How To Make A Meal For 5 For Under $1

As an incurable cheapskate prudent spender, I'm always looking for meal and household ideas that reduce our cost of living, without sacrificing quality.  Homemade chicken noodle soup fits the bill.  It contains mostly local foods (many ingredients not further away than our backyard), minimal processing, contains protein, carbs, and veggies, and cost under $1 for a 6-quart pot. 

Chicken - leftover chicken from yesterday's roast.  The grain used to feed this chicken was factored into our food budget last summer, so I'm not including a price in today's recipe.  "Aw, that's cheating," you say, "Not everyone has a free chicken to work with".  True, and I sympathize deeply with your situation, but don't you think I should score some points for all the work I did last summer? After all, I was the Poultry Feeding, Watering and Strawing Manager.  No matter that my children did most of the actual work.  I was the one responsible for asking, ordering, cajoling, and bribing my younguns with popsicles to get the chicken chores done.  Yep, it's a tough job.  Sometimes they didn't hear me when I called to them from the lounger I was suntanning on, and I had to go looking for them to remind them about chores. I even lost my page in the book I was reading a few times.

Chicken broth - compliments of aforementioned chicken and a bit of tap water.

Noodles - homemade with the help of my 4-year-old.  3 cups flour (I buy big bags of flour when they're on sale, so I'm guessing I didn't use more than 30 cents worth - I can just picture some of you figuring this out in your head - I'll say right off the bat that I may be off on my numbers:)), 2 eggs (free due to an unfair deal we have going with my parents - we offer them eggs in the summer when we have chickens, and they give us eggs the other 9 months of the year.  We end up giving them about 4 dozen eggs per year, and they give us about 1446 dozen, in return.  If you do the math, and even if you don't, it's clear to see this is a very unfair deal, and I should feel very ashamed!), 1/2 cup milk (15 cents) and  a bit of salt (5 cents?).  So the noodles cost me a whopping 50 cents.

Peas, carrots, and parsley - compliments of 2010 garden.  Cost: $0.00 (excluding the cost of freezies that were used to bribe my kiddos to weed "just one more" row of produce).

Corn - I regret to record that I have no garden corn on hand, and I used about 1/4 cup frozen corn.  Cost:  about 10 cents.

Bay leaf - I'll estimate this cost at around 8 cents.

Ground Peppercorn - 8 cents.  I wouldn't want the bay leaf to get a complex, thinking it was worth less than the peppercorn.  I want to keep jealousy at bay.  Sorry, I'll stop peppering you with corny jokes.  I'll leaf you alone now.

GRAND TOTAL:  $ 0.76
Yields:  About  24 cups of soup

Not bad, eh?  What el cheapo, healthy meals do you make for your family? Am I the only one who figures out how much meals cost?