By Cody Meek

So you want to eat the low budget way huh? Believe it or not but having a REAL home cooked meal is a lot more affordable than you might think. First off, cooking for yourself is always cheaper than eating out, ALWAYS! Even if it’s just a burger from McDonald’s. Even the worst cook can whip up a meal comparable to Olive Garden, all you need is the right recipes with some simple guidelines.

1. Spices are your friend

Spices are every low budget eater’s best friend. They are inexpensive, zesty, and can add your own personal flavor. Salt and pepper are of course the basic go to spices and can easily be smuggled from most every fast food restaurant, but on your next meal, try using garlic salt or lemon pepper instead. In moderation they add exponential flavor and zing to any boring dinner. A secret of mine is to add garlic salt to fried eggs. You will blown away! Try to add different spices to your rack.

Spices can turn canned ravioli into a gourmet meal for 3

2. Buy produce

Raw produce is extremely affordable. A dozen eggs is almost always under 1 dollar and can provide countless meals. A 5 pound bag of potatoes is usually around about $2.50 and is a common staple to tons of common recipes. Vegetables such as onions and peppers can often be purchased in bulk for very little money; since very little is usually used at one time, dry vegetables like these last for quite some time and are great investments. Produce can be used to simply add some color and flavor to your meals, or can be the meal itself. Iceberg Lettuce Wedge’s are made of 3 main ingredients; Lettuce, diced tomatoes, and blue cheese dressing. This cheap delicious dish is served at almost any high dollar restaurant.

Next time you are at the supermarket, pick up some fresh produce. You make dinner for the whole week for the price of one meal at Burger King.

3. Buy the cheap brands

You trying to eat on a budget…YOU DONT NEED TO BE BUYING NAME BRANDS. The “Great Value” peanut butter is just as good as the jiffy brand and over a buck cheaper. There is an off brand to almost any prepackaged food and quality is rarely sacrificed.

4. If all else fails use condiments

Condiments are grossly underrated in the cooking world. If there is little to no hope in a good meal, slab some ketchup on it. Lets say you overcooked your meatloaf, a nice glaze can fix that disaster. Packaged condiments can be accessed at any restaurant so there should be no excuse to not have many at hand. Putting your own little twist can make all the difference.Just adding slices of Jalapeno peppers to ranch dressing makes some of the best cheeseburger dressing you will ever have!

With these simple tips accompanied with some low budget recipes and you are ready to prepare a dinner that’s easy on your wallet, and filling to your family!

Tons of cheap frugal recipes.

Article Source: Cody Meek — Frugal Cooking For Beginners

By Bettina Berlin

In our hectic time with longer working hours and a very busy schedule of our loved ones, it’s often difficult to find the time to prepare home-made meals. And what happens when you don’t have the time to cook? It’s again pizza service or burgers, or a ready-made frozen meal from the supermarket.

But these kinds of foods are placing a strain on your budget, and studies have shown that they can have many negative impacts on your health. Fast food often contains lots of fat, and many ready-made meals are packed with unhealthy additives whilst lacking important nutrients.

Cooking yourself is a much cheaper and healthier option. With good planning, preparing your own food does not need to be time-consuming. In fact, you can prepare delicious healthy meals in half an hour or even less if you follow the tips below.

1. Be organized
2. Keep your meals simple
3. Choose fast cooking foods
4. Choose foods that require little preparation
5. Use prepared foods

1. Be organized

Plan in advance what you will cook. A weekly plan before your shopping tour will ensure that you will have all ingredients you need. It also saves you the daily What-should-I-cook-tonight problem. Further, know your kitchen and keep it tidy. You will be much quicker when you know precisely where to find your tools and ingredients.

2. Keep your meals simple

It’s usually quicker to use fewer ingredients than to prepare a complex dish with many different foods. Stick to a basic “vegetable + starch + protein” meal: One or two types of vegetables, a starchy food (rice, pasta or potatoes) and a protein-rich food (meat, fish, eggs or legumes).

3. Choose fast cooking foods

Some foods take longer to cook than others. A kilogram piece of meat will take much longer than a chicken filet because it’s bigger. Potatoes take longer than pasta. And hard veggies like pumpkin and carrots take longer than mushrooms or marrows. If you are in a hurry, choose the foods that are done quicker, and leave the longer cooking ones for days with more time. Another great option is fruits and salads: They don’t need to be cooked at all.

4. Choose foods that require little preparation

Foods that need to be peeled (e.g. potatoes or carrots) obviously will keep you up longer than the ones you just need to wash, like marrows or pepper. As for sizes, it’s less work to peel one or two big butternuts than three to four small ones. If you can get foods that are already cut or small enough to use them (cherry tomatoes), even the better.

5. Use prepared foods

Supermarkets offer a large variety of canned and deep frozen vegetables or fruit that can save you a lot of time because you just need to warm them. Make sure the foods are not processed, and that no or little preservatives, colorants etc. are added. If it comes to seasoning your food, ground spices are helpful. They might not taste as strongly as the fresh ones but nevertheless will spice your meal up nicely.

As you can see, preparing healthy meals in a short time depends to quite an extend on your planning. If you make clever choices, cooking can be a fast job. That does not mean your menu must be restricted and boring. You can come up with many variations of ingredients, and use a variety of spices to give your meals different characters. If you follow the tips outlined above, you won’t need to rely on take-aways and ready-made meals any more. You can prepare your own healthy food, be healthier and have more money for other treats. How about taking your family out to a decent restaurant and spoil them with quality meals for a special occasion?

Bettina Berlin is an Occupational Therapist with special interest in healthy nutrition as it can improve health and help prevent many diseases she saw her patients struggling with. If you want to learn more about healthy eating, visit http://www.elishas-quick-recipes.blogspot.com today and learn how to make your favorite dishes healthier and how to prepare healthy meals in the little time your hectic schedule allows you!

Article Source: Bettina Berlin — Fast Cooking – 5 Top Tips How Your Food Choices Can Create Delicious Healthy Meals in 30 Minutes

By Eleanor Knowles

A male relative once said to me “Oh, nobody cooks anymore”, to which I replied “Well I do, every night”. I thought everyone did. Then I began to find out that maybe he was nearer to the truth. Sure, we love cookery shows on the TV and we read cookery magazines and recipe books for entertainment – but do we actually make any of the dishes that we’ve watched being cooked or that we’ve read about?

Probably not. Especially when it’s so easy to sling a ready meal in the microwave and wait for the ping. Or order up a takeaway. Or get fast food from a drive-through restaurant.

Why make a big deal out of cooking?

Well, having a go in the kitchen could help us all to be healthier and slimmer. Grab an apron, and read the checklist below to find 10 top reasons why.

1. “You” time in the kitchen – enjoy a little quiet time to muse on the day while you prepare the evening meal.

2. The feel-good factor – everyone loves home cooking, but rarely get it, so just wait for the complements!

3. It tastes great – of course it does, because you can enjoy all of your favourite foods and none of the things you hate!

4. Knowing what’s in your food – you made it, so there are no nasty hidden additives.

5. Eating more healthily – without even noticing, mainly because fresher food is more nutritious AND it won’t be bulked up with fillers or fattening additives.

6. You have control – over portion sizes (a BIG problem with takeaway foods), ingredients and timing of dining.

7. Cheaper than takeaways or eating out – and better quality food too!
8. Healthier than a takeaway or eating out – definitely, and your body will thank you for it…

9. It’s fun – just try making bread if you don’t believe me! All that clattering of pans in the kitchen can be very relaxing too, it’s a great stress buster.

10. Satisfaction – the sense of achievement you get from providing a delicious meal really does produce a feeling of wellbeing, which lasts all through the washing up (especially if you persuade someone else to do it).

And don’t worry if you think you can’t cook. If you can work out the instructions for heating up something in a packet, then you can easily cook a simple meal from scratch. Cooking a chop is no more difficult than toasting bread under the grill. Even raw vegetables have cooking information on their bags – boil in water for a while!

So get down and dirty with the oven, or among the pots and pans, and enjoy what my mother-in-law calls “playing about in the kitchen”.

By Delores Robinson

There was a time when the health and fitness movement was warning us of the hazards of lard and telling us vegetable oil was a better choice when cooking. These days, professionals are warning us of the dangers of many vegetable oils and heaping praise on Gourmet extra virgin olive oil as the healthy cooking oil.

The health benefits of extra virgin olive oil are being discovered every day it seems. Once this oil was thought to be only beneficial to the skin. Now new studies have shown that extra virgin olive oil is very heart friendly and can slow down or even prevent the growth of some types of Cancer cells.

So you see, there is a healthy choice that you can use when cooking for your family. It’s Gourmet extra virgin olive oil! Let’s forget about the health benefits for one moment. This oil just taste better than many of the bland vegetable oils on the market. Not only that, but the first pressed extra virgin oil can have distinctive taste depending on what region of the World it comes from

In recent decades, California has started producing some fine extra virgin oil that can rival that of the best oils from Italy, Spain, Greece and other traditional produces of this valuable oil. Try some oil from California producers and see if it isn’t every bit as good as the more traditional producers from around the World.

When cooking with oil from olives, remember that EVOO should never be used at higher cooking temps. For this type of cooking, you’ll want to get oil that is blended with Canola oil or try using olive oil labeled “Pure”. These types of oils have a higher smoke point that EVOO.

Now you can improve the health quality of the food you serve your family and increase the taste, simply by switching from vegetable oil to a Gourmet olive oil. And the price is right also, many are surprised how affordable it is when compared to vegetable oil.

Delores Robinson is an experiences cook who is constantly experimenting with new recipes. She is also a lover of Gourmet olive oil and her hobby is trying the Worlds best olive oil from producers from all regions. If you’re new to cooking with olive oil, have a look at this Guide for beginners titled “Olive Oil 101“.

Article Source: Delores Robinson — Hold the Vegetable Oil – Pass the Gourmet Olive Oil For Healthy Cooking

By Barbara Zagata

Much as I love to be in the kitchen, when the weather gets warm I’d much rather be outdoors, but even when it’s warm and sunny I crave old-fashioned comfort food. Frozen French toast just doesn’t do it for me and that breakfast cereal that imitates little Barbie-sized French toast is adorable but that just doesn’t do it for me either. When it comes to comfort food, you just gotta have the real thing, otherwise you’ll just keep eating and eating until you find it. These days, it’s getting pretty hard to find it, unless you make it yourself.

The problem with French toast of course is that if you want to feed a family you’re going to be standing at the stove for a half an hour, unless you’ve got one of those nice big griddles that holds 8 slices at a time. But there is an alternative!

The best French toast I’ve ever had gets baked in the oven! How sweet is that? No flipping, no burning…and sweet? The maple syrup and brown sugar are baked right in! It gets even better—this recipe gets made the day before so you can just chill on your morning off!

Another amazing time saver in the morning—frittatas, like Italian quiche, only without the crust. You simply mix eggs with cheese and veggies, some bacon if you like, and you bake it. Add a little side salad and you can enjoy the leftovers for lunch later. Frittatas can be enjoyed at room temperature too.

When people actually cooked at home a lot more than they do today, they didn’t have 100′s of exotic recipes that used 3 tablespoons of some crazy condiment kids won’t eat anyway. Recipes like fritttatas and French toast were designed for practicality—they’re highly economical because they use things up…old bread, roasted asparagus, cheese.

Oddly enough this highly economical, practical food was comforting to more than your bank account. The flavor of high quality ingredients like eggs from the farmers market and real butter satisfies more than our taste buds. Our brains can distinguish real sugar from something synthetic. If we don’t get it, we’ll keep trying. That’s one of the reasons for over eating. Real cinnamon has a positive effect on blood sugar levels. Natural flavoring only satisfies someone’s bottom line.

Food designed for profit just doesn’t have what it takes to truly give you what you came to the table for. Home cooking doesn’t have to be complicated or time consuming when you learn the basics. You’ll eat less if you eat higher quality because real food doesn’t just please our taste buds, it deeply nourishes our souls.

For tried and true recipe ideas check out “Wow! Look Who’s Cooking” by executive chef Barbara Zagata of Santa Barbara Soul Food. This compact collection of just 12 recipes represents the best of the best. Barbara cooked with children for over 6 years before compiling this collection. These are the recipes most requested by kids and adults alike and you can down load it right now because it’s an e-Book! Start cooking tonight!
http://www.sbsoulfood.com

While there check out the video for my favorite French Toast! The recipe comes in pdf form when you order “Wow! Look Who’s Cooking!” Just a little bonus gift from me…

Barbara Zagata is the chef and proprietor of Santa Barbara Soul Food, Inc., originally an organic catering company based on teamwork and earth friendly values. She began teaching children how to cook when asked to volunteer at her son’s alternative school. Since then, Barbara founded Camp Cucina, “a culinary crash course for teens,” as well as other programs designed to bring families together through inspiring food choices that empower the individual while creating a sense of community.

Article Source: Barbara Zagata == Cooking Short Cuts From a Pro – This French Toast Never Gets Flipped and Never Burns