Most people who are on SNAP already know how to stretch their money, so most of the very basic tips going around on social media aren't that helpful. However, I mentioned my mother's Depression-era struggle food and a friend said "go ahead"; also it occurs to me that if we all budget a bit more, we could donate the extra $ (such as it may be) to food pantries, so here we are.
I wrote an earlier guide to eating healthy and cheap which also includes a link to Cook For Good which is a much more elaborate guide.
The recipes I'm about to share aren't especially "healthy" in the sense of long-term cardiovascular considerations. But they are cheap and filling, and life is full of trade-offs. Alive and not enervated from not getting enough to eat is healthy, too.
First of all, go buy some flour, butter, and milk. A five pound bag of flour, a pound of butter, and a gallon of milk will get you pretty far, you will discover.
You are going to make white sauce. Never mind what you are going to make WITH it; we'll talk about that later.
Here's what you do:
Melt butter in a saucepan on low-ish heat
Add a more or less equivalent amount of flour, a little bit at a time, stirring the whole time. Cook it until it no longer smells like raw flour.
Then start adding milk, a little at a time, and whisk it in as you go. It helps if the milk isn't straight out of the refrigerator. Make sure it's simmering but not boiling.
Cook, stirring, until it's the thickness you want. Add pepper and salt at some point.
This isn't a quick process, and the sauce will only keep 4-5 days in the refrigerator (it gets very, very thick when chilled) and it doesn't freeze well. However, you can make the roux part (the butter and flour) in a big batch and freeze it in smaller portions to cut down the time.
You will notice that there are no measurements here, just vibes. That is because this "recipe" is from my mother and that's how she rolled. However, 4/4/2 works: 4 tbsp butter, 4 tbsp flour, 2 cups of milk.
My advice to you is to start with about half that and practice until you get the hang of it. It's not really that hard as long as you don't get in too big of a hurry. It's not NEARLY as persnickety as brown roux, where the line between "adequately cooked" and "fuck I burned it and have to start over" is depressingly small. The worst thing that usually happens to white roux is that you add milk too fast (or it's too cold) and it gets lumpy. It will still be edible though. Just lumpy.
You will want to master the technique though, because white sauce is everything. It's gravy, it's sauce, it's soup base, depending on how much milk (or sometimes stock) you add. It's CHEAP and magical.
You can make the sauce with other fats than butter, of course. It will work with margarine, and making it with bacon grease or the oil you just fried something else in is how you make cream gravy.
You can put just about ANYTHING in it once you have it. Put nutmeg in it and it's bechamel sauce. Put cheese in it and it's cheese sauce. Pour that over anything that will be improved by cheese sauce, which is most things. Cheese sauce on pasta is lazy mac n cheese. (If you want the cheesy crust that takes more steps, but you're halfway there). Use the white sauce or cheese sauce for casseroles of leftover veggies and pot pies if you're ambitious.
Put boiled eggs in it and spoon over toast, and you've got creamed eggs on toast which is what my mother made for me when I was feeling poorly.
Thin it out to the consistency of soup with more milk or stock and put canned oysters in it. (Or clams, I suppose). If you want potatoes or carrots in there, add them first and let them cook before you add the oysters.
Bake a whole chicken, eat that for a meal, then strip the meat off and put it aside. Boil the chicken carcass, any giblets, and odds and ends (potato peels, carrot ends, etc) for a couple of hours to make stock. (You can freeze it or make soup the next day).
Make the white roux for a base, then pour the stock in (my mother would also add milk), add the reserved chicken, and heat up. Once it's hot, drop in some dumplings. (My mother made these from biscuit dough, and would make biscuits to eat with chicken and save some of the dough for next day dumplings). Cook at a simmer until the dumplings are done.
Depending on the size of the chicken and the size of your household, you might be able to also get a chicken salad sandwich out of the meat from the chicken as well.
Since I mentioned biscuits, they are more versatile than people assume. Biscuit dough can be cobbler or pot pie crust, and leftover biscuits can be toasted the next day or converted to bread crumbs. They aren't especially sturdy for sandwich purposes, but it's absolutely possible to make sandwiches from biscuits or cornbread; people used to do it all the time. Making your own bread is cheaper and better, but yeast bread is a bit of a time commitment. Quick breads are called that because they're quick, and if you pre-mix the dry ingredients including baking soda, they're even quicker. Use saved bacon grease for your cornbread.
My mother used to eat leftover cornbread crumbled up in buttermilk. That is probably too old school Southern for most people, but it's cheap and nutritious even though buttermilk has gotten more expensive relative to sweet milk than it used to be.
Salmon patties (or croquettes) are typically made with canned salmon. Remove the bones, mash up with a fork, add an egg and crumbled saltines until you can form them into patties. Fry in oil until they are brown on both sides (they should form a nice crunchy crust). One 14 oz can will make quite a few...a family meal's worth with some sides...and they are good cold as well. You can tart them up with paprika or brown mustard or whatever, and people make them with other things to hold the patties together, but the recipe I just gave is the one favored by William Faulkner, so there you are.
Saltines make a good casserole top and the formula for squash casserole (squash + onions boiled until tender, an egg to make it set, pepper, grated cheese, crumbled saltines and more cheese on top, bake at 350 till the cheese melts and browns a little) could be used for most anything you decided you wanted to make a casserole from.
Get cheap cuts of meat. Save drippings and use to cook other things (some fats will go rancid if you don't use them promptly; bacon grease keeps well). Use bits and pieces and leftovers to make other things. Be inventive.
Pasta with butter and garlic isn't something my mother made, but I made it a lot when I was young and broke and make it now because I like it. You just sautee minced garlic in butter, add some Parmesan, dump it over your pasta, add more Parmesan.
How much butter? How much garlic? I dunno, man, just go where the spirit leads you. I am my mother's daughter after all, I guess.
