Ways to Eat Healthy and Cheap

Eating cheap often conjures up images of hot dogs and chips, while eating healthfully makes you think of rice and beans. Thankfully, there are ways to eat what's good for you without spending a bundle that don't require hot dogs or beans (though both can be part of a healthy and inexpensive diet).

Learn to Cook

• The first essential component to eating well for less is learning how to cook. Buying convenience foods is not the best path to your goal of eating cheap and healthy foods. Cooking from scratch, however, is an excellent path to a good diet.

  Besides using cookbooks, you might also take a cooking class or ask someone who's a good cook to share some tips and recipes.

Cut Down on Meat

• Learn to let go of the emphasis on meat. Not only is this better for your health, it's also better for the pocketbook. Traditionally, many people serve a piece of meat with some starch and vegetables. You can instead serve the starch and veggies in bigger portions with a small piece of meat.

  Or you can slice meat very thinly to make it appear there is more meat on your plate than there actually is. Dress the meat with a simple gravy or sauce and pile on the vegetables.

  There are other ways to use meat more frugally. For example, consider making stir fry. This method of cooking uses a small amount of meat and a lot of vegetables to fill a plate. Round this out with brown rice for a healthy meal. You can also make soups that use just a small amount of meat along with broth and vegetables.

Learn to Use Coupons

• It's true that the vast majority of coupons are for prepared foods that might not fit in your plan. And even with a coupon, many prepared foods are more expensive than the homemade version of the food.

  But there are hundreds of coupons for healthy foods, such as milk, eggs and meats. Sometimes you can find coupons for dried herbs and spices and baking supplies.

Rework Meals to Make Two Out of One

• This is an old tip, but it works well with your new cooking skills. In addition, if you know you might only have to make dinner every other day, you might be inclined to spend more time on the first meal since you won't have to spend much time the next night.

  There's a well-known chicken trick that requires the roasting of one or two chickens and the future use of meat for, say, enchiladas, and the bones for stock. But you can do this with even pork tenderloin, using the pork as a traditional meal the first night and creating pork stir fry the second night.

  But to really ramp up the healthy aspect of your cooking and to make it cheap as well, use beans to full advantage. Cook a couple of bags of dry beans (black and pinto beans, for example) with canned tomatoes and seasoning and use the beans for several different applications. You can make bean soup and bean quesadillas. You can even mash the beans to use as a sandwich spread.