My friends and I have been sharing ideas about living on $25 dollars a week (not a bad way to make my budget since the economy is not doing well). We have decided that we’d experiment with the more frugal lifestyle in February of 2009 (we are not quite ready to cut down our spendings to that little right away).

To prepare for our $25-lifestyle experiment, I have been searching for delicious, yet cheap-to-make recipes. The first dish that I have come upon is baked beans. Beans are the ultimate cheap ingredients; 1 lb. of Great Northern beans only cost a dollar. Not only are beans cheap, but they are also very nutritious. Beans are full of proteins*, fibers, calcium, iron, and can make you stay full longer.

Want to make some baked beans? Guinea Pig will help you create this hearty dish without breaking your bank!

Dice 1 onion, 1 hot pepper (depending on your “heat” tolerance), few stalks of celery and carrot, and bacon, then cook  these ingredients slowly over medium-low heat; you want to extract the water out of the vegetables and fats out of the bacon.

After 5 to 7 minutes of sweating (the slow cook method), add 1/8 of cup of molasses**, dark brown sugar, tomato paste, 1/8 of teaspoon of cayenne pepper, 1 teaspoon of freshly cracked black pepper, and a few pinches of kosher salt.

Stir the above condiments into the pot for 1 minute, then add 1/2 lb. of Great Northen beans (or any beans you prefer) and water, just to cover the beans by 1 inch. Bring the pot to boil and put it in 400-degree oven for 4 hours. Then you get…

the baked beans! Stir the pot for 20 seconds so the starch from the beans can come out and make the beans stickier and grainier.

There you have it…baked beans with rice, under…very few dollars. As matter of fact, you can’t even put a significant price on the meal because it cost so little. I also pan-seared some polenta that I made from the other night, but that’s another entry.

What’s your frequent homemade cheap eat?

*Proteins from beans are incomplete, which means that you need to pair the beans with other foods to have the full benefit of eating beans for its protein content. One of the most common ways to complete the proteins is to eat beans with rice.

**Molasses contains calcium and sugar that can bind with acid from the tomato paste, which can keep the beans as whole when cooking them for a long period of time. Please buy all natural molasses that does not contain corn syrup. Molasses should be purely extracted from natural sugar cane without any additives.