Reddit mentions of The Chinese Takeout Cookbook: Quick and Easy Dishes to Prepare at Home

That's my monthly budget, too! (and as a 200 lb guy I do not have a dainty appetite so you can get plenty of food with that much)

Basically, this limits you from nice steaks and fresh seafood. Everything else is fair game.

My wife and I keep a list of what we've made so if we have trouble thinking of what to cook we can look through a bunch of options. (Note: the $200 monthly budget covers only me, not both me and my wife.)

In a given month, we'll eat:

• Pasta dishes (puttanesca, sauce+meat, sauce+eggplant, aglio e olio, butter/garlic/sage, etc)
  
• Stir fries, either following a recipe or using whatever veggies I have around
  
• Other Asian dishes - bibimbap, mabo dofu, jjajangmyeon (Korean noodles with a thick black bean sauce), kimchi stew, "sushi bowls" (sushi ingredients but usually no fish, and in a bowl of rice instead of wrapped), pad thai, etc
  
• Rice and beans with lots of cumin and garlic, plus celery and carrots and maybe heavy greens to add veggies
  
• Ham and navy bean soup
  
• Pizza (working my way through a recipes from a few different sources, slowly getting closer to actually good pizza, not just "good for homemade" pizza)
  
• Roast chicken! A 4# roast chicken is like $6 at Aldi and seriouseats.com has tasty seasonings
  
• Eggs - mixed with rice and scrambled, fried, poached, in burritos... however. Super cheap, super quick, super easy
  
• Tacos or burritos
  
• Chicken tagine (Moroccan braised chicken that is super flavorful)
  
• Doro wat (Ethiopian onion stew)
  
• "Green soup" served over ravioli (cheese-filled freezer ravioli) - throw a bunch of chopped veggies into chicken stock and boil until cooked, add a bag of spinach to turn it green, and then blend it with an immersion blender when it's done. Top with a drizzle of EVOO and parmesan
  
  A couple caveats: I buy very few prepared foods, very rarely have sandwiches so no lunch meat (it's spendy), and I don't eat breakfast. I do most of my shopping at Aldi and only go elsewhere for things they don't carry like specialty Asian ingredients. We have a couple big Asian groceries nearby that are good for that - we count a few basic sauces as staples that we find it's not too expensive to keep on hand that really open up our options for Asian recipes (soy sauce, sesame oil, rice vinegar, and fish sauce).
  
  Edit: because this has gotten a good bit of attention I'll mention that we do have a good selection of cookbooks to work from. Not a huge number, but a well curated set that is mostly based on recommendations from friends and the internet, were gifts, or ones we knew were good because former housemates had them.
  
  But if you don't have many and don't want to spend the cash don't worry! Your local library should have a bunch, and many resources (that are less hit-or-miss than e.g. allrecipes.com) are available online. Good and Cheap, budgetbytes, and seriouseats (The Food Lab) are in my top 3 (I do have a paper copy from all 3, because I want to support what they do). Other cookbooks that I like, also listed in the "Source" column of the linked google doc:
  
  
• Chinese Takeout Cookbook. Meant to reproduce good American-style Chinese takeout, but often less grease-laden.
  
• Cook's Illustrated Best International Recipes (I think it's this one but I'm not sure - it was a gift and I got rid of the hardcover's sheath). I'm a little ideologically against recipes that use 15+ ingredients of which I only have half on hand, but the moussaka, pad thai, and chicken tagine recipes alone nearly make this book worth it (especially with some judicious substitutions)
  
• Everyday Harumi - I've had great luck with several recipes in here, but I also know that I'm not taking the recipes to their full potential because when my old roommate would cook from his copy it always turned out better.
  
• Maangchi's Kitchen - plenty of tasty, authentic Korean recipes. Like budgetbytes, her cookbook started on the web so all her recipes are available for free via her youtube channel, which is great fun to watch. Korean cooking can be involved so I rarely go beyond the simpler recipes (Korea is the only Asian country I've visited so it's the only one in this list I can speak to the authenticity of)
  
• the bread bible has some very tasty flavored breads (mushroom bread made with duxelle, or a cheddar mustard bread) and decent pizza
  
• Bread Baker's Apprentice has yielded some tasty baguettes and quite good pizza
  
• And I only recently got The Pizza Bible and have only managed to try one recipe from it but it turned out great

> Bachelor-ific! If I had $10 a day extra money I'd eat chinese takeout all the time.

The Chinese Takeout Cookbook
=

Highly recommended. (Most Chinese takeout/takeaway food is really CHEAP to make at home -- like 1/4 the cost of the restaurant meal).