Oriental grocery stores are a great source for saving money, if you can shop carefully (as in american groceries, staples are cheap, and extras aren't).
I can buy a quart bottle of gourmet soy sauces for the price of a small bottle of kikoman's. $1.50 to $2.50 a bottle (almost always a quart, I've seen 2 liters of kikomans sell for under $4, but I prefer mushroom soy).
Fish sauce. I buy a thai fish sauce that's about $1.49 for a quart bottle. I use it in asian recipes, but also use it in place of worcestershire sauce.
Sweet chili sauce makes a great dipping sauce for chicken strips, and is pretty cheap also.
I buy only the cheapest condiments and then use them to make the more expensive ones ( for example fish sauce or worcestershire sauce mixed with ketchup and a drop or two of liquid smoke, makes a really good steak sauce. Mayonaise, chopped onion, and a little dill and/or sweet pickle chopped fine or a spoon relish to make tartar sauce. Ketchup, a dash of lemon juice (optional) and horsereadish, make cocktail sauce. Ketchup, diet coke and a dash of liquid smoke makes an awesome barbecue sauce.
Bean sprouts are super cheap in asian groceries. They sell for about the same as in chain grocery stores, but you get about four times as much.
If you're able to buy in bulk, you can get a very good price on rice, especially on the better varieties like jasmine, basmati, and the hybrid jasmati. Black rice (which is really a purple whole grain rice - all whole grain rices can be called brown rice so black rice is a brown rice, but is neither black nor brown, but purple - how's that for nutty).
Everone probably knows my favorite budget slashing technique is mixing dry tvp granules (textured vegetable protein, also sometimes called textured soy protein or soy crumbles, they need to be reconstituted with water) with ground meat. The tvp itself is only about 15 cents for the equivalent of 4 oz of ground beef. I buy it in bulk from whole food and health food stores usually for about $2.50 per lb (which is the equivalent of about 4 lbs of grond beef).
I put my recipe on my blog a while back, as I've often been asked for the recipe.
http://www.3fatchicks.com/diet-blogs/kaplods/
I keep experimenting with different combinations of ground meats and tvp. With sausage or chorizo I can add a lot more tvp - even when calculating in the fat from the sausage, I can bring the calorie/fat content down at least to about that of extra lean ground beef chicken or turkey.
The batch I currently have in the fridge was made with 1 lb of ground pork (.99 per lb), 1 lb of 80% lean beef (2.29 per lb on sale), and 1.5 lbs of tvp. In addition to my standard seasonings, I added dried shiitake mushrooms (I put a handful in the food processor to break them into small bits).
After freezing it so it freezes crumbly, I use it in any recipe that would call for browned ground beef.