6 Easy Dinners on a Budget You Can Make With Leftovers

1. Hodgepodge dinner

The first night of dinner I'm sharing with you is something that I kind of made up as I went. I was working on using things up, so I had just browned up a pound of ground turkey and added some Campbell's Flavor Ups that my husband found at Dollar Tree.

I'm going to add some of the banana pepper brine. I know it sounds weird, but it tasted really good. I'm also going to be adding some minced garlic.

I just added a little bit of water to it so I could get all the rest of it out of this tiny jar because I just wanted to use it up. The next addition is cream of mushroom soup. It looks kind of funny, but it's because it was frozen. To keep it from going bad or having to use a ton of cream of mushroom at a time, I froze it in can-size bags.

I'm adding half a bag of frozen peas and carrots, which is roughly about two cups. Next, I'm going to be adding two cups of rice, and I'm going to give that a good stir. Then I will be pouring in four cups of water, along with some beef bouillon powder. I add Cajun Two Step seasoning to this also.

Once I get the water and everything in, I will bring this up to a boil, and then I will reduce the heat to medium to medium-low and let it cook for ten minutes. I will turn the heat off and let it go for another ten minutes. After that, I'm going to fluff the rice up a little bit, and then I'm going to flatten it back out

I'm adding in 2 oz of pepper Jack cheese. It was half of one of those tiny blocks from Dollar Tree, so it's a very small amount of cheese, but it's all the cheese we had left on this night. Then I crunched up a package of Ritz crackers, and I'm going to sprinkle those over the top and just put the lid on for a few minutes and let the cheese melt.

I know this seems like a really kind of hodgepodge meal or whatever, but it was very good. I added some jalapeños to the top of mine, and it was amazing.

2. Balsamic chicken with steamed rice and broccoli

First, I preheated my pan. I've added some oil, and ideally, I would have been able to fit all of my chicken in the pan at once, but I just wasn't able to.

As it cooked, it shrunk down, so I cut one piece in half, and I was able to fit it all in there eventually, but you just want to brown it up. You don't have to worry about cooking it all. I cooked my rice in the instant pot and steamed my broccoli up on the side.

The balsamic glaze is not a glaze but thickens into a kind of glaze. While the chicken is cooking, make the sauce. There is garlic, balsamic vinegar, brown sugar, and oil.

Before you add this to your pan, you might wish to reduce the heat quite a bit because it instantly made a wreck of my stovetop, but it wasn't hard to clean up.

Balsamic sauce for chicken:

• ½ cup balsamic vinegar
• 2 TBSP oil
• 5 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp mustard (we used a brown horseradish mustard)
• 1 tsp basil
• 1 tsp parsley
• salt and pepper to taste

Some of my kids don't like rice at the moment, so I just cooked them some plain ramen, and they had their chicken over that. Everyone loved this.

3. Potatoes and baked beans

The next night was the easiest of the dinners on a budget. I scrubbed up some potatoes and chopped them up into cubes. I also had some bacon I added to the potatoes.

I just seasoned the potatoes with salt and pepper and a little oil. The bacon also will make more oil, so I didn't have to worry about that. My husband warmed up some baked beans on the side.

4. Big Mac Sloppy Joes

You just brown your hamburger meat with salt and pepper and maybe Worcestershire or soy sauce or other similar sauce. Then we made some fries to go. We have a French fry cutter I used to make the fries.

5. Ribs and sweet potatoes

The next night, my husband made some ribs, and he made some teriyaki barbecue. For the other ones, he made honey teriyaki; these were delicious. I didn't get a picture of our plates, but we had sweet potatoes, and my kids had regular potatoes because they're not big fans of sweet potatoes to go along with it.

I cooked up some sweet potatoes for my husband and me, then I cooked up regular potatoes for everyone else because that's what they prefer.

6. Balsamic pork

We also had balsamic pork with banana peppers on top. My kids topped theirs with cheese and sour cream, which was fabulous. I would definitely have this again.

Dinners on a budget

These recipes were all great ways to use up our leftovers. Do you have recipes you use when you’re making dinners on a budget? Share them in the comments below.