Meals Don’t Have To Be Expensive or Time Consuming

This is what we had for dinner last night. Pictured is my taco salad. I did not put tortilla chips on mine but Hubby did.

My salad was a bed of romaine lettuce, a few cut up cucumbers, a tiny bit of red onion, a bit of cut up tomato, and a couple of black olives diced fine. Then I added 3 oz. of taco meat that I cooked in a skillet. Finely, I added just a little bit of Mexican cheese which ended up melting on the warm taco meat. It was so delicious! This is a salad that we have often because we love it.

While I cooked the meat with the taco seasoning, Hubby made the salads. It didn’t take us more than 10- 12 minutes to make this dinner.

I paid $1.69 for the pound of ground beef and we used 6 oz. of it. We have leftovers for lunch tomorrow. It cost us just $.32 each for the meat. I made taco seasoning from scratch so that was just maybe $ .10. Now the cost is up to $ .74. I estimated the cost of the little bit of romaine to be $.33, the bit of cucumber in mine(Hubby doesn’t like cucumber in his Mexican salad; I do.) to cost $ .10, a bit of red onion to be about $.05, the few black olives to be about $.08 and the tiny bit of Mexican cheese at about $ .20. Hubby’s tortilla chips were about $.15. So the total for all of this was $ 1.65 or $.825 each.

Ten to twelve minutes to make and well under $2.00 for dinner. We drink water with our meals. Think of this meal the next time you are rushed and don’t know what to make for dinner. Quick and easy and you don’t have to run out to a restaurant instead. That is how you save money to pay off debt, fund your retirement, or save for something that is important to you. 


As I have gotten older, I realize that meals don’t have to be complicated or cost a lot of money. This dinner was more delicious than a fast food drive through pick up. Actually it was better than some meals that we have had out in restaurants. 


As I have been on my diet, I am realizing that we eat way too much food in our diets. So we are watching our portions which we did to some extent prior to my diet. But now we are serious about it!


The bonus here too is that making simpler meals like this cost less money than a lot of meals that people make. That will cut your grocery bills.


Do you have any simple meals that aren’t expensive that you would like to share?