The thing is, I've been living on a reduced income since 2002 -- much as I hate to blame 9/11, it DID affect the two industries I work in (theater and office temping), and my income dropped 75% in 2002 because I simply couldn't find work. I have spent the past 6 years trying to recover from that, and finally just now I have.

And what did it is learning these kinds of cheap-meal tricks. Cooking for yourself and buying produce in season is the absolute best thing to learn how to do.

Big batches of vegetable soup was something I did again and again -- I have a recipe for Provencal vegetable soupe au pistou that is really easy, makes a TON, is healthy, flavorful, and can be doled out into individual-size containers and frozen. I also can make biscuits (using yogurt instead of buttermilk) and freeze most of them -- and dinner then becomes a bowl of the soup and a couple biscuits fetched from the freezer and reheated. Soup also lends itself very well to improvisation, so you don't need to fret if the recipe calls for artichokes but artichokes are expensive -- you can just shrug and skip the artichokes, and make something else with what's on sale.

I do the coupon thing. I try to buy mostly organic or natural foods, and this is STILL POSSIBLE through couponing! After three months of doing this, I no longer pay for most toiletries - will never pay for a toothbrush or toothpaste again! There are great resources out there to help someone get started with couponing... some of my favorite resources are websites like www.hotcouponworld.com, www.afullcup.com, and blogs like www.moneysavingmom.com! As a single person household, I have gone from spending $60-80 a week on food/toiletries to less than $40! And I'm still eating the same stuff I ate before - plus, my pantry is WAY more stocked than it ever was before!

Ethnic grocery stores are, in my opinion, the best way to slash your food costs. A lot of products are significantly less expensive (especially produce!), and you can find a lot of obscure ingredients much more easily. Not everything is cheaper there, but most fresh ingredients are a good balance between affordable and high-quality. My grocery bill has been halved since I've started shopping at these places.

My recent favorite has been a local Korean grocer that stocks excellent produce (only seasonal, which requires some adaption but is ultimately a very good thing), sometimes at half the cost of the chain stores, as well as decent meats and dry goods (rice, noodles, etc.). I'm fortunate enough to live in a neighborhood with eastern European, north African, Latino, and Asian grocery stores, but even if you aren't, it's worth the hike for the savings.

You can also write companies directly and ask for coupons. I've done this successfully with a bunch of organic food companies.
Some companies offer coupons thru their web sites. Organic Valley is one of them.

Coops are awesome. Usually much better than what you even find at Whole Foods.

CSAs (farm shares) are also GREAT ways to save money. You pre-pay, which means you pay more at the beginning, but ours has seriously slashed our overall food bill.

http://www.SustainableSuppers.com is a GREAT site. It has a lot of creative ideas for stretching food dollars -- with real food (and yummy food at that).

Buy two or three bottles each of vinegar and olive oil, then flavor them individually, herbs – citrus peel – dried chilies. Drizzling a few drops on most any savory dish will give you the feeling that you’re living luxuriously but on pennies. I don’t recommend adding garlic, because the fear of botulism is real (slim but real), add garlic fresh when you're cooking. If you need recipes search for Michael Chiarello - or - go by your local library and borrow his books titled respectively Oils and Vinegars.

Roast in-season veggies on a pan but store them separately, when it’s time to make dinner you can pick & choose which flavors you want to eat that night. It means that from the same pan of veggies (whatever's in season and inexpensive) I’ll have meals that look and taste completely different with the addition of pasta, grains, legumes or flavorings: soup (chunky one night, pureed another), stew, pizza. For me that beats-all over having the same pot of stew every night. I eat Italian one night, Indian the next, Chinese the next, variety makes it for me. I didn’t mention meat or fish because I gave up eating those, though not for financial reasons, and it ended up saving me a lot but I have to be diligent about ensuring I get all my nutrients in other ways. Skip those ramen-only recipes, really, as you grow older you’ll find that having shortcut your nutrition earlier in life will cost you far more in terms of mobility, flexibility, and doctor’s bills. It’s not worth it – just challenge yourself to incorporate variety and nutrition in your diet now.

I grow or buy bulk in-season then I preserve it by canning or drying it in my home oven. I store the canned goods in boxes stacked in a small 2’x2’ area in the coolest part of my house, in the fridge, and also freeze some things (fruits, sliced, to make smoothies or pie). Whether I’m making tomato sauce or freezing peaches or making jam I make sure I can use it multiple ways. A basic tomato sauce (with the addition of an ingredient or two when cooking): soup or stew or vegetable juice base, pasta sauce, pizza sauce. Jam: on toast or scones, in cake or cupcake batter or added to the icing, used as a sweetener in iced tea. If I'm peeling an orange or lemon, the peel's added to a freezer bag, when there's enough I make a small batch of marmalade. My neighbors and I grow completely different produce, in a mild but foggy part of San Francisco, and we share the excess with senior neighbors, single parents, the local food bank and soup kitchen. We know people who need free produce, family or friends, they’ve signed up to help us during harvest and tree trimming seasons and get a share of our combined produce in-season... I firmly believe that if we can do this here it can be done most anywhere. If you see an unattended tree, ask the neighbor if you can help harvest, many seniors have lost their ability to maintain their fruit trees and need help in return for free produce.

If you take the time to understand how coupons work, it can be a big saver, I won’t spend time hunting & clipping so I pay for coupons through a clipping service and only buy ‘free product’ coupons. For the price of what I’d pay for 1 or 2 items at full retail I usually get enough of that product to last me a year or more (10-20 items). It doesn’t take much space to store, I set aside a 2’x2’ area in a cool location, and I rotate things in & out of boxes. It’s saved me a fortune this year and now, after having stocked up on grains & legumes in bulk, my monthly food bill is down to about $25 a month.

Sorry for such a long post but this is the topic I've been working on personally for the last couple years so I've been ferreting out every trick I can find.