With the cost of living steadily increasing, it helps to have a few super cheap recipes for delicious, nutritious and filling meals on hand for weeks when you may be feeling the financial pinch.

And as the cooler months settle in, slow-cooker meals, soups and carb-based recipes are always something we gravitate towards.

If you don’t own a slow-cooker, don’t fret: most of the things we do in ours can easily be done on a stovetop or in the oven on low. You could also experiment with an old-fashioned way of cooking using minimal energy, called ‘hay/hot box’ cooking.

Essentially, you just use the heaviest pot you’ve got, get the contents up to a proper boil, then nestle it into a box lined with thick layers of blankets (traditionally it was hay) and leave in a warm spot for a few hours to cook in its own residual thermal heat. Here’s a video which shows the process.

Here’s 22 of our favourite frugal winter foods:

SOUPS & STEWS

• Spiced carrot & lentil soup – super simple, super filling, super tasty.
• Tinola – the best chicken soup out there for boosting immunity and happiness. Traditional Filipino recipe often uses green papaya and moringa leaves, but choko or zucchini and spinach leaves does the job just as well! To keep it even more finance-friendly, make it with chicken frames, which you can buy for a pittance from the supermarket or butcher: there’s plenty of meat on them, and you get all the goodness of the bone marrow in all those bones.
• Use-it-up scrap soup – clear out your fridge and fill bellies with a simple lo-input recipe
• Creamy broccoli & zucchini soup – tastes like it’s got loads of cream in it, but it can be made vegan and dairy-free
• Potato & leek soup – a really frugal soup that just needs a slice of buttered toast to make it a complete, filling meal.

MEAT-BASED DISHES

• Adobo sa gata – among our top 5 Filipino favourites. It’s a gentle coconut-based creamy dish that uses all of a chicken so nothing is wasted.
• Use-it-up filling – an excellent fridge cleaner-outerer. Make it with what you’ve got, freeze in batches for quick meals in the future.
• Beef stroganoff – make with cheaper cuts of beef and add mushrooms with extra flavour (like porcini, shitake or foraged wild mushies).
• Slow cooked beef stew – Use cheapest cuts of beef, like Gravy beef, and then jazz up the rest with super cheap root veggies, alliums and mushrooms. Bloody delicious.

VEG-BASED MEALS

• Cauliflower curry – cauliflower are a winter veg, so they become pretty cheap as the weather cools. Buy heads that have lots of leaves on them and add them to, as they’re got great nutritional value.  
• Bombay potatoes – so simple. So filling. So comforting. Serve with flatbreads, yoghurt raita and some mango chutney for a frugal full meal.
• Veggie gratin – potato bake/scalloped potatoes is SO filling & delicious, but gratins can be made with all sorts of cheap veg: cauliflower, broccoli, sweet potato just to name a few.
• Split-pea dahl – dried pulses and legumes are an excellent cheap way of packing protein into curries.
• Pumpkin & chickpea korma – this recipe is vegan and dairy, soy, nut-free.
• Frittata (or quiche, if you have pastry) – a high-protein meal that’s great for using up the veg, cheese & any deli meats you might have kicking about in the fridge.

CARB-HEAVY DISHES

• Toasted sandwiches – particularly cheese & kimchi
  Use up what you’ve got kicking around in the fridge, freezer & pantry for these. Cheese with ferments like kimchi, sauerkraut or hotsauce are definitely a favourite, but equally you can add leftovers like Bolognese, stroganoff, stew, creamy sauce or gravy with some tomatoes or roast meat and veg. tinned baked beans and spaghetti make an excellent quick toastie, and you can make a kind of hot-pocket quiche by pressing bread into a jaffle-maker and filling it with a lightly beaten egg, ham, tomato & onion.
• Pan-fried gnocchi – the best way to enjoy gnocchi. Buy the cheap stuff off the shelf, fry up onion & garlic, bacon/ham/mushrooms, then fry the gnocchi low and slow in a bit of oil before combining and topping with a dollop of sour cream. So good.

SWEET TREATS

• Use-it-up crumble – fruit, flour, sugar, butter. That’s actually all you need.
• Quick jam cake – use up the scraps of jam to create a speedy, scrummy yoghurt-based cake in under an hour.

HOME APOTHECARY

• Fermented honey garlic – a simple ferment that’s full of flavour and packed with good bacteria and vitamins.
• Elderberry syrup – using foraged (or bought) berries to boost your vitamin C and antioxidant levels.
• Fire cider – long-used vinegar infusion that draws nutrients, vitamins and flavour out of loads of simple foods.

We’ve been compiling waste-hack recipes and ideas for a while over on our Pinterest profile, and you can find them here. We also publish regular Use It Up recipes on this website and on socials, so you should have plenty of resources to get you started serving up tasty, low-waste food!

If you’ve got a favourite frugal winter warmer you don’t see here, we’d love you to share it in the comments!!

Xo

NannaAnna

Permaculture Principle 1: Observe and interact; 2: Catch and store energy; 3: Obtain a yield; 4: Apply self-regulation and accept feedback; 6: Produce no waste; 10: Use and value diversity; 11: Use edges and value the marginal; 12: Creatively use and respond to change.