What meals do you cook when very low on money?
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Try to get sardine, kale, and beets.
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Cheese roll ups. Rice balls.
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No, I'm second guessing the advice you're passing on now. Just because you were young and didn't know better doesn't mean you should teach other people to do the same things. Get over yourself.
I'm not giving advice.
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I'm not giving advice.
Now you're just being disingenuous, not only about the obvious nature of this thread but the obvious nature of your answer.
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Seems like I need to educate myself on lentils and dry beans. Any EASY recipes welcome!
I cook beans and rice regardless of how its going. Nothing can beat that. And you can add anything you want, which makes beans really flexible.
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I thought at least 24 hours was the requirement
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My recommendation is to look around your grocery store and see what ingredients are cheapest. That can help to come up with ideas I think.
That being said look up Congri. It's a Cuban dish that's quite tasty and uses very few ingredients.
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I thought at least 24 hours was the requirement
Overnight/8 hours is what's normal where I am. Or boil for 10 minutes, soak for a couple of hours.
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I mix lentils and rice with sautéed onions and I have a meal for a couple days. Add a dollop of sour cream.
If you then add fried onions to that you get a lebonese comfort food
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Pasta, instant noodles, polenta, rice+tuna, bean guiso or stew whatever you call it. Also whatever vegetables in season and cheap, ie, potatoes, pumpkin.
Frozen Basa fillets are the cheapest unprocessed meat too
Search for guiso recipes if you need to learn what to do with legumes. Beauty of guiso is that the amount of ingredients doesn't matter much and you can always add more of what you like and remove what you don't like. You can add any bits of meat to it like sausages, chorizo, beef, chicken, you name it. You can also add any tubers, onion, or pumpkin if you have any, but if you don't have any of these things you can still cook it.
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Nothing against the other suggestions, but pretty much anything you can buy that is "ready to eat" (canned soup) or "easy to make" (Kraft dinner), even if it is already cheap, would still be cheaper to make yourself from scratch. Cooking, in bulk, is your friend.
Two cartons of soup broth $1.77 CDN/946ml each, half a bag of frozen veggies $2.57/500g, boom you have 5 soup meals for <$1 per meal. A cup of flour to make dumplings in that soup and make it more appealing. Compare that to a canned soup which seems to be up in price lately, between 1.50 - 3.00, and you're laughing, and eating a lot less salt.
I haven't figured out exactly the cost of making bread (I play with the recipe and how many loaves), but I am absolutely certain it costs less and tastes better than the cheapest bullshit bread you can get at a store. So less than $2 for a loaf, and it actually smells and tastes like bread and doesn't dissolve in your mouth like cotton candy. No bullshit preservatives.
Pasta with pasta sauce, ez and cheap af, filling. <$1 per meal.
Things that are more difficult imo are meat and cheese due to the cost. I like to buy frozen logs of ground beef which isn't that appealing on it's own, but is passable in chili and shepherd's pie.
Cheese can go a long way especially if you shred it for pizza (and you already have flour and pasta sauce from above.)Speaking of shepherd's pie, potatoes are cheap and versatile. One tube of ground beef with a layer of frozen veg and mashed taters on top, again <$1 per meal.
Not to mention rice which is maybe the ultimate value-for-money food when you just need something in your stomach. Foodies will crucify me, but I love to eat it with margerine (way cheaper than butter) and salt and pepper. There's so much more you can do with it, though. Good for bulking up soups too.
Tacking on..
It can depend where you shop or what resources you have. Canned clams can be dirt cheap and still good if you have the right grocery store. Using spaghetti instead of lenguine can save money as it tends to be about half the price (clams over lenguine / spaghetti). A ~$2 meal at home that tastes better than a $20 one at a restaurant.
Regarding bread, the $1 Italian loaves at Walmart's bakery are great for the price and freeze well (*yellow tagged even cheaper).
Chicken thighs are often $1-$2 a lb (cheaper than whole chickens), and are far more forgiving on over cooking. Learn to cook and pair them good (like thai peanut sauce or roasted veg or chipotle instead of Franks) and you won't want white chicken meat. Deboning them yourself can save money and make for great sandwiches (I don't know a store that sells deboned with skin on either).
Aldi has great prices on many kinds of sausages, and they're pretty good.
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Consider the food bank too probably.
Bulk dry beans, bulk sack rice, canned beans for chilli when feeling lazy or on sale, meat only on steep discount usually making stew or chilli with the worse less/undesirable cuts. Stir fry when you find better ones. Frozen vegetables and fruit bags. Store brand usually. Basic frozen pizzas, pasta bags with tomato based pasta sauce. Pasta sauce cans are frequently on sale and baseline is a low price.
Bananas, kiwis, and mandarin oranges are usually cheap in Canada anyways for fresh fruit.
I have a meat grinder attachment on my used mixer, very useful.
You can do a lot with apps like Paprika or Supercook. You add stuff you already have and it spits out only recipes with what you have on hand already. Helps me use up what I buy efficiently and stops you from getting bored of eating the same stuff. Less food waste and flavour bordeom is always good for mood and wallet.
If you have space, gardening. Fruit trees alone fill a deep freezer eventually.
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You don't actually need to soak them before you cook them.
I've made plenty of bean dishes, starting with completely dry beans. It takes a little longer to cook because they are rehydrating while they cook, but they still come out great.
Adding to this. A pressure cooker brings the cook time down dramatically and I think it produces a superior result.
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If you then add fried onions to that you get a lebonese comfort food
Thanks. I’ll try that. It’s definitely my comfort food.
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I often fry whatever vegetables I can find and add a fried egg.
Rice and buckwheat are very cheap (and vegan if you're of that persuasion). If you cook buckwheat, you can add a few tiny bits of sausage in there and you've got a very filling meal.
Oatmeal is great because you buy it in huge bags that last long and you can eat it for breakfast, lunch or dinner. If the budget is not that bad you cook it with milk. If it is you cook it with water (this is called gruel, medieval peasant food). If you're making gruel add a bit of salt to make it more palatable.
An old classic is of course ramen, but the ramen bricks can be made much more filling if you boil them in a pot with a sausage or two (this requires you to have sausage).
If you live in certain tropical areas you can harvest some edible fruits from unfenced land and use this to enrich your diet.
Eating a couple extra hours of sleep for breakfast instead of food is a dubiously healthy but certainly effective way to save some money on weekends.
A pro tip is if your drawer is not very clean your onions will start to sprout and take root. I didn't have to buy onions for about half a year at one point because I just kept cutting off a bit and it kept growing back. I didn't water them or anything, they just did that in my dark dingy cupboard.
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Beans and cornbread. Or beans and rice. Cornmeal is especially cheap in the US with how subsidized it is, so cornbread is a good way to fill out a meal.
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Basically pasta.
I don't know where you are, but a 500g pack can be had for significantly under 1€ and is sufficient for multiple meals. Add a similar priced can of tomatoes, onions (optional) and some spices (I assume you have those).
Obviously there are other options for the sauce, many are cheap enough to consider when money is tight.
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I'm really enjoying you second guessing all the decisions I made when I was poor! Not only was I struggling, but apparently did it completely wrong!
Third party here!
That other guy needs to fuck right off. You’re contributing reasonable stuff, they are not. Fuck em.
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Rice and beans. Together they make a complete protein so can make up a larger bulk of your diet.
Pork loin, those gigantic big ones, are cheap per pound. Cut it into three for three roasts, freeze the other 2.
Try to get Multivitamins and magnesium. Long term you want those vitamins and minerals. Fish oil too. It seems expensive but it's cheaper than fish itself.
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Get the rice!
