Low budget meal ideas!

Congrats - it's exciting to move off to university!


Rice is very cheap and filling - you can mix things like veggies, soya sauce, spices, etc. in it to keep it interesting. It's super easy to make too. Great for lunch or dinner, pair it with something obviously. And you can make some and it'll last for a few days if you make enough. My boyfriend and I get HUGE bags in bulk for like $10 and it lasts us a month or so (he eats rice a lot lol, me not as much but still enough :P).

For breakfast - oats! Mix it with fresh fruit or sweetener if you'd like. Again, you can buy it in bulk. We got 5 kg of oats for $8. I'm sure you could find cheaper deals. But people often spend like $5 on the prepackaged flavoured stuff - don't worry about those, get the oats you can use for baking and stuff like that.

Beans are great too for protein and stuff. We eat a lot of chickpeas (yes, we get those in bulk too! :P). Chickpeas probably 5/7 days a week aha. Romano beans are good too (they are good in rice I've found!). Spice them up and yum!

For the two of us, we spend about $50 a week on groceries. HOWEVER that's because we buy things like fake meats ($5 for 4 veggie burgers or veggie sausages) or shirataki noodles or something like that. If we were on a student budget still, we'd just avoid those! :P

We go out twice a week for fresh fruit/veggies, we eat a LOT of veggies lol.

Other ideas: cornmeal, potatoes, a lot of fruits and veggies (whatever is in season), pasta is OK in small amounts, tofu
Soup is good to make large batches of ... then eat it when you don't feel like cooking! :P

Things I avoided on a student budget: meat (I don't eat meat now but it's really expensive), yogurt, prepackaged things, cookies, crackers, canned things (fruit, soup, anything ).

I use to live off of tuna fish and rice. I lost all kinds of weight doing that .

LOL sounds like the Jesus Diet

My local co-op provides several recipes that make 4 (or more) servings for under $2 per serving:

http://commonground.coop/?page_id=130

While your prices will be different, it should give you some good ideas for healthy, relatively inexpensive meals.

I'm a student too. I have two housemates with who I buy my food. We all have different breakfasts, but kinda the same lunch and always the same dinner.
I would advice you to make sure you always have the basics at home. Make sure to have enough eggs, pasta, rice and potatoes. If you eat meat, make sure to buy the bigger packages. They will be more expensive at once, but it is cheaper than buying one at the time. (Only if you have access to a freezer though!). We are growing our own herbs (basil, for example) and also other things like strawberries and lettuce. Cheap! If you do buy lettuce, (for example ice berg), you can eat it different times a week. On your bread, or in two salads?
If you buy broccoli, it is going to be too much for once. But if you boil it all and blend the remaining broccoli and freeze it; broccoli soup! Same with cauliflower.

Besides that, we buy everything as cheap as possible. For example, try to buy your fruit and vegetables at the market. We only chose to pay more for our bread, since we really like bread and want bread that is really good, not just eh.

Good luck!