In my ever broadening quest for cheap healthy meals there are two crucial factors, which I search for. Inexpensive healthy meals need to have both a high nutritional density as well as a high satiety factor. The satiety of a food or meal is simply how full it makes your body think it is and for how long.

Researchers use the concept and in weight loss experiments measure the satiety of foods by carefully observing the eating patterns of groups of people following consumption of the test meal. Legumes are high on the satiety scale as well as rich in nutrients.

Incorporating legumes into your regular diet, due to their high satiety factor, is also a good weight loss strategy.

Common legumes such as beans, lentils and chickpeas have sufficient protein to stand in as a meat substitute. As I have no qualms about and thoroughly enjoy eating meat I do not take the substitution thing too far!

Legumes are also high in dietary fiber and essential minerals such as iron, zinc, potassium, phosphorus and selenium. They have many of the B vitamins, are lower on the glycemic index than potatoes and are rich in antioxidants.

Dried legumes produced organically and purchased in bulk are not only super healthy if properly prepared they are also relatively inexpensive. Black beans, lentils and chickpeas contain phytates, which are anti-nutrients. They can bind with essential minerals and keep us from digesting them.

Hence, they should first be neutralized but as the legumes need to be soaked to rehydrate this is easy to do. One needs to just add a Tbsp of something acidic to the water like whey, kefir, lemon juice or vinegar for each cup of legumes.

Beans and chickpeas should be soaked for 24 hours whereas lentils only require a minimum of 7 hours.

In my adventure of trying to achieve independence from the commercial food game I have vastly increased the nutritional quality of meals while cutting my food budget to a fraction of what it was. I purchase my meat from a local who has a small farm where all his stock have access to space, sunlight and pasture.

By substituting a good portion of the normal serving of meat with legumes I not only save a considerable amount of money I can purchase top quality pasture fed meat. With the corporatization of the food industry most people have probably never tasted the meat of animals raised traditionally.

Let me tell you from experience, I would never go back to eating the stuff from the supermarket. The real thing is not only so much healthier it tastes far better. Because of the severe crowding in commercial stock pens pathogens are becoming resistant to all of the antibiotics they shoot into the cows.

Commercial producer are ever resorting to more bizarre methods of trying to get pathogen free meat to the market include bleaching the meat!

For someone who enjoys meat in their meals the secret to substituting a good portion of that with legumes is to start out with a good stock. The farmer I buy my meat from does his own butchering and I can get bones for stock dirt cheap. I use marrow and knuckle bones as well as meaty bones from the breast or neck.

Using a large stock pot with a couple of gallons of water and 6 or 7 pounds of bones I add a cup of vinegar and soak for an hour. After bringing this to a boil I turn it down to simmer and carefully skim off all the foam. It is not only unhealthy to leave it, the foam can ruin the taste.

I add several onions, carrots and sticks of celery roughly chopped. I like to add some fresh thyme, marjoram and basil as well as salt and pepper. After simmering for a couple of days I add a bunch of parsley 10 minutes before turning off the heat.

Don’t let the unpleasant looking, as well as smelling, result throw you. Once you have strained out the clear broth and chilled it to remove the congealed fat, you will have a very tasty clear stock. With a good source of beef bone, if you have done everything right, it should gel in the fridge.

This gelatinous property make the stock an excellent aid to digestion as it makes the stock hydrophilic. Hence, like jello it has the unusual property of attracting liquids. When combined with your meat and legumes it attracts digestive juices to the food.

An example of a typical, as well as one of my favourite cheap healthy dishes is what I call chickpea hash. After soaking the chickpeas I cook them for 6 hours in stock.

I use 1 1/3 cups of chickpeas 1 cup of millet soaked for 7 hours with whey, a lb of ground beef and a few veggies, which along with the stock costs me around $10.00. Since I get roughly 10 servings I am making a cheap meal for about $1.00, which is nutritious chock full of protein and vitamins as well as very tasty.

Now that I have the stock I use it, much in the same manner to make soups. Hearty inexpensive soups can be made with lentils, chickpeas, veggies, tomatoes you name it.

As a bowl of soup for lunch is often insufficient to satiate my appetite I often enjoin it with a Texas Caviar salad made from dried beans, onion and bell peppers. I can make the salad in bulk also as it keeps for weeks in the fridge marinating in the vinegar dressing.

Another great way to incorporate beans into your diet is a variation of the typical bacon and eggs. I cut down on the expensive pasture fed bacon by spreading a normal serving over a few sides of refried beans. I cook the bacon and throw it in a food processor with cooked beans and raw onion then fry it in the bacon fat. I add a Tbsp of cooked quinoa to the eggs and make a cheese omelet. Very yummy!