Eating While Broke : Lasagna

Sounds good & I really enjoyed all of the pictures! ;o) I found wheat noodles so I stocked up on those haha ;o) I am not usually health conscience so for me to do wheat all around (bread, noodles, etc) it's crazy ;o). Good article as always Victoria!

Sounds great! Thanks for the recipe!
I hate starting the new broke......uugghh!! Good luck to you!

Sounds good - I've never thought of using sour cream in lasagna

Sometimes those "scrounging" meals are the best!

Being broke sucks....

I always find the weirdest stuff in the back of my cupboard. Who bought the canned beef stew? yuck. and the canned pasta stuff the kids love (I'm mean they hardly ever get it) double yuck.

Your lasagna looks yummy. I never thought to add olives.. good idea.

Sounds good! I'm making mexican lasagna tonight. We already have all the stuff for it. We're trying to use up a lot of the stuff that we already had in our house, too.

Man, that looks good. I'm freaking starving.

Yum! Who knew living on a budget could be so delicious! What a very great idea - you are totally resourceful. I've been in that situation before too - after we closed on our house we had no money AT ALL for a good six weeks and we had to eat using just stuff in the cabinets. It was kind of fun actually.

Yum, this sounds and looks very good. I love lasagna.

The first time I ever cooked it myself I was pregnant with our youngest daughter. My husband's ex-girlfriend's mom told me he LOVED lasagna. SO, I spent all day following a recipe to a T. I used wine in the sauce. The more it cooked the more I didn't want to think about eating it. I took one bite and well, to be nice, puked my guts out. lol THEN come to find out my husband HATED lasagna. Never did like it, still doesn't to this day. Methinks his ex-girlfriend's mom had an agenda.

I love it though and as long as I don't make it with a ton of sauce he's semi-okay with it. :) This may work. Woo-Hoo!

Great job Victoria! It looks wonderful!

I make some of my best things by just scrounching (spelling?) for what I have on hand. Any meal done out of love is the best one.

It looks good to me. I believe in these one dish meals using leftovers. I hate wasting food when it is so expensive to start with. Since there is just the two of us, we always have left overs. Sometimes I just take all the things that go to together well, mix them with a jar of gravy, mix in some noodles or macaroni and there you have a perfect meal all in one pot.

that sounds absolutely awesome! I think I'm gonna have to steal the recipe and try it out myself

Great way to use what you got on hand. It sounds really good. I will have to try that sometime. I got most of it on hand.

You did a super job of it Victoria. My mom taught us how to look at our cupboards that way. You can make up some delicious meals.

what a good idea, you should do that even when you do have money and then the money you do have will last that much longer. I can't belive you can cool that still amazzes me lol

Sounds delicious, Victoria!

looks good

I love lasagna!

Necessity is the mother of invention, I always say. This is awesome, Vic. I love the addition of the sausage, black olives and sour cream. Yummay!

I am featuring this :)

I see you shop at Aldi and that alone will save you a ton of money on groceries.

I substitute cottage cheese for ricotta when I make lasagna. As long as you drain it well it works just fine and costs a lot less.

I think we have all been there...broke at one time or another. That's why I hate tuna casseroles, macaroni and cheese and spam....for several years during graduate school that's what we ate!

When my husband and I were younger we were very broke and lived a long ways from the store. We ate a lot of beans and rice with cornbread and baked potatoes with broccoli on top/ bulk oat meal for breakfast everyday. I used to buy wheat berries and dry corn and grind my own flours. I remember growing blue corn and grinding that, it made the best pancakes. Kids didn't like the blue corn it was too weird having blue-gray pancakes. Have fun being creative. Feeling poor is hard.

It was, Lindy! I even ate the last of it last night for a late night snack! Hehe.

Thanks, Birdee. I'm not much of a wheat person myself either.

Thanks, Lori! Yeah, being broke is not fun.

April: Me neither actually, but I had it and didn't want it to go to waste so I threw it in! LOL It seemed to work.

I totally agree, Kathy.........with both your comments! ; )

Thanks, Carmel! I have the same thing with my cabinets. We have a can of beef stew in there and I have no idea where it came from. Yuckers! And you know, my kids never liked any of those canned pasta things like Chef Boyardee. I bought some thinking they would love it and it would give me something to fix them for lunch some days. They wouldn't touch the stuff. I was amazed. I thought that was a super kid friendly meal!

Mmmm. Mexican Lasagna. Sounds great, Carla!

It was, Tina, but you'd never eat it! It has sausage in it!!!

Jennifer: I totally know what you mean! I'm enjoying myself doing this. It is fun! LOL I'm thinking of whipping up a sort of BBQ chicken pizza tomorrow.

Uhhh, yeah, Lynn, I think your hubby's ex-girlfriend's mother had ulterior motives there. What a (add word my mom wouldn't approve of here)! LOL I love lasagna too! Funny because I'm not much into spaghetti but I love lasagna!

Thanks, Juley!

Tell that to my daughter, Jerri! LOL Some evenings she flat out says "Ma-ma, this is not good!" LOL (She's 4!)

Oh, I'm so right there with you, Nana! I love one pot meals. So easy to clean up after. ; ) I've created some great meals actually just throwing stuff in a pan or a crockpot. I, too, hate to waste. We try to use up everything

Do so, Sarah-jane! I hope you like it if you make it!

Thanks, Aubrey. It was quite tasty I thought. I'll definitely fix it again actually.

I agree, Nancy. My mom taught us to do that too. And it's fun!

You seriously didn't know I could cook, Jodie?!?! Did I not ever cook for you in Huntington? I know I did for Erin and Mary Beth. I made Oyster Stew once but neither of them would even touch it.

Thanks, Sue and Elaine!

Those things sound great, Becca! I'm anxious to see what else I can come up with before hubby gets paid and we can go grocery shopping. I think I might actually cut back on groceries so I can do this more. It really is fun. LOL

Me too, Marianne!

Awesome, Shannon! Thanks for the feature! And the positive comments. Coming from you that is great, because I consider you "The Gather Chef". LOL

We LOVE Aldi's, Andrea! I actually prefer their canned veggies to the namebrand ones. We started shopping there about two years ago I think and could instantly see the savings. We would walk out of there with $150 worth of food and it was piled up in the cart and would barely fit in our trunk whereas when we used to shop at the Walmart Supercenter we'd get basically nothing for a lot more money. Good idea with the cottage cheese, but I didn't have any of that on hand. I'll have to start trying to keep some on hand. Can you freeze cottage cheese?

Probably so, Elizabeth. My sister and I lived on Ramen noodles in college. And I created a dish using carrots, celery, potatoes, and ground beef, all of which was very cheap. I actually still make it sometimes.

Thanks, Penashe. Some great ideas there. I'm hoping the year starts to look up for us. I'm not used to being broke and I don't like it!

Yummy, See you can have great meals by just using your storage. Now that you understand that you may need a storage. Maybe you should pick up 5 cans of extra food each payday. That is a start and you wont even miss them.

That does look good, wish I had a plateful right now!

It looks yummy.

There were years when we were broke too. We managed to get out of debt and eat at the same time by Planning.

I would take one of those big desk calendars and plan my meals for the whole month. Keeping in mind using left overs and cutting corners by watching the ads to see what was on sale.

Then we would shop for the month (keeping extra money for milk bread and eggs) and then stick to the plan and it worked.

It didn't take long to pay off some pretty huge debts when we wouldn't wast money in the grocery store or anywhere else.

Thanks for you comment about skiing. I started skiing on school trips when I was in high school too but just kept at it after.

WOW, this sounds and looks yummy Ms. Betty Crocker...Oh, I mean Victoria!!!! Think I will try your recipe, - I just do not do black olives!!!!

Wow! It sounds really great to me. Good way to get creative :)

It sounds like you are really broke, sorry to hear that! But you really did a great job of using up what you had on-hand. I wouldn't normally put some of those things in a lasagna but it sounds good anyway.

Aside from the use of canned mushrooms (which I have never understood since fresh ones last a pretty long time in the refrigerator and their texture is so much better), I thought that it all sounded so good. I love lasagna. It looks good too.

Why sour cream? That isn't something that is usually in a lasagna! Sounds good though.

I hope things get better for you soon.

Mom: Yeah, I think I'll start adding things to my food storage now. This has shown me some things I would like to keep on hand and others that we have on hand but don't really need or need some other things along with them.

Thanks for the comment, Cortney!

Thanks, Teresa. I found it to be quite tasty myself. : )

I so need to get back to Planning, Marilyn. We used to do that before we had the kids. Back when I had the time to sit down and plan out things. LOL Thanks for the reminder. I think I'll get back to doing it. The grocery store seems to be where we waste a lot of our money. We'll decide we want steak for supper so we'll run over to the grocery story and buy some and buy this and that to go along with it. Do that a few evenings and it really adds up!

Thanks, Phyllis. I definitely wouldn't call myself a Betty Crocker! LOL The kids love black olives!

Thanks alot, Sarah.

Thanks, Risa (I think). We generally have some fresh mushrooms on hand actually, but we use them up very quickly and wouldn't have near the room in our fridge to ensure that we had them on hand at all times. The point was to use up what we HAD ON HAND instead of having to go to the store and buy anything. And actually I wouldn't call us "really broke" really. My husband gets paid tomorrow actually. I'm mostly just trying to spend as little money as possible, which can be done by using what we've got instead of going out and buying what we don't need. The sour cream was there and I wanted to use it and not let it waste. I hate waste!

good job. i'm kinda poor right now too, so i know what your going thru.

Mmmm... It looks tasty. Now I want to know why you're Annoyed, Frustrated, and Exhausted?

I love lasagna so we make a huge one and then eat leftovers for a week :-) Great job on the photo essay!

We have quite a bit of stored items in our pantry. I was thinking about making lasagna this past week. Hubby isn't a huge fan of this dish, but he would eat it if he had to.

I have a ton of canned foods, especially tomato sauce. I never know what to do with it all. You have some really creative ideas. I don't like the ricotta cheese in lasagne that some people make, so this sounds like a great version.

thats the heartiest lasagna ive ever seen! i LUV your creativity! and it was well worth it if the kids enjoyed it.

Sounds delicious!

it was good .

Looks like a great meal. Wonderful job!

This turned out to be a interesting blend of ingred. Being broke sure gets the creativity juices flowing, looking forward to reading some more of your recipes. Very nice recipe essay... :)

sounds good

oh yummy

Victoria that lasagna looks so good I will have to try it soon