Potato recipes make for easy dinners; Make great easy dinners from these frugal recipes.

Potato Recipes

*Healthy Meals start with Potatoes and Veggies.

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Potato Recipes

The great potato is one of the most common, most humble foods in the world. Potato dishes exist in every country that has ever known a potato, and each tradition is unique. Whether you mash, whip, bake, fry, or even stuff potatoes, these easy potato recipes all have one thing in common: their main ingredient is amazingly inexpensive.

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Potatoes by the sack are ridiculously inexpensive, last a long time, and are shockingly easy to cook. One of the best Frugal Dinners in the world is the fancy baked potato, and it consists entirely of wrapping foil around a potato, throwing it in the oven, and putting out bowls of toppings on the table. We like to oil the skin before foiling as it makes the finished skin so yummy it's worth a few more calories.

This particular strategy is a favorite of children and adults everywhere, and can be as healthy as you make it. You don’t even have to use russet potatoes, and you don’t have to use bacon bits! This works for sweet potatoes and all other varieties as well. As for toppings, cooked spinach is absolutely marvelous on baked potatoes. Our favorite though is cottage cheese in place of sour cream, you get much less fat that way.

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Easy Dinners

The trick with potatoes is making Frugal Recipes look like gourmet foods. Potatoes can, after all, get very bland if you eat them the same way every night. However, there are lots of easy dinner recipes using potatoes that provide a lot of variety.

One great recipe is to cook chunks of beef, potatoes, and diced tomatoes, making a delicious Crock Pot Stew. This dish is surprisingly flavorful for something so simple, and the potatoes seem to suck up the flavors of the items they were cooked with. Of all the potato recipes, it’s one of the healthiest easy dinner recipes around.

You can also go the extra mile and make delicious twice baked potatoes and even a beautiful baked potato soup. Here's another one becoming popular in restaurants- mashed potato pizza! It is great, the trick is to use equally thin layers of mashed potatoes with cheese bubbling on top.

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Frugal Recipes

Potatoes themselves are not very expensive, but potato recipes often require a lot of additional ingredients such as cheese or cream. One way to make potato recipes into frugal recipes is to change the way you cook the potato rather than what you put on it.

For instance, if you’re using potatos as a side every night and don’t want to get tired of it, try mashing it one night, baking it the next, then frying it on the third. Each of these cooking methods makes a very different product, none of which requires additional expensive ingredients.

You can cook lots of easy dinners when you pair potatoes with a meat and a vegetable portion of the meal. Try our Fresh Green Bean Recipe here.

You can make a lovely side dish for a fancier dinner by halving baby red potatoes, slathering them with olive oil, rosemary and garlic, and steaming them until tender.

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Easy Dinner Recipes

While it’s pretty easy to cook a slab of beef with potatoes, there are better easy dinner recipes out there. Consider making fancy hash browns for dinner: grate the potatoes and add additional ingredients like you would an omelet. You can include chunks of ham, cheese, sour cream, Salsa , or even avocado. While you can make this dish for dinner, it also makes an excellent breakfast for lazy weekends.

Simply slicing potatoes and onions and frying them in a pan, then covering them with cheese, is a delicious meal in itself. However, meals that involve fried potatoes are usually heavy on the calories.

It is better when possible to bake potatoes rather than fry them in oils, although these dishes do not ever taste the same. Baked potato slices with cheese do make a lovely side dish, though.

It is true that potatoes are not really a very healthy thing to eat if you eat nothing else. The same could be said for corn. The best approach for potatoes, like anything else, is moderation. While you clearly shouldn’t resort to an all-potato diet, potato sides are excellent and nutritious dishes that are easy to make on a tight budget. When you’re in need of frugal recipes for dinner, look no further than the humble potato.

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