I’m going to admit a secret, ya’ll. During my first semester of college, I survived on $10 a week for groceries. I’m not proud of this. I subsisted on ramen noodles and butter sandwiches. But boy, could I stretch a food dollar! An entire semester of eating ramen noodles will teach you to get creative. If you’re living in a dorm or in a dumpy college apartment and you don’t know how to get through the summer without your financial aid disbursement, here’s how to get the most bang for your ramen noodle buck.

Here’s a cheap recipe – try making a stir fry with ramen noodles and some frozen vegetables. The seasoning pack and a little bit of soy sauce is really all you need to season up the dish, and half a pack of frozen veggies and a pack of ramen noodles will feed a hungry college student for under $2 a meal. If you can throw in a fresh vegetable, you’re really in business.

Add ramen noodles to a green salad. I like to combine spinach, canned mandarin oranges, and almond slices. They give the salad a nice, crunchy texture, and they’re a heck of a lot cheaper than those other crunchy Asian noodles you can get in a can at the grocery store.

Substitute ramen noodles for spaghetti. They’re usually only 10 cents a package, which is super cheap compared to other packages of pasta noodles. You would obviously omit the seasoning package and flavor this with spaghetti sauce. The cheapest recipe I know is to use a can of tomato sauce (you can usually get a great deal on this if you watch the food sales), then season it with Italian seasoning, or fresh herbs from your own garden. You could skip the tomato sauce and make a cheap pesto with olive oil (or butter/margarine) and Italian seasoning or fresh herbs. I think you get the idea.

Ramen noodles are great for homemade soups. You could use the other half of that package of frozen vegetables that you used to make a stir fry earlier in the week to make your average ramen noodle soup more substantial. Or you could make chicken noodle soup with a small piece of chicken that you split up from a larger package of chicken that you bought on sale. I make my own broth, which is a terrific way to minimize your food costs. But you could just boil the meat and add your ramen noodles at the very end, and voila – chicken noodle soup.

Ramen noodles aren’t glamorous, but they’re definitely cheap. I don’t recommend living on $10 a week – $50 a week is a much healthier number. However, you can take a simple and cheap ingredient like ramen noodles and dress it up to make your meal more nutritious, and hopefully, a little more appetizing. You don’t have to be a starving student to try these cheap recipes. I think we’re all trying to stretch our food dollars. The key to staying within your food budget is creativity – utilize cheap ingredients in new ways, and you’ll be able to live on less without growing bored of eating at home.

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