Making your food budget stretch as far as you can is quite a skill - and these days, it's a skill more of us are trying to perfect. Here are some of our favorite money-wise suggestions to get you started.

• Learn to stretch. In many recipes (stews, soups, pastas, casseroles), you can increase the amount of beans, pasta or rice to stretch it out a bit without losing flavor.
• Learn to switch. Most of the time, when a recipe calls for a relatively expensive ingredient, you can swap it out for one if its cheaper cousins. Examples: Use green pepper instead of red pepper; use ground chuck instead of ground sirloin.
  
• Less expensive cuts of meat such as stewing beef or a whole chicken are easy to stretch out into several meals, making them an even bigger bargain. You can make at least three meals out of a whole chicken, for example: Your first meal is the whole, roast chicken. Next, use the leftover meat in a chicken salad, chicken pasta or chicken tacos.
• In just about any recipe except for cold salads, you can substitute dried herbs for fresh ones. Just remember the ratio: one tablespoon fresh equals one teaspoon dried.
• Still prefer to use fresh herbs? Try freezing them. Chop up the remaining herbs and place 1 tablespoon in ice cube trays. Carefully fill with water and freeze. Once frozen, place in a resealable plastic bag and return to the freezer.
• What do you do with the crusts or heels of a loaf of bread? Simply run them through the food processor and freeze until ready to use. You can also transform your slightly stale bread into stuffing. Cut bread into cubes and toast in a 400˚ oven, turning once, until they're golden brown.
• Making vegetable stock is a great way to clean out the refrigerator of food that is less than fresh. But don't limit your stock making ingredients to whole vegetables. Start saving peels while you cook. Your stock will be strained before being used, and all those unattractive peels will be gone, but they will have imparted a lovely flavor to your stock.

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