You just have to improvise a little, blending recipes & substituting for expensive ingredients.
I was definitely surprised to see so many comments on here about recipes, when the recipe was a pretty tiny portion of the article! Maybe it reveals a latent demand for recipes specifically aimed at being as cheap as possible.
Personally I'd love to see more recipes that are
- cheap
- quick to cook
- healthy
- tasty
As it is, there's a hell of a lot of books that presume you want to make something fancy.
There are quite a few student cookbooks over here, and surprisingly most of the stuff in them is fairly decent.