Running into a month where money’s totally tight and you need to do something drastic to avoid spending money? Here are some quick tips.

Make an inventory of what you have on hand

Look in your pantry. Look in your refrigerator. Look in your freezer.

Make a list of every meal you can make based solely on what you’ve already got in your house.

How many meals can you come up with? Will you have leftovers from one dinner enough to provide lunch the next day?

• Can you bake bread or muffins with what you’ve?
• If you’ve got a bit of plain yogurt and some milk (even dried), you can make yogurt.
• Most anyone can make a good soup from from leftovers or whatever you have around.
• Little bits of meat and vegetables can become calzones
• If you’ve tortillas, make quesadillas (or make your own tortillas)
• Leftover chicken can become chicken pot pie
• Leftover meat of any kind (or just veggies) can become fried rice

You get the idea. And in the future, these ideas might provide some incentive to save those bits of leftovers rather than throwing them away.

Okay, how many meals did you come up with without having to buy one single thing?

What can you make by buying just one more thing?

Get creative. If you just had X, you could make Y. Scour your old cookbooks. Look in the more “complete” ones that often have great ideas for using up stuff. Search the web with phrases like “leftover chicken recipes” or go to a site like Cooking By Numbers and list what you’ve got. They’ll give you some great ideas. Other good are Expendible Edibles, Hillbilly Housewife, plus this site of Ramen Recipes. Student Cooking in the UK is another good source.

Shop the loss leaders

By now you probably have nearly a week’s worth of menus. Pull out your grocery ads. Or go online to the SundaySaver. If you’re not vegetarian, use my Cost Per Serving Calculator to see which cuts of beef, chicken, pork, or fish really gives you the best buy for your money. Plug in the sale price and compare the cost per serving. Then think how you can stretch that even further by lessening the amount of meat you use for a serving. Stretch it with fried rice, soup, burritos, and casseroles.

And even if you aren’t vegetarian, think about some great vegetarian meals you can make. A pound of dried beans around here is usually just over $1. Pinto beans and cornbread will fill you up cheaply. Or cook them up and refry them for chalupas. If you’ve got eggs, make a quiche. Broccoli and tofu with peanut sauce over rice is cheap and healthy. Many of these vegetarian recipes could become a main dish or be combined to make a complete meal.

Don’t forget breakfast

Make breakfast burritos if you’ve got some eggs and potatoes. Leave out the meat if you don’t have any.

Do you have cornmeal? Cook up some cornmeal mush the night before, put it in a loaf pan and refrigerate overnight. In the morning slice it and fry it, topping with maple syrup or brown sugar. Make your own granola. Make pancakes and serve with maple flavored syrup. Heat up some tomato soup or make grilled cheese sandwiches for breakfast. Think outside the box–just don’t go spend $5 on a box of sugared nothing.

I hope this was helpful. I know lots of folks are feeling the money-crunch again. I started this web site and blog when I was out of work and needed to cut back on every penny I could. Many people spend more on food than they need to so I hope I can help you cut back on this area that you can control, to some level, so you can spend the money where you need to.