Most of the time we eat pretty simple meals around our house, and yesterday was no exception. I had the ingredients on hand for potato soup which is one of my family’s favorites. I never plan on potato soup; it’s just one of those meals where I need to use something before it goes bad and potato soup is one of the easiest and fastest things to make. It does require a little preparation time since it requires cutting all of the vegetables, but it is well worth it end the end.

Potatoes are a staple at our house because they provide an inexpensive side dish, are easy to store, and can stretch a meal if you need a filler. We almost always have carrots, celery, and onions on hand which are the base of any good soup. I actually can’t stand the taste of celery, but will tolerate it in soup since it practically melts aways after I dice it into tiny pieces. Since the main star of the soup is potatoes, I dice all of the other vegetables up into small pieces as well. Our young son is not a fan of many of the meals we make, but I was able to get him to eat the soup last night after I removed most of the carrots from his bowl of soup; oh the joys of motherhood.

The soup is pretty basic, and starts out just like I would be making a spaghetti or ragu sauce. I toss all of the chopped celery, onions, and carrots into a stock pot with butter to sweat the vegetables before I add the liquid and the potatoes. After just a few minutes, it’s time to add the liquid and the potatoes. The liquid can be whatever you have on hand. My potato soup is never the same twice since I don’t do a lot of measuring, and don’t really follow a recipe. Yesterday I used chicken broth, water, and a can of evaporated milk for the liquid, but I’ve used heavy whipping cream or half and half, and even 2% milk in place of the evaporated milk.

After many attempts at trying to make my potato soup thicker, I actually discovered by accident that leaving the lid off of the pot while cooking reduces the soup and causes it to become slightly thicker after I’ve added the milk. I am not the best cook in the world, but I love when I figure out how to do something, quite by accident.

Sometimes we like to keep it simple at our house for dinner by fixing something that we all enjoy eating; breakfast. My favorite part about eating breakfast for dinner is the economical sense it makes. We fixed biscuits, gravy, and eggs with cheese for dinner which all came to less than $5.00. There were even leftovers. We could have even had bacon or potatoes with our breakfast and still kept it under the $5.00 mark. The combination of eggs, biscuits, and gravy are so filling that you wouldn’t need the bacon, but man, you just can’t go wrong with bacon. I forgot about the bacon until the last minute, otherwise we would have had that as well.

I know that bacon is on the expensive side most of the time, but I wait for it to go on sale, and then stock up hopefully with enough to keep until the next sale. Eggs are usually around $1.50 or less for a dozen, and about a half dozen eggs will feed the five of us. I keep my gravy costs down by using bacon grease (instead of butter), which I store in the refrigerator so that it doesn’t go rancid. The possibilities are really kind of endless with breakfast, and it certainly makes things easier on the budget knowing that a good nutritious meal can be prepared for less than $5.00. If you forget to make breakfast for dinner like I do sometimes, plan out a thirty day menu, or even a weekly menu and include breakfast on your menu a couple of times for the month, or more if it’s something your family enjoys. Of course if you want to bake something for breakfast instead, my favorite is cinnamon rolls. I found Amy’s (The Finer Things In Life) cinnamon roll recipe and haven’t looked back!