Ideas For Gourmet Cooking on a Budget
How much do you pay for a meal in a fancy restaurant? How much just for the entree? Even on the low end of the scale, you could be paying around $15 per person for an entree. Sometimes you may end up paying $20-$30. Well, you can save a lot of money by cooking at home, and you can make a meal just as good, if not better than you can find in a fancy restaurant. You can easily cook up a gourmet quality meal at home with ingredients that you can easily find in your local grocery store, and with what you already have in your kitchen. If you do some planning, and look around in your store for some good prices, you can make a meal for $5.00 per serving that would cost $15-$30 in a fancy restaurant.
The most important thing to do is to plan the meal ahead of time, before you go shopping. A typical meal consists of a main dish (fish, chicken, pork, beef), a starch (rice, pasta, potatoes), and a vegetable or salad. For example, you may go into a restaurant, and order a steak; typically, it will come with a potato and vegetables. You’ll want to keep the three elements in mind when you plan your meal. The main dish, should be the primary focus of your meal, after all, you don’t go into a restaurant and order a baked potato in order to get the steak. So, you’ll want to start by deciding what the main dish is going to be. Look in your newspaper for circulars from your local grocery stores, and find out what is on sale. Pork chops are usually a good deal. I know I commonly find pork loin chops for around $1.00 per serving, and they are thick enough to stuff with other ingredients. Keep in mind the price per serving when you’re shopping. $8.99 per pound for tuna steaks may seem like a lot, but 1 pound is 3-4 servings, meaning about $2.25-$3.00 per serving… not too bad.
Decide what you want to do with the main dish. If the meat is thick enough, you can add a lot of flavor by stuffing it. Here, you can add things like cheese or sausage, or use your favorite stuffing mix. This is an opportunity to add a lot of flavor without spending a lot of money. You can buy a jar of sun dried tomatoes for probably around $5.00. That may seem like a lot, but one jar can go a long way. You only need a little bit to add a lot of flavor to a meal. You can also whip up a quick marinade to add flavor to the meat.
The sides are probably the least expensive part of the meal. Grab a head of lettuce, a couple of tomatoes, and maybe a little bit of cheese, and you have a great salad. You can also chop up some of the sun dried tomatoes, mentioned earlier, and use them to add some flavor to the salad. You can find several varieties of frozen vegetables in the freezer section of the store that are just as good a fresh. Just heat them up and serve. For a starch, potatoes, rice, or pasta are all inexpensive, and you can find several ways to add variety to them. Add some roasted garlic and a little bit of olive oil, or you can use the aforementioned sun dried tomatoes.
It isn’t hard to cook a nice meal if you just use your imagination. Choose your meat, and then decide on how you want to add flavor, and what you can do to make something a little different than what you usually do. Choose a nice inexpensive vegetable or salad, and a side dish, and you’ve got a complete meal. You can do it in your own kitchen, and you can make it for less than $5.00 per serving.
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