Big pots of soup are also cheap meal ideas. Soup can be made using mostly leftover vegetable scraps. Make your soup in a large pot and ask your friend to make a different soup. Then trade portions of soup with each other to create variety in your meals. Freeze the remaining soup for a welcome quick food idea on another day. Potato Recipes

To save money, stop buying canned beans. Buying bags of dried beans saves a huge amount of money and they last practically forever in your pantry. Take the mystery out of Grandma's old fashioned baked beans by being brave and making them yourself from scratch. They are so easy to make; they just about make themselves. There are many recipes on the Internet, but it's basically just tossing the beans in a big pot of water at night and letting them soak. Then in the morning, turn on the crock pot, go off to work and come home to a wonderful pot of beans. Now scoop some into a baking dish and add brown sugar or any other ingredients from recipes for old fashioned baked beans, bake and enjoy.

Have you ever gone to the grocery store needing one green pepper for a recipe and then cringed at the price of just one pepper? I have. One of my favorite money saving food ideas, as well as being a tremendous time saver is to buy peppers when on sale or at the farmers market. I chop many green peppers at the same time. I simply bag them and freeze them. When I need some chopped peppers for a meal, I just shake what I need out of the bag and into the frying pan. This saves money also, because I buy them on sale at a lower price.

Try growing some vegetables yourself. If you do not have a yard you can grow vegetables in containers on a patio in pots. Tomatoes can be grown in hanging planters if you do not have enough floor space. Lettuce and spinach can be grown right on your windowsill because they are shallow rooted plants. Try growing sprouts in a jar on your kitchen counter.

Enjoy the money you save.