Adventures in Debt

In an effort to reduce my grocery bills, and also to start eating different recipes, I made the dreaded Experimental Meal tonight. Now, since I live alone this isn’t as daunting an event as in my sister’s house, where my brother-in-law will running screaming out of the house when she says those three words.

Tonight I took a look in my fridge and started searching around on AllRecipes.com for ideas. This site is my favourite one for recipes, as they’ve got such a huge database of them, plus users can also rate them, which is a bonus. There’s also a handy feature that lets you type in a few ingredients, and it will search for recipes with those ingredients in them.

On tap for tonight:

• pasta
• feta cheese
• garlic

My father used to enjoy making a variation of this meal, using olive oil, capers and hot peppers, which was not one of my favourites, as I don’t really like capers. But the idea is a sound one.

So I whipped out the frying pan, poured in a little olive oil, and tossed in a few garlic cloves. I sprinkled some dried oregano, basil and cayenne pepper. Then I cooked up the pasta and took out the garlic cloves from the pan. I dumped the pasta in the pan, and then transferred the whole lot back to the pot. I sprinkled in some feta cheese, gave it all a swish, and poured it into a bowl.

Voila!

Approximate cost for the meal:

• 50 cents for the pasta
• 10 cents of feta cheese
• pennies for the spices and garlic

Total: Less than $1! And it was tasty, tasty, tasty.

What are some of your cheap-o recipes? Leave a comment and let me know.