I have $24 to last me til Friday, what should I buy with it?
a pallet of ramen noodles
I hate ramen noodles tho
hmmmmm
bees?
Are you suggesting that I eat bees for a week
This is roughly what I make sure I have in my kitchen all the time along with rough estimates of local prices (MN). I buy a lot of things when they’re on sale and stockpile them.
instant oatmeal packets with fruit in them – $3 probably and this can be breakfast all week and maybe even a lunch or dinner too since you usually get 10 packets
bag of rice – $2-3 depending on size. 1 cup dry rice makes enough for about two meals depending on what you add in. if you get cheap rice, rinse it before cooking
canned beans – usually under $1 per can – mix the can with your rice and you have a meal. chili-spiced beans will make bean tacos. Rinse non-spiced beans before adding to anything.
Tortilla – usually around $3 but you get like 8-10 of them. Tacos, wraps, and quesadillas are all fair game here
lettuce – $2 max around here, either a head of something or bagged precut depending on preference, use as a salad or on tacos
protein other than beans of some sort – probably $5-7 for meat, $2-3 for eggs. sometimes I can get bags of frozen chicken breasts in this price range and each is usually 2 meals if I add in a bunch of veggies. fry/scramble eggs and add to any of the options.
your favorite stir fry sauce – $3ish
vegetables – $5ish. literally anything that you can 1. fry in a pan and 2. you’ll eat. fresh carrots are usually pretty cheap. get frozen if it’s cheaper and you’re strapped for cash/prep time on this part.
alternative to stir fry: pasta (~$2), fresh tomatoes (~$2), cheese (~$3).
cheese and fruit if you have extra – look if your store has loyalty cards for free that you can load coupons on for cheese there’s always one it seems like.
ahh thank you!!!
Reblogging because there’s never knowing who’ll need it.
Adding also: the single most nutritious food on earth is potatoes in their peel. Potatoes + some milk and butter = everything you need. They don’t last all that long, but they’re fairly cheap and the quickest cheat to “How do I not fuck my body up.”
(Cooked potatoes’ll last a while in the fridge. Potatoes nearing the end of their useful lives? Cook them to half-done first, figure out what to do with them later.)
Easiest baked potatoes: slice thinly but not paper-like, spread like cards, brush with oil (a silicone baking brush is totes worth the little it costs), spread salt and pepper (a little less than you think you’d like), cover with foil, stick in oven or toaster-oven at 150C for 40min. (If you have the patience, at that point click up to 180C, remove the cover and add 10-20min.) Reheats well, lasts in the fridge longer than it’ll take you to nom.
Dead-Animal-Free Whole Protein: some legumes + some grain. AKA rice and lentils, or rice and beans. (Maybe some fried onion for flavor; onion’s cheap and stays good a descent while. Fried onion makes everything taste better and keeps forever in the freezer, so frying up a bunch and keeping portions is not a half-bad idea.) (If going for the beans option – lentils are cheaper around here but fuck if I know what it’s like in your area – dump some tomato sauce and oil in; canola or soy are best health-wise, and far cheaper than olive; avoid corn.) Oh, what does instant couscous go for in your area? It keeps for fucking ever, it’s usually cheap, and it takes well to any and all added taste.
If you get to choose, black lentils taste the best and need the least soak-time (0-20min), green lentils are best for cooked stuff and red lentils are best in soups. (Red lentils + potatoes + root vegetables of choice + spices; cut into small pieces, cook, run through the blender if you wanna [stick blender’s awesome], freeze in portions.)
When possible, get instant soup mix. Get the good instant soup mix. (The kind that’s not made primarily of sugar, yeast or both. The rest is optional.) Dump 1/2tsp (or more, but start on the low end) into couscous, or chicken, or sprinkle over potatoes being stuck in the oven. Whatever. It’ll make most cooked-food-type things taste better. And again, lasts forever on the shelf.
If you can have eggs (goodness knows they’re sometimes expensive), dump some tomato sauce in a pan (tomato sauce lasts forever on the shelf), add some oil, onion/beans to cook in it, hot peppers if you wanna, then when it’s nearly ready crack an egg or two in. Hard-boiled eggs last a remarkably while in the fridge, so when eggs reach near the end of their usable lives, just hard-boil and stick in the fridge.
(Have eggs as often as you can, particularly as you have brain-shit going on. You need all the eggs, salt, and 60%-or-more chocolate you can get. Brains are made of cholesterol and salt, so folks with neuro or other brain shit need more of both. Potassium is also aces. You know what has the most potassium? Tomato paste.)
Grated cheese keeps in the freezer for ever. Grated cheese will make a lot of things taste nicer. Preserved lemon juice keeps forever in the fridge. Grated cheese + oil + lemon = instant and awesome pasta sauce that’ll liven up the weeks-old dry pasta in the fridge.
Slices bread also keeps well in the freezer. Try to have half a loaf or a loaf. Dry bread gets cut in cubes, mixed with oil and the aforementioned instant soup, stuck in oven at lowest until properly dry, then kept in an airtight jar to add to soups.
(Over-ripe tomatoes come cheaper. They get turned into soup or sauce, then frozen in portions.)
this is a very good post but why are we glossing over the fact that the alternative to ramen is bees
i have it on pretty good authority that bees are not an affordable eating alternative to ramen.
Seriously, bees are expensive
Trufax.
And speaking as someone who is also living off oatmeal, beans, and brown rice, if you need recipes, I have them!
Today I made 16 bean soup with chicken sausage and it was crazy good and I got 8 servings out of the one batch (froze half). I usually get the cheapest beans I can find, and GOYA bags of beans are usually $1-2. I soaked them overnight,rinsed them, and threw them in a gallon lidded saucepan with 2 boxes of chicken stock (also on sale for $2), two bay leaves, sauteed green pepper, onion, and celery, some garlic from a jar, about two tablespoons of dried herbs de provence,and the “fancy” bit was adding $6 bourbon and apple chicken sausages. You can actually sub veg stock for chicken and skip the sausage and make it vegan and it would still taste great.
Oh and I’ve been doing steel-cut oats. I don’t buy the name brand ones, I just pick whatever store brand/generic I can get for less than $4. They take about ½ an hour to make, but they’re super tasty and I make 2 cups
of dried oats at a time
with dried cranberries and that’s breakfast for 4 days at least.
I’ve also been making black bean soup, red beans and rice, and curried potatoes and chick peas. I got 100 quart and pint take-away containers from Amazon for $20 and they all stack neatly and are perf for one serving of whatever.
Additionally, depending on where you live, whole rotisserie chickens are something like $4-$7 and are easily 4 – 6 servings of protein and on TOP of that, if you stick the carcass in a ziplock bag and then the freezer you have excellent soup makings. Using bones in soup literally squeezes all viable vitamins and minerals out of the suckers. Soup made from lots of bones is great to keep around if you get sick, it’ll feed and sooth you relatively easily and as you get better you can add noodles. ON TOP OF THAT, a quarter to a half cup of soup broth added to a lot of dishes also adds those nutrients PLUS flavor.
Here’s my “How to eat for a week on $30″ post.
don’t forget Good and Cheap: Eat Well on $4 A Day
Yall are clutch for this lmao cuz ima need this for about the first month after I move
Reblogging cause who knows what your followers are going through rn
God I was at that restaurant in Annapolis yesterday that serves those 4 lbs milkshakes and these two dudes were just finishing one together and people were asking them for tips and they were like “you have to get like mint chocolate chip or something because if there’s no texture it gets too boring to finish” and all I could keep thinking was that it can only be a matter of time before some god wipes this town off the map and we will have earned it with our disgusting hubris
Everyone who has ever finished one of these will have it weighed against a feather when they die
Doable? Maybe
Listen. After the Burger Incident of 2016 I’ve learned to accept my fragile mortality and live within the boundaries set for humanity by the Universe.
I’m a little nervous but my curiosity is overwhelming~ what, pray tell, is the Burger incident of 2016?
In 2016 the day Pokémon Go came out I worked up a big appetite with my friends and we went to Steak ‘n Shake and I decided that none of the burgers looked big enough which…..I don’t know if I thought the photos on the menu were actual size I don’t know what was going on but
I asked the server for the biggest one they had and she said “that’s the 7×7, it’s not on the menu…you don’t want that”
And immediately my friends knew I was fucked because I felt challenged which I blame on my middle child syndrome and also on that I am by birth just an idiot so I ordered it without knowing competitive food bloggers write entire articles about this thing.
I sort of knew I was in trouble when the cook came to see who’d ordered it but I wasn’t backing down and in the end I ate all 1300 calories and THEN the fries and ALSO my shake and I had to go to my friend’s and take a three hour nap and when I woke up I was so fucked up that I just started eating leaves straight off her mint plant because antacids weren’t going to cut it.
Then I complained for like two days and Ultimately I learned absolutely nothing.
In case anyone wanted a visual for the 7×7
Hubris
When you can’t decided between pride and gluttony so commit both sins at the same time.
This is the only comment allowed now
“I didn’t think nothin’ of it. Thought it was just a seed.”
“Deep breath”
I SWEAR TO THE FUCKIN GODS…..
(cue 25 minutes of unintelligible yelling)
….and that is why being separated from our food’s origins and not knowing anything about botany is what is wrong with the world today goddamnit.
I bet some people would eat castor beans too. Or yew. Or just fuckin’ snack on some hemlock because it’s natural, man.
Fucking incredible.
LIKE IT TAKES SOME FUCKING EFFORT TO GET A CHERRY PIT OPEN FUCKING W H Y
Question: Is it the same with plums? I used to do that occasionally when I ate dried and seasoned Asian plums as a kid.
Yes.
Plum pits do not contain as much as cherry, but they do.
Do not eat stone fruit pits, people. Or bitter almonds.
They all have cyanide in them.
Oh boy, apricot kernels. The amount of people I see lauding those as a “cure for cancer” is… demoralizing. I can’t find it right now but I believe there was a mother in the past few years who was taken to court for child endangerment/neglect for feeding those to her very young child as a cancer treatment.
I saw this horror last year, and yelled for an entire hour.
To be fair, I bet if you die of cyanide poisoning the cancer won’t kill you.
I have been wanting to use these photos for months.
The recommendation is to only eat 3 in one hour. because that is just the most filling snack and of course they will stop at three.
But then they say DON’T EAT MORE THEN 10 A DAY.
It’s not even FDA approved. “may be toxic”.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Just because it’s natural doesn’t mean it’s good for you.
Just because it’s food for another creature doesn’t mean it’s fine for you.
Best case scenario it’s like grass which is basically neutral- it’s generally not going to kill you but there’s no nutrition for humans in it, and enough will probably make you sick.
Worst case scenario it’s something like belladonna berries which taste sweet but will kill you stone cold dead.
Same for the wrong kind of mushrooms, other berries, leaves and barks. Before consuming, CHECK. If you can’t check, don’t put it in your mouth.
Just because it’s natural doesn’t mean it’s good for you.
Just because it’s natural doesn’t mean it’s good for you.
Just because it’s natural doesn’t mean it’s good for you.
I’ve been saying this for so long, oh my gosh.
^^As a toxicologist, I approve this message.
Friendly reminder that the laws on supplement labeling in the US are super lax and haven’t been updated since 1994. That’s nearly 25 years ago!
10 tricks you didn’t know you could do with your food.
By Blossom
The internet went from showing food recipe videos to alchemy in less than a decade. There’s going to be a quick video on how to make the philosopher’s stone from tomato sauce next week.
Wow
Coming from a state champion baker:
If y’all use a decent box mix and use melted butter instead of vegetable oil, an extra egg, and milk instead of water, no one can tell the difference. I sure as hell can’t.
Also, if you add a little almond extract to vanilla cake, or a little coffee to chocolate cake, it sends it through the roof.
This concludes me attempting to be helpful.
yo I can vouch for this
I’ve done this for the last few cakes I’ve made and holy crap it makes suuuuch a difference
the cake is still fluffy, but it also seems more dense, and it doesn’t dry out
like at all
you can leave it uncovered on the counter all day after being cut into, and it won’t get all crusty and dry
this is an amazing way to take your cakes to the next levelDoes this count as cake hacks?
(Fact Source) Follow Ultrafacts for more facts
THIS is the knowledge I didn’t know I was seeking!