This is how you can make a delicious holiday dinner on a budget

As Christmas approaches, many people are trying to budget for a holiday dinner with current food prices.

Two Edmonton-area professional home economists and cooking enthusiasts have some tips for capping costs for your holiday dinners, without sacrificing quality or taste.

SHOPPING TIPS

"Do some legwork. Look online or check on fliers. Many grocery stores will price match. So if you have a grocery store that you prefer to go to, but there's a better price somewhere else, they'll often price match," suggests home economist and teacher Jodie Kachkar.

"Prioritize the pieces of your meal that you want to make, spend the most money on what's the big high priority or the big ticket item, and put your dollars there and find other ways and cheaper ways to buy the other ingredients."

Kachkar also suggests going to the grocery store when you have more time, on off-peak hours, and when you have a full stomach.

"It's a stressful and busy time of year. So I think always you should just give yourself some grace to understand that we're all doing your best."

MEAT

Kachkar says if you want to go the traditional turkey route, there are options for the budget-conscious shopper.

"It's still possible to get utility birds and they're just a lower quality, a little banged up, still lovely."

She urges people to ensure they have enough time to defrost a fully frozen turkey.

"You will need time to thaw it safely in the refrigerator or in a sink of cold water. And we're talking about days of thawing. So you are coming up to not enough time to do that."

For those willing to forgo the turkey, she has other options to save more money.

"This pork tenderloin is $9. And you can do a lot with pork. And it's lean and very economical."

"I butterflied the pork tenderloin. And then I pounded it so it was thin. And then inside, I put cranberry sauce and caramelized onions, and some cooked spinach and some goat cheese. And you actually don't need a lot of either of those things."

For people who don't eat pork, Kachkar suggests chicken as an alternative.

"Costco has three chickens for about $30. And so that would be probably the most economical whole roasted chicken that you could get right now in the Edmonton area."

"You can also cook more than one, you can butterfly or spatchcock chicken. So that means they're easier to fit multiple birds in a pan or in a sheet pan if you're cooking a big meal."

POTATOES

Home economist and teacher Justin Gabinet suggests buying your potatoes early to help space out your grocery bills before the holidays.

"You can buy a giant bag in bulk and as long as you store them properly, they last for a long time."

He says you can reduce costs for mashed potatoes by using less conventional ingredients like powdered milk, and if you want to save money on butter and margarine?

"Add a parsnip. They add that creaminess. It's another root vegetable and it tastes sweeter."

He also suggests saving money on butter and milk by roasting potatoes instead of mashing them.

"Potatoes are a great option for any family that can be done 1,000 different ways for relatively cheap."

STUFFING

Gabinet says to skip the boxed stuffing this year, because the dish can be made without being expensive.

"Stuffing is literally just bread with broth and some aromatics. So that's celery, carrots, onions, as well as some herbs."

He suggests using croutons for the bread, or looking for options in the back of your freezer.

"I literally cleaned up my freezer full of my summertime hamburger buns and hot dog buns and you just kind of lightly defrost them and chop them up and then put them in."

"Put them in the oven while I was baking cookies, and then dry them out and then re-hydrated them with broth. And then you put it back in the oven to kind of just flush it out a little bit more and bam, it's done."

DESSERT

As an inexpensive, and unexpected option for Christmas dinner, Gabinet suggests sticky toffee pudding.

Gabinet's pudding is made with dates, which he says are still inexpensive.

"The fresh dates are maybe five or $6 for a ginormous package, I made two of these cakes for less than like I think it was less than $10."

Top the pudding with caramel sauce for a dessert that everyone is sure to love.

"People get really intimidated by caramel because they think it's coming into the world of confection, when actually it's not hard at all. It's just butter or margarine, if that's cheaper, and brown sugar."

If you can't find brown sugar because of the ongoing sugar shortage, Gabinet suggests using a premade option.

"If you have a can of caramel sauce from ice cream in the summer, use it. Or worst case scenario, you can use jam."

"There's this idea that you need to do everything from scratch, get up at 5 a.m. in the morning and put yourself through all that hard stuff. You really don't. If there's things that make your life easier, do them."

RECIPES

These are the recipes Kaschkar and Gabinet used to make their dishes:

With files from CTV News Edmonton's Nahreman Issa