A stir-fry is a healthy alternative to the traditional meat-and-potatoes meal, allowing you to offer beef or chicken but with fewer calories, less saturated fat and less cholesterol. In addition to a healthier dish, you can prepare a less-expensive meal with stir-fry using cheaper cuts of beef.

While foil-packet cooking is most often done during camping, it's also a convenient way to cook lean cuts of steak in the oven. Wrapped in foil, the steak essentially cooks in its own steam, ensuring that moisture stays in the meat.

With little fat and usually no bone, sirloin steak is one of the easiest meats to prepare for stir fry. Easy preparation, however, does not equate to no preparation.

Venison is a lean and well-flavored meat, much lower in saturated fats than mainstream alternatives such as beef and lamb. That makes it a fine choice for grilling or slow-cooking, but venison alone is too lean to make a decent sausage.

Just like whole turkeys, boneless turkey breasts come in a variety of sizes, ranging from about 2 to 3 pounds to more than 20 pounds. No matter the size, a benefit of the breast is that it takes less time to cook than a comparable whole turkey.

Deep-frying onion rings at home can be a time-consuming, messy business. It's also not good for your heart or your waistline: A typical serving of fried onion rings can have more than 900 calories, 50 grams of fat and nearly 9 grams of saturated fat.

Chicken is modern America's favorite meat: The average American consumes over 20 pounds more chicken than beef per year, reports Business Insider. Much of this chicken is boneless, skinless breasts, but you'll save money and get juicier meat if you choose chicken thighs.

Tomatoes are high source of vitamin C, or ascorbic acid, but it is this acid that can contribute to stomach discomfort and a bitter taste to your sauce.

Beef brisket is a staple for any barbecue because it is a versatile and inexpensive cut of beef. A roaster will cook your brisket in a similar time frame and manner as using a roaster pan in your regular oven, and many roasters have a nonstick liner that can be removed and cleaned, which makes cleanup a breeze.

Convection ovens use fans to circulate hot air throughout the interior of the oven to cook the food more thoroughly and uniformly. For this reason, the food also cooks more quickly, retaining more moisture and losing fewer nutrients.

Ciabatta is a traditional Italian bread that supposedly gets its name from its resemblance to house slippers -- "ciabatta" being Italian for slipper. Crusty on the outside with a soft texture on the inside, ciabatta bread takes well to toasting.

Cod baked in foil packets, also known as "en papillote," is a dish as elegant as it is simple. The fish cooks in an aromatic steam, ensuring moist, flavorful results every time. There's practically no clean up involved because the foil is discarded.