Frugal Cooking

A pickled bell pepper recipe easy and tasty enough, you’ll make excuses to eat them. Making your own condiments is extremely rewarding. Not only can you save a bit of money but homemade condiments allow you to add a bit of flair to food with a minimum of effort. These pickled bell peppers excel in [...]

Bread Maker Udon Recipe—Is it possible to have homemade Japanese noodles with little fuss? One of the nice things about living in Japan, is that recipe books come with ideas geared towards Japanese people. I’m not talking about cookbooks you get at the book store but the rather the ones you get when you buy [...]

T-Fal Home and Baguette—Dumb Name, Good Bread Machine I recently purchased the T-Fal Home and Baguette bread machine, known in the United States as the Emerilware Bread and Baguette. I had been wanting to buy another bread machine since my Zojirushi Home Bakery Supreme rusted to death, but around town, the T-Fal was selling for [...]

Pro Pur BIG Review—Is it worth the price? Clean drinking water is important to say the least and the best and cheapest way to have it readily available is to filter it yourself. When it comes to water filters though, the gravity feed filters, like the Berkey filters (which I do not recommend) and the [...]

One good way to stay frugal with your meals is to create a kitchen that just forces you to do so. With a frugal kitchen comes the need to be a frugal cook. With that said, here are a few things that you should put in your kitchen.   Less Processed Foods Processed foods always [...]

If you live in an apartment or a studio, where you don’t have any space for a real garden, then a mini garden is for you. What probably comes to your mind is why you would want one anyway. Well, mini gardens can serve two main purposes. First, it serves as an ornamental earthly piece [...]

exceptions.   There are two types of people when it comes to free food. For this, let’s take the example of two guys walking into a store – no, this isn’t a bar joke. There’s a little booth that offers free hotdog samples. The attendant offers both men. One guy takes the sample while the [...]

Personally, I’m the type of person where I don’t really care how much money I make or how lacking I am in terms of luxuries, as long as I can sleep at night on a full stomach. However, there are times when this ideal is just inappropriate. For one, I have a family, and I [...]

Everybody knows how to make nachos, since there are freely available tortilla chips in the market, and all one has to do is buy or make some salsa. In the spirit of frugality, however, convenience foods are a no-no, and that includes junk foods and tortilla chips. Also in the spirit of frugality you is [...]

I’ve mentioned getting a bigger freezer for frugal cooking quite a ton of times in my posts, and I usually say that it is for storing a lot of food that you buy wholesale. This is for two purposes – to reduce the frequency of trips to the grocery and for you to be able [...]

***Update 12/31/2011 I can no longer recommend the Berkey Light. The unit has quality issues that make it unsuitable for water filtration. Read my Pro Pur BIG Review for an alternative***   Frustrated by the Berkey Light Reviews on the net which are really just people selling the Berkey Light through an affiliate offer? Here’s [...]

  If you’ve just jumped into the frugality wagon, you’ll find that the kitchen is one of the best places to start. It is no secret that cooking your own food instead of having it cooked – and delivered – for you can cost less than half of your overall expenses every month; or even [...]

When on a tight budget, one of the first things we try to cut down on is the things that we whip up in the kitchen. While some people would just go on a diet and skip meals to conserve stocked produces, you can actually still have a full stomach if you know how to [...]

Ok, we’re all busy; I get it. That’s why I’ve put together these three simple dinner recipes, to get you cooking thrifty food but without resorting to the pre-packaged, pre-processed crap that you’ll find in your typical TV dinner / frozen pizza section of your typical grocer. Now to qualify to use the term simple, [...]

Strategies for Frugal Cooking In my last post on frugal meals, I made a multi-course meal for just a few dollars that had enough food to feed three people. Today, I’d like to share some things I do to make food stretch as well as save money. Along with that, I’ll share a recipe for [...]

Last night, my wife, daughter and I had a three-course meal that cost around $4.75—not per person but for the whole meal. Now this frugal meal wasn’t ramen surprise; it was a spinach turnover, cucumber salad and an apple tartine for dessert. On a forum I participate in, a discussion was going on about food [...]

Introduction: Looking for a Taco Bell copy cat recipe? Well you’ve found the best one on the net. I guarantee that if you follow the directions here, you’ll be making the best, Taco Bell style taco meat and I’m not even going to charge you for it. But first, let’s get a little background out [...]