What meals do you cook when very low on money?
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Really depends on the situation.
If I'm just feeding myself, I have no issue with going outside and foraging for food. I don't hunt, but I'm not the type that needs an animal based protein main entree in my meals, so it works/worked for me to collect wild vegetables, fruits, and fungi.
And from there, I eat whatever is cheapest. Grocery store mark-downs and deep-discount sales would guide my decisions. If an acquaintance was giving away food, I'd take it. When the food bank is doing a giveaway and it was close enough for me to visit, I'd go there and take what they had to offer.
At my poorest, when I had no access to a kitchen, peanut butter sandwiches were a mainstay. Tuna sandwiches were next best, but more expensive. At the time, powdered milk was a bit of a luxury, but it definitely helped wash down the peanut butter and was way cheaper by volume than fresh milk.
A lot of stores and restaurants, at least where I live, will have condiment packages out in the open. Don't go hog wild, but my experience is nobody cares/notices if you grab a few packs of whatever items are out: ketchup, mustard, mayo, honey, hot sauce, soy sauce, salt, and pepper -- in moderation -- so those can be free to you to use for meal prep.
When I've just been broke and/or saving money, my main protein was usually chicken. I'd just buy whatever was cheapest on sale, and try to stock up a bit or get rain checks. Then I could cook that in a crock pot and literally have meals for days. Around Thanksgiving and Christmas, turkey usually goes on deep discount and there are almost always a myriad of programs that just give them away. If you have room in your freezer and a crock pot, then you can be set just from that.
Add in some rice and/or beans/legumes to soak up the flavor when cooking meats.
Eggs were also always a solid choice, pretty versatile because they could be hard boiled, scrambled, fried, mixed into other things like noodles, or used to cook/bake other dishes.
Potatoes were another cheap source of carbohydrates, something that goes on sale often enough that I could usually find a deal, and if properly stored (cool, dark, dry) they can last a long time. Plus, they can go into the slow cooker with some chicken thighs and both ingredients benefit flavor-wise.
So, meals would be whatever combination of those things you can physically obtain. Your meal items don't have to have a name. If you have potatoes and mix those with scrambled eggs and mix in some wild dandelions, that's still a meal even if that's not going to show up in a recipe book. If you boil some noodles and add in some mayo and a pinch of rosemary from a bush you saw down the road, that's still a meal. Basically, just get creative with what you've got.
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There's a few things I usually have at home because they're cheap, can be used for various dishes with or without additional ingredients and I will actually eat them before they spoil:
Beans, lentils, tomato paste, eggs, peanuts, cottage cheese, smoked tofu (not neccessarily a cheap item but I only use half a block or less per dish), bread, rice, spring onions, bell pepper, frozen spinach, hummus, cucumber.
Is tofu considered expensive? I don't have much money per month for groceries, but I usually have 4-5 blocks of tofu in my fridge at all times because of its versatility and range of use in various dishes, so I've never thought about the price. It's around 2€ for 2 blocks of tofu. Not bad imo.
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Yeah, this is it.
Any grain, any bean, any vegetable u can find and then slap that bitch into a tortilla. Or don't, If the tortillas aren't in the budget that week.
Yoghurt plus garlic makes a cheap sauce.(Vegan) yoghurt, garlic, spices, squeeze of lemon juice, fresh herbs is the staple yoghurt sauce we eat with anything that fits it. Salads, wraps - you name it
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Chili, chili, chili! No ground beef? No problem! Make a bean chili!
Bulgur wheat makes a really good textural element in vegetarian chili.
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When I was in college, it was a lot of yogurt, cereal, pasta, and subway. Those $5 subways were 2 meals for me.
However, as an adult, I just made a cabbage salad. I highly recommend recipes from budgetbytes. They try to use cheap but nutritious ingredients whether fresh, frozen, or canned
wrote last edited by [email protected]That looks so good! I always forget cabbage for some reason, but you definitely get your money's worth.
I used a head of green cabbage few years ago to make baked cabbage wraps with lentils as the meat substitute. They fell apart, but still tasted really good.
Uncooked red cabbage leaves makes a pretty good tortilla/bread replacement. Also sauteing shredded red cabbage with red onion then mixing in some goat cheese and sriracha is a really delicious and easy to make side dish.
The most expensive thing is the goat cheese, but be fairly cheap depending on where you buy it. You can also just skip it if necessary bc red cabbage and red onion by itself is still really good.
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Seems like I need to educate myself on lentils and dry beans. Any EASY recipes welcome!
budgetbytes.com great cheap recipes their older stuff was a bit more budget conscious. But you can sort by ingredient and find good bean and lentil recipes.
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An Italian home cooking staple is pasta with butter and sage. Just melt the butter with the sage and gently fry while boiling the pasta
Yes my statement was probably a bit too broad. I meant any pasta with a sauce you generally don't want butter (or oil) on, as it causes the sauce to stick less to the pasta. Which is the whole point of having the sauce in the first place.
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You have luckily never been that poor
I actually have. A can of tomatoes is (or at least was back then) cheaper than a pack of pasta, and can also last for more than 1 or even 2 servings. If I add (just) butter to the pasta, I'm making it worse because I'm one of the seemingly 5 people on earth who don't like butter.
But my comment was meant for pasta with (any) sauce, see my other reply.
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I actually have. A can of tomatoes is (or at least was back then) cheaper than a pack of pasta, and can also last for more than 1 or even 2 servings. If I add (just) butter to the pasta, I'm making it worse because I'm one of the seemingly 5 people on earth who don't like butter.
But my comment was meant for pasta with (any) sauce, see my other reply.
Well you do you then. It was pasta + butter, not anything else.
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Things are way better now! I was getting pretty depressed, and struggled with suicidal ideation. Had a plan, and a redundant backup plan in case the first one didn't turn out to be fatal, but then randomly decided to try an extreme change in lifestyle so I enlisted into the Air Force on kind of a whim. Was always opposed to military cuz of the whole killing innocent people thing... figured if they put me that kind of position I'd just refuse (gave absolutely zero fucks back then) or worse case I'd just go back to plan A and kill myself instead.
Didn't have to find out though: got lucky and they made me a medic (surgical tech specifically). And hugely: access to actual healthcare, to include mental!
Got the fuck out as soon as my enlistment was up, and I've been working as a civilian surgical tech ever since, which has me up to $24/hr. Actually not broke anymore, which still feels kinda weird. Using my GI Bill to go to nursing school right now, so soonish I'll looking at another income bump, but I'm already making enough to at least eat healthy... you don't realize how shitty you just always feel at baseline when your diet consists of carbs and whatever you can find on the clearance rack.
I see a lot of my classmates with that with that same kind of "aw fuck" expression on their face when they see the price tag on the hospital cafeteria food at our clinical rotations, so I've been pretty quick to buy their meal and tell em to pay it forward when they're a 'rich' nurse lol.
But yeah, it sucks absolute balls to be poor. I will never let myself forget what that's like.
Thanks for the history and glad you're on a good track! Good luck you seems to be a sincerely good person!
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Life of Boris has a funny (and actually useful) series on budget cooking if you're into that. Great watch imo
Subscribed. Cheers.
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West African peanut stew but you'd need a place to get a huge bag of berebere spice.
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I braise a whole bag of onions and use it the base for a big pot of Turkish-ish red lentil soup. This then gets portioned into 10 or so meals and frozen so it lasts till i have money again.
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In a beat boxing tone:
Beans 'n rice (repeat as many times as needed).
Also do pasta with tomato sauce a lot, add whatever I have or what I can find on sale (mostly lentils, beans, frozen vegetables (kinds that have protein)).
I've always loved lentils but I've kinda rediscovered them lately, it's crazy how good they are in every way. Cheap, somehow always makes more food than you think, easy to cook and extremely versatile, makes you feel full with less and keeps you going for longer. Truly a superfood IMO.
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The carbs have a place in a healthy diet. Nothing wrong with rice or noodles. The Ramen if it's instant is crap though
I would hope most people reading this would know already, but pasta, ramen, rice, even oatmeal, on their own are not nutritionally adequate to keep you going.
You've got to include vegetables and protein - pulses usually being the best bang for your buck.
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Fun fact FTW! Check out epazote for not only doing away with the pre-soak, but most of the renowned GI effects, too.
A little goes a long way, (IIRC, ~ ½T for a 4-5gal pot) and it's essentially dried grass. Get it from your local mercado/bodega for dirt cheap, change your life. 🥳TIL, thanks
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As a side note, it's a good investment to buy a pressure cooker at least for the beans since it cuts the cooking time to about 10 minutes (and this is assuming you've soaked the beans for at least 12H).
Pressure cookers will also cut down the cooking time of things that need longer cooking to not be too hard to chew, such as cheap pieces of beef.
Also consider chickpeas along with beans and lentils since you can cook them in the same way and they're the same kind of thing (pulses).
wrote last edited by [email protected]If you didn't soak your beans, you can still do them in a pressure cooker. It'll just take about an hour. It lets you make a somewhat last minute decision to have beans whenever you want.
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Ramen with frozen vegetables mixed in.
Bean tacos.
Some kind of dish using chicken thighs as you can buy the thighs for cheap.
If ground beef is cheap, cottage pie.
Various pasta dishes
Ramen with frozen vegetables mixed in.
I like to add soy protein chunks (TVP) in my instant noodles too. They're one of the cheapest sources of protein and do not need any extra work as long as you get the small ones. Just dump it in with the hot soup and wait for it to rehydrate.
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Agreed! Pulses in general allow for a healthy and affordable diet.
I'm not a proponent of rice mainly for the way it gets produced (lots of water needed and methane emitted in the process) and the fact it's a hyperaccumulator of arsenic. About all these things I don't need to worry when picking pulses.
But each to their own and some variety rarely is a bad idea.How much of a concern is arsenic? A lot of Asian cultures have rice with every meal and they have some of the healthiest people on the planet.
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Herb water? As in tea? Never heard of this
Its probably some kind of herb tea
I put herbs like oregano into the noodle water before even adding salt. Mostly i use some ready made mix
