Groceries are crazy expensive for no valid reason, so a decently nourishing meal grows harder to manage almost by the day. Likewise, most food media paints elaborate pictures that will never pan out properly. Even the simple stuff gets dressed up with gratuitous expense, so the plan becomes looking at a recipe and toning it down to keep it on a budget without losing impact.
Here's an example for you. Simple recipe that supposedly makes 8 servings but could conceivably run you seventy bucks to make depending on where you're buying: Food and Wine Magazine- Sunday Sauce
Don't believe me? I normally shop at what most would call the poor-people supermarkets, and if I see bone-in short ribs, they're all sorts of expensive- never less than double what I'd comfortably pay for them. They average 13-16 usd / #. So you're already around the fifty dollar mark, and you haven't done any other shopping.
Two 28oz cans of whole tomatoes could run you another ten bucks. (Apparently you're supposed to pop them all by hand? That's silly, and an extra potential mess. Use crushed.)
Two pounds of spaghetti could well be another ten bucks (I wish I were joking, but even the cheapest generic stuff around here is near 3.00/#. Lunacy.)
Yes, these are nice round numbers for simplicity. To compensate for any rounding up, I'll stop there, and just skip pricing out all the other ingredients. I won't even talk about how onions can be upward of 1.99/# because it hardly matters,
Look at the principles of the dish. It's a braise, designed to tenderize tough cuts of meat over a long period of slow cooking. This sort of recipe started a long time ago as a way to effectively use off-cuts, cheap stuff, and leftovers. These days, there is no cheap stuff, and the same resulting product is marketed and treated like a premium item. Madness.
I'm going to make something like this later, spending the same amount of time and effort, but for a quarter of the price. How? Magic.
My local Asian market does a lot of its own butchering in-house. It lets them keep some prices a little lower than you might see elsewhere. That also lets them offer useful things you might have to dig around for in most western-style markets. My 'Sunday Sauce' (or 'gravy', as my grandma would have said) is made with pork instead of beef because it's cheaper, and with neck bones instead of those staggeringly expensive short ribs.
Now, you might think "Neck bones? What?"
Well, let me break it down.
One point of the original recipe's use of ribs is to enrich the sauce with the marrow and other flavor drawn from the bones, the same as you might when making stocks. Getting more out of less.
Another point is to use heavily worked, tough muscles since they take more time to cook and historically less expensive as a result. Every single breath you take, every time you turn your head, the exercise never stops.
Lastly, both cuts of meat also tenderize by the collagen/gelatin conversion process, so the enrichment process from the meat itself is identical.
The recipe says to remove the ribs after several hours of cooking, get the meat off, and toss it back in without the bones. That's still happening, and it's smart. Eventually the bones have given everything they have to give, so they're just dead weight. You could conceivably just eat around them, but it's much friendlier to remove what you can't eat and might accidentally bite down on. The neck will take a few more minutes of work than the ribs since there are more cracks and crevices for meat to hide in, but it's not so long as to be significant.
I didn't really change the recipe. I simply returned it to its natural state- a pursuit of affordable deliciousness.
In the end, it's all about finding alternatives you can live with, and live on.
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