Cheap and Easy Dinner Recipes Ideas

Cheap and Easy Dinner Recipes Ideas

With food prices rapidly rising, it's crunch time for family food budgets these days. To help lessen the pressure on your purse, here are 10 suggestions for lunch or dinner entrees you can make for about $5 apiece. The following cheap meal ideas and easy dinner recipes will show you just what $5 can get you if you invest a little prep time.

Egg Entrees

Frittata is one flexible and quick cheap meal option. A dozen eggs will make about four servings , and you can keep the cost down by using whatever cheese, veggies, and herbs, or bread you have handy in your refrigerator. You know how there's always half a tomato or a quarter of an onion wrapped in foil or a little shredded cheese in the bottom of bag waiting to be rescued from the refrigerator.

Canned Tuna Entrees

Buying tuna on sale and making sure you get the water-packed kind is the key for this healthy $5 entree. You can sometimes find 6-ounce cans of solid white tuna canned in water for 88 cents on sale. With each can, you can make a tuna casserole for four, or you can make two servings of quick tuna pattie

Lean Steaks

A pound of steak makes about four sensible 3-ounce servings (cooked), or three 4-ounce servings. You can improve the taste and texture of lean steaks by marinating them in the refrigerator for a couple of hours. If you don't want to make marinade from scratch, using half of a bottle of light balsamic vinaigrette or bottled steak marinade adds about $1.44 to the total cost (a bottle of dressing or marinade can cost around $2.89). For $5, you'll get about 1.5 pounds of a lean steak (at $2.47 per pound) plus the marinade (either homemade or half a bottle).

Spaghetti

If you can get a couple of key ingredients on sale, you can make six servings of this popular American entree for about $5. Start with a 12-ounce box of multigrain pasta for about $1.25 on sale. You can either make meat sauce (1 pound of lean ground beef at $2.49, a 29-ounce can of tomato sauce at 99 cents, plus seasonings from your pantry) or a mushroom sauce (10-ounce package of sliced mushrooms at $1.99, a 29-ounce can of tomato sauce at 99 cents, and seasonings from your pantry). The total cost will be about $4.73 for about 6 servings