Mine was cooked pasta + two cans of tuna + one can of Campbell’s condensed soup. Condensed clam chowder worked surprisingly well.
See my prior thread for some easy ideas:
But one hack that’s always worked (and I mentioned in said thread) is to have several cans of Rotel ready as a multipurpose additive for food.
Second, in terms of easy to cook in large quantities at low prices, I will always mentioned slow cooked pork dishes. Even with meat prices being what they are, I can get pork roast or loin for $2.99 or less (often far less) on sale at least biweekly.
Pork roast in slow cooker in the morning, with beer, Rotel and chilis? Hell yes. Get a 5 lb bag of potatoes and you’re done for a week, or a couple of pounds of rice or dry pasta at a good price point.
Pork is cheap (frequently cheaper than chicken) and versatile. And on to chicken. Drumsticks, and thigh/drumstick quarters (bone in) are very cheap, and easy to prepare with homemade or purchased seasonings. Pick a starchy side as above, and boom. Cheap eats.
Lastly, add some greens for better nutrition. Frozen broccoli isn’t peak, but roasted in a hot oven it’s still darn tasty! Frozen spinach can be sauteed in a pan as an easy and cheap side, or you can do as I do and make a slow cooker saag in quart sizes, freeze a bunch in store gladware, and have as needed.
I used to absolutely love to cook and became quite good at it. Now I hate it. I realized a while back that the reason for this is that I used to have much more free time and cooking elaborate dinners was something of a hobby. Now I’m up at 0445, out the door at 0600, and am lucky to be home by 1700. Cooking dinner is just a chore. But I still do it.
Which is one reason I actually like doing the menu planning. It means I don’t have to think about it as much whenever I get home to make dinner. Some of the stuff is already prepared/thawed/prepped and I just need to cook it or put it together.
One way to ease into menu planning may be to simply make whatever strikes your fancy and then make a note of the meals you made that you enjoyed, with annotations on how difficult it was to prepare and what you’d do differently to prepare/plan for next time. Do that for a month or two until you have a couple of solid week’s worth of dinner ideas with a solid roadmap on what you’d need to do to prep them to make the actual cooking less onerous. Then organize them so that you can prepare the ingredients together a day or three ahead of time without each meal being repetitive. (Chicken alfredo followed by chicken fajitas would be fine by me. Chicken fajitas followed by chicken burritos would not be.) It also makes grocery shopping much easier as you know at the beginning of the week exactly what you’ll need for that week’s meals.
Give yourself an out if you need it. Just finished a really long day at work? Don’t beat yourself up if you decide that’s the day you come home and have a bowl of cereal for dinner, or even just decided to stop by Subway on the way home because you don’t feel like cooking that night. Don’t let it become a habit, but don’t paint yourself into a corner that you may regret.
Antithesis of frugality, right there.
One person. One package bacon. At least 3 meals.
Watch for bacon on sale
Buy a few pkgs. Freezes well.
Buy a chest freezer and a Costco or Sam’s Club membership. Possibly a vacuum sealer, or freezer paper. Bulk meat, pick up a giant sack of rice or beans. For meat you could also look into buying a half or quarter cow and butcher the rest yourself. Lentils and split peas, other grains like barley, last forever and make good soups and such.
And when you have nothing left but the carcass, roast it again, and then boil it for soup. Broth, the last few scrids of meat, and whatever leftover veg needs using up- voila! Another couple of lunches.
Since you’re spending a bunch of money already, OP, consider a subscription to a great meal planning app like this one. You can make your own notes, tags, add meals to the schedule, schedule leftovers, pull recipes straight from the web, and once you get a big database of collected recipes it gets easier to figure out what to make for dinner with the ingredients you have on hand.
Learn to cook. That is the basic answer.
A bag of rice. Not Uncle Ben’s or Minute Rice but actual dried rice. It is not easy to cook but it is cheap around the world.
Potatos. Not the frozen, chopped potatos that you would like to use, but the unwashed unpeeled potatoes. Soups, fries, stews, cassaroles.
A bag of flour. There are so many things that can be done with just a bit of flour. Dumplings, pastry, pies, bread, pizza, the list goes on and on.
These are the basics. You should also have some sugar, salt, yeast, some kind of fat like oil or lard.
It all boils down (sorry about the joke) to knowing how to cook. Everything that you ever wanted or love to eat, starts out with just a few of these items.
All that bacon, beef, and chicken sounds expensive. If you were not a vegetarian, you are now: that 5 kg bag of rice you can get for $15 has 18,000 calories. And so on.
But easy to learn, or just get a rice cooker. Mine finally died so I got a “new” one for $5 from St. Vincent’s.
Mostly, I wanted to congratulate you on cutting your daily food bill by half or more. That’s actually pretty awesome.
Here’s my suggestion for “bachelor chow” I used to make fairly often.
1 package of those “Rice N Sides” or “Pasta N Sides” by Knorr (Example). Pick whatever flavor(s) look good to you. Assemble and prepare to cook according to instructions. Add 1 (or two!) handfuls of mixed frozen (or canned) vegetables. Add 1 (or two!) handfuls of some protein - browned ground beef, canned chicken, beans, whatever (this MUST be fully cooked before being added, but it’s a great use of leftovers from something else. Including leftovers from restaurant meals.) Cook according to instructions (you made need an additional minute or two if the result is “soupy”. Unless you like it as a soup/stew). Takes about 20 minutes start to finish.
Also go back and re-read the bits about tacos. They’re very flexible.
Actually… from a young age I have preferred the stems, which are completely edible. Worked out nicely when my spouse was still alive - he’d eat the florets and I’d eat the stems. Very efficient.
If you’re not a freak of nature like me you might consider using broccoli stems in stews or even soups. You can grate them and mix them into cole slaw type foods as well.
Huh.
The store I work in we can’t roast 'em fast enough - we have people who know the schedule and line up just before the chickens come off the spit. They go fast. In my store. YMMV.
But that’s a good point - nothing wrong with doing a bit of research on the rotisserie chickens at a store.
Costco has the roasted chickens for $4.99, but I don’t like them. They taste funny and the meat is slimy or something. I seldom eat chicken, now I think about it. I prefer beef and sausage and pork.
I can cook. I am a pretty good cook, actually. I can make a lot of stuff, I promise. 
Do you have an Aldi store near you? If so, it’s worth checking out. They carry very few name brands, but I’ve found the house brands to be consistently good.
No, I don’t. I have Safeway, Costco, Bel Air or Raleys. Walmart, of course.
30something posts and no mention for RAMEN noodles?
the mother of all cheap eatings - and good hot comfort food for cold winter days
Perfect YOUR sandwich
It occurred to me that a majority of what I eat every week for lunch is a sandwich and so what if I could make it better than anything I could ever buy anywhere? Turns out I can, and it’s also hella cheap.
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I make my own wheat bread. A two pound loaf lasts a week, it’s very easy, the house smells amazing, I am certain it was a major factor in me losing 40 lbs of corpulence and keeping it off.
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In season I hunt through local food markets for fresh produce. It’s affordable, the people are cool, and the food blows the doors off the grocery store fare.
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Meats, local butcher shops are not cheap, but you can find great cuts and supplement them with the regular Boar’s Head or whatever. It’s still better than anything you can get at a Jimmy Johns or Mikes.
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Sauces. I like Sir Kensington’s Sriracha Mayonnaise and a local Deli Mustard but I am always trying new flavors. Turns out this is most of the defining taste notes of a good sandwich and the ability to mix and match with any product on this planet leaves any business in the dust.
I have to say Knorr stuff is good.
It’s not Michelin star good. But it’s good.
Cheap as dirt.
Upgradable.
Gotta be better than fast food.
And ramens can be used to build other dishes, such as an actual ramen dish(I like using the flavor packs for marinades)
My contribution to the thread is don’t skimp on the fresh fruits and veggies, both for flavor and nutrition. I always have some fruits or fresh veggies around, even if its just a couple of apples for when I’m feeling snackish. Fresh veggies in a dish can really kick up the visual appeal and make a meal that much more satisfying.
I actually eat a ton of salads from the build your own salad type places, those places are not cheap.
My biggest problem is changing my mindset and it helps if I have some exciting new ideas to try.
I try so hard to keep food costs down, but ours are outrageous. My husband is allergic to most of the suggestions here. My kid has a feeding disorder so I can’t just feed us all the same thing.
But I make a lot of great recipes that aren’t too expensive. Tonight I’m making Coconut Turmeric Chicken Soup.
You can do a lot with canned beans.
And canned vegetables. But in a pinch, frozen are better, and they tend to be cheaper than fresh.
When I look at our food costs as high as they are, they are way lower when I’m cooking, especially when I’m taking stock of the food we have left and using it up in a new recipe.
Example, I made butternut squash soup Tuesday. Yesterday I had like a half of a cubed butternut squash left over, so I found a recipe online for a butternut squash and black bean skillet. Boom. Squash consumed, and that’s two dinners for pretty cheap.