Cheap & Healthy Recipes: Part One

We've been collecting our favorite cheap, tasty and healthy recipes for the past few weeks and we'd like to share them with you. Our criteria for selecting recipes is the following:
1) The meal can be prepared in advance in large quantities, frozen, and used for other meals
2) Many of the ingredients are versatile and can be used in a variety of other dishes
3) The ingredients are almost entirely whole foods (exceptions include condiments and certain time and money saving prepared ingredients)
To save space, we'll post the a brief description of the dish with a link to the full recipe.

• Chickpea and Spinach stew with garlic, cumin and red wine vinegar. This recipe was featured at The Simple Dollar and edited from the original recipe to be less expensive and time consuming. There's even an instructional photo guide to help you cook!
  
• Chicken fajitas with lime. The best part is you can customize this dish to meet your needs and tastes, and you can buy the chicken in bulk, slice it up in advance, and freeze! Frugal Scholar has an instructional video here.
• You can use the ingredients for the first two recipes to make Grilled Chicken and Spinach Quesadillas. You'll find that the ingredients you'll buy for one Mexican dish can be morphed into a variety of other dishes-- fajitas, burritos, tacos, quesadillas, even soup!
• Baked sweet potatoes. We don't even need to give you a formal recipe for this one because it's that easy! Just pop some potatoes in the oven at 400 degrees. Bake them for an hour or until soft. Slice them open, add a small amount of butter, some brown sugar, cinnamon and salt. One of these will fill you up and they are delicious at any time of the day. They are also ridiculously cheap and are considered a superfood. Keep some of these around for times when you'd rather not cook a labor intensive meal. We'll follow up with another post about all of the amazing things you can do with sweet potatoes soon.
  

For more recipes, try the ingredient search engine at All Recipes. You can input the items you already have on hand and find recipes that use them. Remember to invest in pantry essentials like flour, sugar, salt, rice and pasta whenever they are on sale. Having staples on hand makes it easier to invent new recipes.

Bon Appetit,

Savvy Student