Part of learning to cook on a shoestring budget is recognizing the importance of good meals.  Eat a decent breakfast, and you won’t find yourself snacking during the morning or famished by lunch time; that means less money spent at vending machines and less food consumed at your later meals.

Breakfast is a very important meal, but it can be so hard to find time to cook; it’s easier to just grab a pop-tart and go, but that will cost you extra over time.  Remember: It’s almost always cheaper to cook for yourself instead of paying some pastry company to do it for you.  So we need a good, cheap meal that we can make in a hurry and won’t leave us hungry in 2 hours. Enter French Toast.

French Toast is essentially bread dipped in scrambled eggs and grilled on a stove top.  Here’s what you’ll need to cook French Toast for 4.

Ingredients:

• 8 slices of bread
• 4 eggs
• 1 Cup of milk
• 1 tsp. of vanilla extract
• A dash of cinnamon and sugar
• Some butter or margarine

The Process:

1. Heat a skillet on the stove top — medium high heat
2. While your skillet heats up, quickly beat 4 eggs in a large mixing bowl. Be sure to beat them well–as if you were making scrambled eggs.
3. Pour milk into the bowl with the eggs.
4. Next, stir in vanilla extract, and any cinnamon or sugar you want.  These are entirely optional, but a little bit will go a long way for this recipe (and cinnamon is considered a natural appetite-suppressant, meaning you’ll be less likely to overeat or get hungry later if you add some to this recipe).
5. Grease your skillet with margarine or butter.
6. Dip each slice of bread into the egg-milk-vanilla-cinnamon solution; make sure each side is good and coated, then throw it on the skillet.
7. Let each slice of toast cook for a few minutes before turning them over.  Your goal is to achieve a brown-to-gold tint on each side, but they’re ready to eat pretty much as soon as you think the eggs coating the toast have cooked (No salmonella, please).
   
8. Dish them up on a plate, and serve with syrup, molasses, jelly, or butter (or eat them plain–they’re good no matter what you put on them).  Goes great with coffee!

From start to finish, this recipe takes a little less than 30 minutes; is that as fast as it would take you to roll out of bed, grab a pop-tart, and go to work? No. Is it better for your diet and your wallet? Probably.

The most expensive part of this recipe is bread and eggs.  At about $1-$1.50 per loaf and $1-$2 per dozen eggs, minimum, this recipe is going to run you about $1-$2 in bread and eggs; the next most expensive elements are the milk and vanilla, but we don’t use much of either. Altogether, we’re looking at roughly $4 for this 4-person meal–about $1 per person, give or take a little.

Be sure not to let your bread soak up too much of the egg mixture when you coat each slice; if you do, you won’t be able to coat every slice of toast sufficiently, and your bread may become so soggy that it falls apart (listen to my voice of experience on both of these points).  Otherwise, I hope you enjoy this very tasty, filling breakfast.

Filed under: Recipes

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