Healthy on a Budget?

Last week, I had the great opportunity to interview Anne Cain, a Senior Food Editor and Registered Dietician from MyRecipes.com.

logoSrch

MyRecipes.com is a huge hub of recipes from magazines such as Cooking Light, Southern Living, Real Simple, and more! If you haven’t checked out MyRecipes.com, you should!

Anne’s job is to help create new stories, packages, and ideas using the 35,000 + (and growing!)  recipes on the site, as well as updating new health information and helping tie common topics or new ideas with great recipes and tips from their website. Sounds like the perfect job, right?  I know I’d do it!  :)

I’m always on the lookout for a good deal – One of the main things my husband and I deal with is eating healthy while still living on a low budget – I work as an admin assistant and he’s finishing up grad school, so we have a pretty tight budget on everything that we have to stick pretty close to each month.

I asked Anne for her best tips for still eating healthy on a budget and she had some great ones!

  • Make recipes without meat or  with less meat – you don’t have to have meat at every meal, and you can always cut back on the amount and add more veggies, beans, etc to the dish. Eating just 1-2 meals a week without meat as the main protein source can save you a good amount of money each week!
  • Always buy in season – buying asparagus in November won’t be cheap and it probably won’t be good, either. If you have farmer’s markets/local produce stands, buy there when possible because you know it’s fresh and it may be cheaper than getting the same thing in your grocery store.
  • Use coupons if and when you can.
  • Check weekly flyers for the stores you go to and plan your weekly meals around what’s already on sale.
  • Buy meat in bulk and freeze what you don’t need right away.
  • Don’t buy something that’s on sale if it’s not something you would normally buy / eat.

She also pointed out some really great articles on MyRecipes.com about eating on the cheap!

Healthy Entrees  for $2 or Less

Eat Healthy for Less: 10 Tips

Are You Getting Ripped Off at the Grocery Store?

Since she works for MyRecipes. com, I also wanted to know what her favorite things were about the website  :)  I love it, but I wanted to see what she said, too.

The biggest thing Anne loves about the website are all the pictures and I have to agree! I love that the majority of the recipes you can find have pictures with them – it just makes everything so much more appealing when I can see what a dish might look like.

The other thing Anne loves is that you can find a recipe for any need: diabetes, gluten free, high blood pressure, etc. The great thing? Most of their recipes are pretty healthy, but it’s also a great place to find a decadent dessert, as well. It really does have just about anything you could ask for.

Of course we ended up talking about actual recipes from the website so I thought I’d post some that are tried and true, according to Anne and me!

Anne has tried and loved these:

goat-cheese-ck-1654641-l

cacciatore-ck-549786-l

Although I don’t have pictures/reviews of 2 of these recipes (they were made pre-blog), I have made these recipes more than once and loved them:

ham-casserole-ck-226485-l

chicken-chilaquiles-ck-1634740-l

Plus, all of the recipes are tested in special test kitchens and the nutritional information/breakdown is reviewed by RDs, so you know it’s a good recipe and the info is correct!

If you haven’t checked out MyRecipes.com, get over there right now! They have new articles every day, new recipes, a blog, a newsletter, and tons of other cool food and health related articles and info – I get stuck on this site a lot….it’s easy to lose track of time when you’re looking at recipe, I’ll just say that.

Thanks so much for spending some time with me Anne! I learned a lot about MyRecipes.com and can’t wait to see more   :)

6 comments

  1. Great interview!

    This is such weird timing – I JUST sent my email to Anne with questions. Wish I would have read these first… I think I may have asked something similar.

    Ah, oh well :)

  2. I love that website!! So many great and healthy meals!

  3. myrecipes.com is great. It is def my go to web site when I am trying to figure out what to cook.

  4. I’ve made that ham and asparagus casserole! Cool interview.

  5. Those are awesome, thanks for sharing!!

  6. Pingback: Indoor Cookout «

Comments are closed.