Save Grocery Money and Serve Bread for Dinner

French Toast, Stuffing Bake, Stuffed Bread and Bread Pudding

Bread is inexpensive, hearty, healthy (yes, if it's real whole grain), and filling. This makes it the perfect food to serve when money is low. It's also a great food to serve when spirits are low as well, since it's so comforting.

I recommend learning to bake bread from scratch. I recently estimated that my homemade bread costs about $.32 a loaf for me to make, and one loaf is cut into 12-14 fairly generously sized pieces. They are larger than store bought bread and one sandwich made with them is plenty for my husband's appetite. When made with whole wheat they are even more economical, since whole grains are digested more slowly, don't spike blood sugar, and release their energy into the body more slowly than processed grains do.

Baking bread doesn't have to be very time-consuming and complicated though, and a bread maker can make very short work of it, producing wonderful homemade bread more conveniently than buying it at the store, since I don't have to leave the house to have it! The book, Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes, is also a good source for would-be bread bakers. Even so, there is something to be said for doing it by hand at least once in a while, just for the enjoyment of it.

But man does not live on bread alone, if I can mangle a quote, and sooner or later, PB&J or buttered toast with jam for dinner is going to look more like a harsh economy and less like a treat. So, how does one continue to serve bread for dinner without looking like that's what they're doing? Here are five ways to disguise bread, serve it for dinner, and call it something else.

French Toast

Any breakfast for dinner is a delicious, but very affordable treat, and French Toast is one of the cheapest. It's unusual and involves syrup, so the kids love it, but it's basically a way to make a couple of eggs stretch around a whole family and back again. It's best made with slightly stale bread, or slices that have been toasted on the lightest setting or dried out in the oven. To make it seem even more gourmet, nutmeg and cinnamon could be added to the batter.

Stuffing Bake