30 Meals for $15 for Seniors Living Alone (End of the Month, Before Social Security Comes)

Budget meals for one person: 30 dishes for $15, built for the last days of the month when bulk-buying advice doesn't work. 0:00 The calendar problem nobody budgets for 1:49 Oatmeal that holds you till noon 2:43 Twelve-cent tomato rice soup 6:12 Egg drop soup and grandmother's cold nights 10:20 Split peas, lentils and fifty-cent pintos 16:18 Sardines, sweet potatoes and the cold-pan trick 20:35 Tuna pasta and the plate-and-chair rule 23:40 Cornmeal mush and sixty-year-old fried potatoes 27:02 The dollar fourteen breakfast at number one Budget cooking advice says to buy in bulk and plan six weeks ahead, but that doesn't work for one person on a Social Security check who can't finish a ten-pound bag of potatoes before they go soft. The real problem is the calendar: the check comes once a month, and the money runs out before the month does. So how do you eat well on fifteen dollars? I walk through thirty meals for one person, using nothing but what's on the bottom shelf of an ordinary grocery store. Each has one detail that makes it work: day-old rice for egg fried rice, the pasta water in buttered pasta, a cold pan for grilled cheese, soaked pinto beans at about fifty cents a meal. Along the way come lentil and split pea soups, sardines on crackers, cornmeal mush and rice pudding. Number one isn't the cheapest or the most filling. It's a meal I made on a morning when my check was four days late and I had a dollar and fourteen cents. What I decided before I took the first bite is the reason it earned the top spot, and it's what I hope you'll take with you. If budget cooking for one is useful to you, subscribe for more meals built around real-life constraints. Which would you rather have at the end of the month: a pot of soup that feeds you for days, or a quick skillet meal you can make in ten minutes?