with 5 or 6 buy one get one free meats, so we’ll have plenty of meat again for next week.

I thought I’d start sharing my meal planning with you all, so you can follow along (and give me some hints along the way).

So here we go:

These meals are in no particular order. Part of the problem with setting a meal schedule is my husband’s schedule is so irregular that I have a hard time sticking to the meal plan. So I’ve set up meals, but we’ll play it by ear when we’re going to have what.