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We love baked beans on toast - that is a cheap meal and perfectly acceptable!

Tacos, breaded chicken breasts, egg dishes like omelets

Chili, chili cheese dogs

I really like beans, rice and cornbread, and eggs and toast. It helps that E loves those things too

Budget Bytes is a good resource for budget meals!

Italian dressing chicken - put chicken breasts and and a bottle of italian dressing in the crock pot for four hours. Serve with rice/pasta and a frozen veggie.

Breakfast for dinner - omelets or eggs and toast with potatoes, pancakes with frozen fruit

Check out budgetbytes.com it's great for a cheap meals that aren't boring.

Rice, beans, and cornbread
Chicken stir fry - You can make a ton of rice at once for the entire week and chop whatever veggies are cheapest to throw in there
Spaghetti and garlic toast (to keep it even cheaper, I don't use meat).
Vegetable Soup and cornbread (you can get a 6-pack of Jiffy Corn Muffin mix for $2.99 at my store).

Eggs, stuffed crescent rolls, homemade mac and cheese, picnic cut pork/lamb shanks or necks/ beef cap ends (these are "throw away" cuts of meat you can get pretty cheap) for pot roast.

Eggs and anything in a tortilla.

Tacos or quesadillas. Add tuna and peas to the mac and cheese. And I just made this last week and my family devoured it.
http://bit.ly/1LJYfwo

Mac n cheese with cubed ham, frozen veg, or even hot dogs or tuna fish is good.

You can make your own white sauce by making a quick oil and flour or butter and flour roux and add milk and/or broth with herbs and salt and pepper and some Parmesan if you want or have it. I will add some Better than Bouillion chicken base for a cream of chicken substitute. You can make a nice noodle dish of that sauce with pasta, ham, and peas, or a chicken tetrazzini type dish. Or add some pesto for a creamy pesto sauce. DH also likes it when I cook pork chops or chicken in this white sauce in the crockpot and serve it over mashed potatoes. I just add a veg to the side.

Leftover pasta like spaghetti especially can be thrown into beaten eggs and veg and turned into a pasta frittata.

You can stretch the chicken to make chicken and rice or noodle soup with just some carrots and celery and onions.

French toast for dinner is good because of the eggs for protein with a bit of fruit on the side.

Ham fried rice. Chicken fried rice.

In college I used to love to simmer black beans and corn with salsa and top it with raw slaw mix as a cheap low carb meal, but the same can be put over rice. I also used to like to simmer Goya red beans (they are already well seasoned in a yummy sauce) with a bag of frozen stir fry veggies over brown rice. All of this can be thrown in a tortilla for burritos too.

Adding elbow macaroni and some corn to a can or two of beans and chili makes a lot of chili mac that stretches and tastes good. Top with cheese if you have it.

Retried bean or canned bean enchiladas are good - just roll some retried beans and cheese into tortillas, line them up, and top with sauce. Homemade enchilada sauce is easy - just mix up a can of tomato sauce (or 2 cups warm water + tomato paste) with a teaspoon of cumin, a tablespoon of chili powder, some hot sauce, pepper, garlic powder, some chicken Better than Bouillion or a bouillon cube. Top with cheese and bake.

My husband loves stuffed pepper skillet - just brown a little ground meat and onion, add a jar of tomato sauce, and then add a bunch of cooked rice (great way to use leftover rice) and chopped green bell peppers. You can use frozen bell pepper strips. You can obviously add more veggies like chopped mushrooms or crumbled tofu instead of meat to make it vegetarian.

Other than eating cereal you can make bars out of almost all of them like you would Rice Krispies. Or Chex Mix or muddy buddies. Plain cereal can be crushed and used to coat meat like breadcrumbs. Lots of homemade granola bar recipes also call for a few cups of crushed cereal, as do some cookie recipes.

Make a big batch of pizza dough and use up all your odds and ends at the end of the week for pizza night. If you're out of tomato sauce, try BBQ sauce or white sauce.

Vegan sloppy joes can be made with cooked brown lentils simmered in a sweet sauce made of tomato sauce, onions, and some brown sugar, or if you're in a pinch, ketchup and a little extra sugar or pancake syrup works fine too. You can also add some BBQ sauce for a twist and serve open face over buns or toast.

You can bake up pancake mix or cornbread mix in mini muffin pans and stuff them with breakfast sausage or hot dogs or cubes of ham for breakfast or dinner with ketchup or syrup to dip. You can also just have them plain with some scrambled eggs on the side. Or you can throw some frozen corn or canned green chilies into the cornbread batter to have a side to some other meal.

Risotto stretches rice and can use just about anything, including canned pumpkin leftover from the holidays or peas or corn or grated carrots or random greens.

Aldi always has eggs on sale, it's not organic but still good quality.

Loco moco!
Spaghetti with red sauce
Tacos
Blts

We make a pasta alfredo dish
- diced ham, frozen peas, diced onion (saute together in a bit of oil with garlic & red pepper flakes) add a jar of alfredo sauce and put over any pasta

@Ms maths: Thanks for that pasta recipe! I've been trying to figure out how to get more beans in our diet.

DH is one of those that doesn't think it's a meal unless there's a bunch of meat so I'm trying to change that mind set. And I really want to start using more beans in our cooking as the protein and using meat as a flavoring. I'm finding that it's super easy to cook a big pot of beans in the slow cooker or crockpot and then freeze in portions. For instance, I just bought a 2 lb bag of dried pinto beans at Aldi for less than $2. I made them in the pressure cooker and then mashed them to make refried beans. I like to eat these for lunch with a little big of cheese and some pita chips. I got 12 servings out of that bag so it'll be less than $0.25 a meal for me., once I factor in the extras. So much cheaper than buying lunch.

Another trick is that when I make a pasta or some other dish, I just cut the meat the recipe calls for in half and make sure that it's cut up in smaller pieces. This way, you think you're eating more than you are. So if the recipe calls for 2 chicken breasts, I only use 1.

This isn't a meal but I use extra cereal (like Cheerios) to make snack mixes. Add in popcorn, some oil and seasoning, bake it for a little while and you have a cheap snack.

Grilled cheese sandwiches, baked potatoes, pasta, pancakes, stir-fried rice

Get a chicken, throw some onion, celery and carrots and roast it. Make some sort of chicken dish out of it, then use the chicken carcass to make broth and make chicken noodle soup. We don't mind eating leftovers so it can last us a few days.

Beans and rice for sure....but dried beans, because they are super cheap. Lentils are cheap and they don't have to be soaked like beans. Eggs and toast in the morning.

Roast chicken, carrots & potatoes. And then I use the bones to make stock and make soup the next day. Literally the cheapest meal I can think of.