One of the best tools you can possibly have in your kitchen is the crockpot or slow cooker. Forget diamonds, this sucker is woman’s best friend. You can cook cheap meats in your slow cooker and they will magically come out soft and falling off the bone! Beans turn into a wonder dish in the slow cooker and everything has more flavor because its stewed in tasty juices for hours.

While slow cookers are most renowned as time savers, they are really very good for helping the average family lower their food budget, too. Instead of buying expensive cuts of meat, you can easily cook cheap ones that would ordinarily be too tough to deal with. Ribs, for example, can be very tough on occasion, but if you pop them in the slow cooker, you’ll have melt in your mouth ribs by evening.

Add to this the fact that anything you add to the slow cooker or crockpot disperses its flavor slowly throughout the cooking time and you have a great way to stay on budget.

Vegetarian dishes tend to be cheaper than meat ones, so you might want to try cooking a bean stew or lentils in your crockpot for cheaper meals. With the addition of a few vegetables, you’ve got a tasty dish that can be served over rice. If you want to make pasta sauce, this can be very easily done, you just need to slow cook the tomatoes and onions with herbs added in the last hour. Freeze the extra for later use and you have a huge savings over those pre-made sauces.

Many dishes cost just a dollar or two when made from scratch, so skip the prepared items and use your slow cooker to cook cheap cuts of meat, vegetables, soups and stews, or even prepare your own chicken stock by cooking your chicken carcass for 24 hours or so in water. Things that would normally take a long time and require a lot of attention are now able to cook overnight or during the day while you are out and about and busy with other things.

Cook cheap meals in your slow cooker and your family will eat well for next to nothing. You can stock up the next time there’s a sale on tough bits of meat and just pop them into the crockpot for 10 hours to soften them up . . . you won’t regret having a crockpot.

Looking to cook cheap for your family? At TheGourmetMama.com, you’ll find great, easy recipes to impress everyone in the family.