Start a Cooking Club: Save money, Eat Better
Some people hate to cook, some people love to cook, but most people don't have time to cook a good full meal every day. A friend of mine and I started a cooking club. One day each week we cook extra and bring it to others in the club.
Start small; one day each week we cooked double and provided to the other. Soon a third friend joined in and I learned that it doesn't take any more effort to cook for three families than to cook for one.
It is great to know that at least 3 nights a week we will have a home cooked meal, and two nights a week I don't have to do anything but heat it up. And we get to try new foods. I started a regular slow food dinner where everyone would bring something and put on the kitchen table to come up with a meal.
We tried really hard to not make a stir fry or stew/soup. We did find a website and then an app where you can enter all ingredients and it would provide a list of recipes. Like a Recipe Roulette!!
I joined a freezer group where we could trade in as many groups as we wanted. Each group was 5 or 6 people who each cooked Enough for trading with everyone else in the group. A trade had to be 5 or 6 servings which is a gallon freezer bag full.
I was in the gluten free group or there was a vegetarian group. Basically when I felt like cooking a bunch of 5 or 6 gallons of something I would label with date and what it was, fill the 6) gallon bags, and freeze them. We would meet once a month to do trade and I would take home 5 or 6 different foods. I usually participated in 2 or 3 groups each month and ended up with 10 to 15 different meals.
For 4 years I hosted a weekly International slow food cooking together cooking club we called Rice and Spice www.EatRiceandSpice.com learning how to feed an average of 43 people for less than 100$ every week and how easy it is for most of the world to make lots of food for a great price. Out of that we were able to create a cookbook to be a fundraiser to pay for the dinner. The cookbook is still available on Amazon here https://www.amazon.com/Rice-Spice-Cookbook-Aur-Beck/dp/1480284114
Now I host the weekly Leave It to Chef international slow food cooking together online cooking class. For current class and ingredients list https://www.facebook.com/leaveittochef/events
Every week we have a different "chef" who shares something that they think is simple or easy to make. For example, we had a regular from Brazil last night teach us how to make brigadeiros (which are Brazilian chocolate truffles) which only had 4 ingredients and were very easy to make. Learning food from different cultures that they think are simple or easy to make makes it so I learn many new ways to make simple and usually cheap very good food.