This was dinner the other night. It was not just budget-friendly, but downright cheap with a capital CH.
- bean burger patties, using 2 cups of mashed, cooked pintos, a cup of cooked barley (for chew), some chopped onions, chili powder, salt, 1 egg and a handful of bread crumbs from the freezer. (The bread crumbs were the pan scrapings from several batches of cornbread. I can scrape about 1 tablespoon to 1/8-cup of crumbs from each pan of scratch cornbread. Then save in a container in the freezer.) I fried the bean burgers in ham fat (stored in the freezer) combined with veg oil. Very good! I offered mustard and BBQ sauce to everyone for topping the patties.
- oven-roasted potato wedges, using potatoes bought in November for 10 cents/lb. I had exactly 5 packets of ketchup (1 per person) from the horrible lunch at a fast food place, the day of my biopsy. (Anything would have tasted horrible on that day, so I won't knock the ff joint too much.) It's been a while since I made a batch of ketchup. I'll do that again the next time I open a large can of tomato paste.
- dried fruit, part of the tray of dried fruit given to us at Christmas
- dill cucumber pickles, homemade last summer with garden cucumbers
- sautéed garden greens (kale and mustard greens) with onions, sautéed in ham fat/veg oil. The garden greens are from late summer plantings, and will continue to give me fresh greens until the end of the month.
This was one of those dinners that probably cost just under $1 to feed the 5 of us. Add in cookies and milk, and we're talking a dinner for 5, for well under $2. Not bad!
