Day 12: 12 Days of Frugal Stockpile Meals

For the final meal in my frugal stockpile meals series, I made fish with sides of broccoli and pasta:

Here is the cost breakdown for the ingredients:

• Wholey swai fillets - $3.60 (used an entire package of 4 fillets ($2.88) plus 1 fillet ($0.72) from a second $2.88 package)
• Birds Eye Steamfresh broccoli - $0.67 (I have to say, I'm glad my kids love broccoli because they've been the most easily accessible veggie in my freezer!)
• Lipton Pasta Sides (not pictured, since I accidentally threw the package out before remembering I should have taken a picture first - oops!) - $0.50
• Goya Adobo seasoning - I only paid $0.59 for the entire jar and I used a negligible amount sprinkled on each fillet

Total cost of a meal for a family of 5: $4.77 ($0.95 per person).

We had never eaten swai before (to be honest, I had never even heard of it until these packages went on sale at Tops a while back) but we all liked its very mild flavor.  The package says you can use it in any recipe calling for catfish (which I've never eaten, either) but it reminded me a lot of tilapia. As far as preparation, I simply sprinkled each fillet with a bit of adobo seasoning and baked them in the oven at 425 for about 12 minutes.

Although I'm not typically a meal planner, I really had a lot of fun creating a 12-day meal plan for this series of blog posts.  My family enjoyed trying some new recipes and I felt like I was able to get out of my typical rut of making the same few dinners every few days.  I was pleasantly surprised to find how inexpensively I was able to cook for family, and a bit shocked to find that a couple meals I had always thought of as quite frugal turned out to be much more expensive than I had realized!  Most of all, I hope my readers enjoyed it and maybe found some new ways to use up items you've perhaps stockpiled.  Or, if you haven't stockpiled much in the past, maybe this series has caused you to reconsider how valuable and useful it can be.