How to Meal Prep to Save Money by Having Breakfast for Dinner

I am sharing how to meal prep to save money. Meal prepping is an easy way to make budget meals every week. To be honest with you, it's one of my favorites.

Breakfast for dinner

My secret to saving money throughout the week is by making breakfast for dinner at least once a week. Breakfast can be one of the cheapest meals to make, depending on what you make, and I make pancakes once a week. Pancakes are super, super cheap. Nowadays, with food prices being as high as they are, I'm trying to save money as much as I can in as many different places as I can. So for me, breakfast is the way to go.

Today I'm going to be making from scratch biscuits and gravy, and then some scrambled eggs.

The biscuits have flour, butter, and milk, so you've got some protein in there from the milk.

You've got carbs from the flour. Now a gravy, again, you've got a lot of milk in it. You have flour and butter, so you have protein and fat. Scrambled eggs definitely have a lot of protein. They have some good fats in them to help keep you full.

There are no vegetables in this, but if you want to add a vegetable, spinach is the easiest way to add vegetables to a breakfast food because you can scramble it with your scrambled eggs. If you want to add a side of fruit onto this as well, apples and bananas tend to be pretty cheap all year round, so that is an option too. So you can add nutrition to this meal in plenty of ways.

Biscuit recipe

Ingredients:

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 5 tablespoons cold butter
• 1 cup milk

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.

In a large bowl, add the dry ingredients and mix until just blended.

Cut in the cold butter, a little bit at a time, until the flour mixture becomes a bit coarse. The butter will be about the size of peas. You can use a pastry cutter or a stand mixer for this.

Pour the milk in slowly until the dough just starts to peel off the bowl. You may not have to use all of the milk.

Use a round cutter to make about 12 biscuits.

I use an old tuna can as a biscuit cutter, and it works great. You can also use a round cookie cutter.

Place biscuits onto a greased baking pan and bake in the preheated oven for 13-15 minutes. The tops of the biscuits should be golden brown. Optional step: Add melted butter to the tops right after the biscuits come out.

Gravy recipe

Ingredients

1 pound sausage (Pork or turkey)

1/4 cup all-purpose flour

2 cups milk

Salt and pepper, to taste

Instructions:

In a large pan, cook the sausage until fully browned, then drain.

Add the flour and continue cooking until all of the white disappears.

Pour in the milk a little at a time, and stir constantly until the gravy thickens. Add salt and pepper.

When the gravy has reached the desired thickness, pour over the prepared biscuits.

Price breakdown

So let's break down the prices of everything. So, the prices I'm about to give are for the individual ingredients and just what I used for the recipe. So, for example, I bought an entire gallon of milk, but I only used about three or four cups in the recipe. So I'm only including the price of what I used, not for the entire item itself.

For the flour, I spent about $0.18 on the biscuits and the gravy milk, and I spent $0.61 on both of the recipes. Butter was a dollar, and that was probably one of the more expensive parts of these meals.

For scrambled eggs, if I made eight eggs, that would be $1.66 because eggs right now are super expensive. Baking powder was approximately five cents, then salt and sugar were about two cents each, give or take. So altogether, I spent about $3.54 on the ingredients I used.

This recipe can serve anywhere between four and six people. So if you're serving four people, that will be about .88 cents per serving, which is not bad. Now, let's compare that to maybe store-bought biscuits and gravy.

A can of biscuits that you just open up and put in the oven is going to cost you around $1.50 for around the same amount of biscuits, and then one of those premade gravy packets is around a dollar. So you're going to spend around $2.50 for just the biscuits and the gravy and then whatever you would pay for the eggs.

Up front, the can of biscuits and the packet of gravy is a little bit cheaper. However, if you were to buy all of the ingredients, like the flour, milk, butter, and all of that stuff, you may be spending more upfront. However, you will be able to make more out of it; I would say at least three or four batches, even more with what you buy. So upfront, it is cheaper to buy the premade stuff, but in the long run, it is cheaper just to buy all the ingredients.

How to meal prep to save money

Do you know how to meal prep to save money regularly? What are your favorite meal prep recipes? Share your recipes in the comments below.