I eat dairy products and eggs is ok! No seafood or meat
Okay, dairy and eggs i can work with.
Well, obviously things with a lot of rice and beans are going to be cheaper. Maybe also pastas, especially if you can make your own. Not sure on how use to that you are.
For starters, Chili. Comes to my mind because I just made a big crock-pot full and I've been eating it for a couple days now.
If you can buy the dried beans and soak some of them overnight instead of the canned beans that helps a lot too. Not sure if you use TVP or just prefer it without any meat like stuff. If you don't own a crock-pot or don't want this to cook a long time, be sure to cook the beans a while before making the chili just to make sure they get done. You can also add two cans of red or black beans instead if you want to have it be quicker and easier. But that ups the cost a bit.
Beans, couple bigger cans of diced tomatoes, can of tomato sauce, large onion, 1 or 2 green peppers, 4 or 5 jalapenos, 4 or 5 cloves of garlic. For spices, 2 or 3 Tbsp of chili powder, 1 tsp cayenne powder, and 1/2 tsp cumin. (that's all that's really in those premade chili packets anyway) Taste the chili when it's mostly cooked to see if you need more heat (cayenne), chili flavor, or the earthy flavor of the cumin. But those amounts are usually a good starter for a big pot of chili. Think that about covers a basic chili, there's a bunch of recipes out there for variations. But chili is always good and cheap I think.
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Not a vegetarian here, but I actually like meatless lasagna better. I usually have a spinach variety that uses ricotta and cottage cheese, and some diced celery and mushrooms. This also freezes GREAT in tupperware. So you can make this up on a Saturday as an extra meal that you freeze all of it. Then you're ready to just grab one of these during the week for lunch variety.
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Look up a good Beef Lo-Mein recipe. Use sliced up Portobello mushrooms instead of beef. Great way to use cheap fettuccine noodles. It's even cheaper if you have a pasta machine and buy some semolina flour to make the noodles yourself. But it's not expensive even using store bought.
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Homemade veggie pizza. If you can make your own dough for crust it helps make it cheaper over the packet mixes. I usually make a half cookie sheet pan at a time. For sauce instead of buying jars of pizza sauce, get a regular 15 oz. can of tomato sauce, and add in a 6 oz can of tomato paste. Then half teaspoon of basil or oregano (maybe both, experiment!), a bit of S&P and a pinch of sugar. Sugar helps bring out the flavors a lot. Heat that up just a bit to incorporate it all, does't need to be boiled or anything. 84 cents for sauce, 50 cents for paste. Say $1.40 with spices to make 21 ounces. In my area a 14 oz. jar of premade sauce is $1.42. So basically it cuts the cost down by a third making it your own. I just freeze the extra for next time. These are all the cheaper brand prices but it works out about the same savings if you use more costly brand comparisons.
For a variation on this, and to make it much quicker, skip the pizza dough. Use large tortilla shells instead. PERFECT thin crust single serving pizza. Trade off on cost for time savings and much less effort though. This one has onion, green pepper, mushroom, jalapeno, and sliced roma tomatoes (no, that's not pepperoni haha)
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Basic roux recipe is 1 cup milk, 1 Tbsp butter, 1 Tbsp flour. Melt the butter, toss in the flour and stir it in. Cook that for a bit to help get rid of the flour taste. Then add the milk a bit at a time and whisk it all together. Gently bring to a boil, stirring all the time. That thickens it up. With that basic recipe there's so many variations. And of course you can scale it up as needed, just keep those 1 to 1 to 1 proportions the same.
Then with that basic recipe in mind:
Basic roux sauce, but add in some white pepper and a nice amount of Parmesan cheese. Alfredo sauce. Serve that over wider noodles.
Basic roux sauce, add in some finely chopped carrots (so they cook fast), add in some of the Better Than Boullion (no chicken base), and some S&P and parsley. Then serve with bowtie pasta or Orecchiette pasta (I think of that as the thumbprint pasta). Those tend to hold a nice light sauce well.
Basic roux recipe, precook some larger sliced carrots and add in. Then toss in some cut zucchini and some frozen peas. Not too long of cooking on those last two, just want to heat them up, not overcook them. Cook up some cheese tortellini on the side and stir that in with the sauce. May need to do that double or triple batch of sauce with this, tortellini is a heartier pasta and goes good with more sauce.
Basic roux recipe, add in some of your favorite melting cheese. Stir into elbow macaroni for mac n cheese. Cheddar is common, but I also love this with smoked gouda. That is a bit more expensive of a cheese though, so keep that in mind. I've mixed a small amount of gouda with cheddar just to get some of the flavor and still keep the cost down. Can also add in chopped broccoli that you cook up. Always goes good with mac n cheese. So many cheese and other addition variations on the internet for mac n cheese. Just look them up and see what you like.
Basic roux recipe, only make a double batch AND add in one extra cup of milk. then also add a can of cream of mushroom soup, jar of diced pimento. Melt in about a pound of shredded mild cheddar and 4 Tbsp parmesan cheeses (see note at the end of this recipe for a crust option here). Put in some of that 'chickenless' bouillon, a tsp of garlic powder and some S&P to taste. Then also cook up a pound of spaghetti noodles and drain them. Mix the sauce and the noodles and then also add in 1/2 large chopped onion, a cup of fresh chopped mushrooms, and a diced green pepper. Mix that all up. It should be a bit watery at this point, not dry, so if you need to add a bit more milk at this point, do it and don't worry. You bake that at 325F for 55 minutes. Stir it a couple times during. The cheese will help thicken this up (hence the not wanting it to be dry before cooking)
Optional crust: the last 10 minutes, if you saved aside some of the cheddar, sprinkle the top with a bit of that. Can mix that with some more parmesan and some bread crumbs to make it go further. Let that slightly brown for a nice crust. This is basically a chicken free Chicken Tetrazzini. So if you want some variations or different amounts, just look up recipes for that to get ideas.
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I think also an Asian broccoli salad would be good, but it really depends on how expensive broccoli is in your area and at certain times of the year. About half the year in my area it gets expensive so I don't make this as much as I like. Instead of copy pasting the recipe I'll just post a screen shot. It's originally from walmart. They use to give out recipe cards in the store, the original is from that. And they sold this in the deli that i'm sure is the same recipe only with less bacon to save money. I loved it. So I reworked it for a 'light' version that is also still really good. Obviously for you, skip the bacon all together to make this vegetarian. You can also substitute pine nuts instead of sunflower for a slight different taste, but those are more expensive. You can mix and match between the two calorie versions here to do what you like. The original is of course better, but you up the calorie count by 1100 with the full mayo choice alone.
This is the light version. And I used imitation baco bits (soy based) so it actually is vegetarian, I think, and less calories than the recipe says, but still with a bit of bacon flavor.
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Rice dish, think fajita's here, but with rice to make it go further. 1 or 2 cups rice (uncooked amount) depending on how much you want to make and how cheap you want to make it (more rice makes it cheaper per meal that way). Cook that up and work on the other stuff while it's cooking. Sliced up green pepper or two, large onion sliced, mushrooms, garlic. (other veggies too if you like, I make this off the top of my head every time) Pan fry up all the veggies to brown them and caramelize a bit. Then I add in a couple packets of fajita spices. It needs two because you have a large portion of this as rice, which is bland by itself. So you have to power that up a bit. But you can vary the spice packets up a lot. They make so many different flavored packets: cheesy enchilada, taco, cheesy taco, slow cooker fiesta flavor (some of these may have some bouillon you don't want, check ingredients. I'm not sure on these.) There's also a pulled pork BBQ spice pack that is good. My store has a lot of different ones for variations in this recipe. I've even used chili spices (see recipe above for using your own spices) in this.
Then once you get all this made, wrap it up in a large tortilla wrap. Quite often before I wrap it up I'll add on one or more of: sour cream, guacamole, shredded cheese, or fresh diced roma tomatoes. Usually two or more at the same time.
I can see you not wanting to wrap all this before hand to send as a lunch with your BF. But a bowl of the rice veggie mix, and the extras on the side in containers, and tortilla shells maybe folded up. That way he could nuke the main dish and wrap it up fresh. Should still be good. I do leftovers that way for days after when i make this. I make large batches.
Oh, and if you want some more variations. Instead of the spice packets, cut the rice down to 1 cup or less (pre cooked amount), but then add in a box of prepared Rice-a-Roni. Whatever flavor floats your boat there. So many variations of that. And it's still cheap enough. I do that once in a while.
