Cheap Eats is a weblog devoted to inexpensive food. The site features recipes, reviews, tips and more.

Cheap Eats recipes include cost, instructions, and numerical ratings, as well as witty evaluations of the end product. A recent entry described attempts to make homemade Gatorade. The recipe produced two liters of the stuff for only eighteen cents. But how did it taste?

I lined up one glass of Homemade Gatorade and Real Orange flavored Gatorade. I took a swig of fakey Gatorade. My first impressions were: “Gag”, “Retch”, “Bleahhrg” and “Barf” in that exact order.

[...]

Real Gatorade tastes like Gatorade. it also has a smoother feel to it which I suspect comes from them using corn syrup or fructose or whatever it is to make it easier to drink. Fakey Homemade Gatorade tastes like Orange-Flavored Ocean.

The reviewer gave the homemade Gatorade thee points out of ten. More successful recipes include:

• Home fried potatoes (8/10)
• Frito pie (8/10 — “I am pretty damn impressed with Frito Pie. I think I’ll do this every Easter.”)
• Ghetto pizza (9/10 — “For me Ghetto Pizza ranks right up there with the best Cheap Eats for people living at home…it is extremely cheap and uses readily available ingredients.”)

Cheap Eats also has restaurant reviews. It has food tips. It discusses using leftovers for lunch. The Cheap Eats hall-of-shame features such atrocities as the world’s most expensive sandwich. There’s an entire section of recipes under $3.

The site also reviews pre-packaged foods, such as ramen (6/10), red-hot beef burritoes (7/10), Spam lite (5/10), and Progresso clam chowder (5/10).

Cheap Eats is great if you’re trying to eat on a budget.

This article is about Food, Frugality  Wednesday, 9th August 2006 (by J.D. Roth)