5 Ways to Prepare Healthy Meals on a Budget
If you don’t have the time to prepare healthy meals, then you might also not have the money. Even if you do have a budget to work with, you might still wonder how far you’ll have to stretch your dollars to get a nutritious and healthy meal. Well, thankfully you won’t need to do that for much longer, because there are plenty of ways to get healthy meals without breaking the entire bank.
Here are some of the best ways to do this, and whether you live alone or have a family to feed, you can keep your budget low and your intake of healthy meals high!
1. Buy Your Ingredients In Bulk
This might bite into your budget a bit during the short term, but you will be spending less per month if you buy a lot of common ingredients in bulk. If you know that your family can eat a lot of vegetables, then buy those in bulk and get a couple pounds worth of each. It might cost more at the checkout line, but if you portion out your meals correctly, then you might have a few weeks to a month worth of food after just one grocery run.
This will require a bit more in the way of meal prepping as well as knowing what your family wants to eat, and that your family can handle eating the same type of food for a few weeks, but it allows you to spend some money now to save a lot later.
2. Buy Some Meal Kits
While the actual savings you get depends on which meal kit service you use to get your fresh fit meals, as well as your average grocery bill, you can save a bit of money by buying from some cheap meal kits. Most meal kit services that are cheap are not that way because of the quality of their food, but instead because of other things they leave out, such as printed recipe cards or excess packaging.
If you look through a meal kit’s menu you will be able to find chef crafted and made to be healthy prepared meals as well as meal kits where you can make the meal yourself. So no matter what you and your family might like, then you will find something that will work for you and your needs.
3. Use Your Leftovers and Make Your Food Last
If you find that you have a lot of leftovers from previous meals, don’t throw them away or simply make the same old meals that you made last week. Instead focus on finding a way to repurpose your leftover foods into new meals or into the meals that you are making this next week. Throwing food away isn’t just wasteful, but it can also mean throwing money into the trash as well. You can also make food last longer by freezing leftovers as well and then thawing them out whenever you are in the mood for them again.
Plus, it can be a great way to expand your cooking skills as well, by combining different materials as well into new meals. If you can make your food last, then you are saving money, saving food, and still eating healthy.
4. Use Your Money On Spices, Sauces, and Seasonings
Take some ground beef for example, or salad, or pasta. All of these are pretty plain whenever you have them on their own, but they really come into their own whenever you use spices, sauces, and seasonings to make them taste however you want. For example, you can use different sauces with salads to flavor the lettuce and other vegetables, or make different types of pasta with different spices and sauces.
By buying a lot of plain foods and then spending your money on things that can really add flavor to the foods, then you can save money without feeling like you are eating the same thing every single day. Plus, it can be fun to experience what all of the spices will do to the food, and you might find some amazing flavor combinations.
5. Make The Basic Amazing
Going off of the last point, you can take basic cheap dishes such as sandwiches, salads, and eggs and can spend your money on ways to make it fancy as well. If you can make a good gourmet sandwich you will never go back to basic ones, and you won’t be spending too much either!
You can spend very little money and have some very healthy and delicious meals, all it takes is a little ingenuity and some willingness to think outside the box! So don’t be afraid to get your inner chef out and start cooking some very healthy meals for your family!
