I’m sad that this is worth mentioning. But if you are dealing with hunger amid threats to SNAP benefits, rice and beans are very cheap per meal and can be bought in bulk. Here’s some tricks I’ve learned:
If you get dried beans, make sure you follow the directions to pre-soak them. Canned beans are easier to prepare, just dump in near the end of cooking to heat them up. Dried lentils don’t need to be pre-soaked, but I prefer to cook them separately and drain the water they boil in.
Brown rice, barley, or other whole grains have much more protein than white rice and I find them more filling. Whole grains take longer to cook than white grains.
Frying diced onions in the pot before adding the grains and water is an easy way to kick the flavor up a notch. Use a generous amount of cooking oil (light olive oil is healthiest) for cost effective calories and help making the meal more filling.
Big carrots or celery in bulk are pretty cheap too. I like to dice carrots by partially cutting length wise into quarters, but leave the small end intact to keep the carrot together to make it easier to dice down the side. Add them to the same pot as the grains after the grains start to soften. Beets are also great; skin and cube then boil separately until soft. Change up your veggie to get a mix of vitamins
Get some bulk garlic powder, hot sauce, paprika, cumin, crushed red pepper, black pepper, etc. Season and salt the pot to taste.
You’ll only need 1-2 pots and a cutting knife/board for veggies.
I recommend Harvard’s Nutrition Source for science-based nutrition information and they have some recipes too
Edit: discussing big changes in diet with a primary care doctor or registered dietician is generally a good idea.
Probiotic supplements may help with gas.
As a bonus this sort of meal has a very small environmental footprint.
Also a very underrated flavoring that’s unjustly stigmatized because of racism is MSG. You can get really big bags of them for super cheap, and it’s an easy way to make any meal taste savory.
MSG is my secret weapon for making my cooking better than his mother’s.
MSG has been a godsend in the kitchen for us. It just makes everything taste better!
It stands for Magical Savory Goodness
You get it! My wife and I use the term “the sacred MeSsaGe”
Rice, oil, little tomato paste or *sauce, pinch of sugar, whatever spices you have -> mexican rice
Large skillet of cooked rice, 1 scrambled egg, salt. Stir egg in to rice over heat and mix until cooked. Eggs and rice. Decent flavor, super filling, reheats well.
Rice, soaked black or soaked red beans, Filé powder, chilli powder, salt. cook like it’s just rice. red/black beans and rice, heartly flavor, super filling.
1 single sausage patty cooked and chopped super fine, file powder, skillet of cooked rice, salt - > dirty rice.
1 serving of cheap uncooked spaghetti broken into 1/2 inch pieces, 3C uncooked rice, 2 tlbs of high heat oil, stir until pasta browns a bit, water barely to cover, stir in salt, dry italian herbs, butter if you have it, tight lid. stir occasionally, DIY Rice-A-Roni.
Throw a single uncooked chicken wing in a large pot of uncooked rice and water, cook normally. it will flavor the rice and you can still eat the wing or tear the meat off into the pot.
lentils in particular can be mixed with rice and cooked up right in a rice cooker. easiest meal to make.
Lentils are another good legume. Look up a daal recipe for any lentil you find, and basmati rice
I’ve been making a Lebanese dish. It’s lentils mixed with rice and sautéed onions. Top it off with a dollop of sour cream.
That sounds pretty good
I’m anaphylactic to lentils and peanuts, and less allergic to other legumes too. If I ever became vegetarian or vegan I think I’d starve to death.
I’m not currently requiring budget protein (I’m still poor-ish but not as bad as some) but my bills are about to skyrocket soon (need to upsize apartment, looking at around ~$600 increase per month) so I might need to look at budget options soon.
Edit: TIL soy is a legume lol.
There are some good soy protein options too. Tofu can be cooked a bunch of different ways, and there’s tempeh which is similar but different. One of the lesser knowns is TVP or textured vegetable protein, which is soy, but comes in different forms like mince or chunks (like ground beef). Its pretty cheap (especially in bulk), shelf stable and has good protein.
Soy is also a legume.
TIL lol. Thinking more deeply about that I should have guessed
Basmati is usually quite expensive, no?
TBH any white rice would work. Basmati is generally $2-3/kg or $1.50/kg if you buy a big bag. (Canadian Dollars)
How do you make the cheaper brown ones not super bitter?
Something like this. Spices, lentils, tomatoes.
Skip the olive oil. If you’re buying it on a beans and rice budget, its gonna be fake olive oil anyway. Just use corn/canola/veg oil.
Fortified short grain white rice… hit up Costco or Sam’s, or your local Asian market, and you can score a 20 lb bag for like $15 which comes out to literally a few cents per meal. (well… pre-tariffs at least… nowadays idk)
From there, add beans, or eggs, or chicken broth, or literally almost anything else: shit off the clearance wrack, from the food pantry, w/e. If it’s a meat or veggie, it’ll go with rice. In the case of the pantry, if you’re not actually sure what it is, it’ll still probably go with rice. Got a bag of spicy cheetos you forgot to close and now it’s all stale? Don’t throw that shit away, smash it up and throw it in with your next batch of rice - now it’s spicy! (I’ve done it - texture’s a little weird, but otherwise came out better than expected). Rice is ridiculously versatile.
Disregard the hate for white rice being nutritionless junkfood - it is, but when money’s that tight, you don’t give a fuck. The fortified rice mitigates that a bit, and in my experience is usually cheaper. It’s a starting point: add what you can to make it less shit; and even if it’s a meal of just straight rice, that’s still better than an empty stomach.
Your basic rice jazzes up well, too. Scoop of soup stock, scoop of turmeric, scoop of cumin, can of peas, cook it all together in the instant pot or rice cooker. Soy sauce and a raw egg, whip it together.
To each their own. Brown rice comes in 20lbs bags too. The biggest benefit in my opinion is brown rice keeps me feeling fuller longer.
totally agree on chicken broth adding that extra something
It’s a bit of a misunderstanding to think white rice is only “nutritionless junkfood”. As you said the fortification does make it kind of like a multivitamin in addition to providing decent macros. The main issue is the loss of fiber and other nutrients bound up with it. This can be mitigated though. If you include other high fiber foods like broccoli, legumes, and/or other vegetables in the same meal it will balance the way the rice digests a little and reduce the glycemic load. Another thing you can do is cook, then chill, then reheat the rice - this will cause resistant starches to form, which have somewhat similar properties to fiber and also are good for our gut microbiome.
Imagine living in a country with 900+ billionaires, with growing tendency, where regular people are discussing about the best ways not to starve.
Not that it’s much better where I live, but damn, what the hell is wrong with this world?
The problem is less that people can’t afford to eat, it’s that they’ve been alienated from their food and don’t know what to do to feed themselves without being exploited by gouging opportunists.
The elite have always been vampires living on the blood of us peons… it feels new to us because we are living it now, but history shows its been this way a long time, and it was probably the same in prerecorded history too… we, as humans tend to suck…
part of it is that the working class, poor to people who incorrectly think they’re middle class included, basically everyone who is not ownership class (where owning things is the primary means of making them money), utterly fail to organize, and sometimes actively work against their own interests (like the “lets make a third party!” morons, the “I am morally superior for not voting” morons, and or course the actively malicious “I let the billionaires tell me that them fucking me was actually brown people’s fault” morons.
I hate the use of working class that excludes front line workers who very much still work for a living. Why call it working class if it’s just a fancy name for lower class instead of fully including all workers?
???
I certainly include them in my definition.
I took. > Incorrectly think they’re middle class
As to assume you didn’t. But clearly my assumption was wrong
What I was meaning to say is that people who are working class think that they are middle class because they aren’t destitute, yet they have no significant assets, and could not survive an extreme financial event.
I just feel that politicians use middle class as a weapon where when they talk about policies benefitting the middle class they often benefit people far richer than the median but people think they mean them.
Yup. Most people think they’re middle class. Not many actually are
As the saying goes, “most of the working class are just temporarily embarrassed millionaires”
I don’t even think they think this. I think its small potatoes compared to the ones who are convinced that skin colour is like shirt colour in middle school sports, and that means they’re all on one team and the ones who don’t think that are traitors.
Rice is way cheaper.
What is this po ta toes of which you speak?
Dried lentils don’t need to be pre-soaked, but I prefer to cook them separately and drain the water they boil in.
Pre-soaking lentils (and pouring the water away) makes them easier to digest, in particular it makes them bloat you less.
https://farmhouseguide.com/benefits-of-soaking-lentils/
An exception are dehulled lentils, like red lentils. They don’t need pre-soaking and are quicker to cook, too. I often throw red lentils into the cooking water with my noodles or rice, just to add some protein into the meal.
Bean stew is one of the most delicious things you can cook whether you can afford more or not. Here’s my recipe. Everything but the beans, onions, carrots, paprika, oil and salt is optional and mainly improves the taste profile. Works with almost any kind of bean. Can be done with dried beans too but you gotta handle softening them up first.
Bean stew/soup v4.1
- 3x beans cans - 540ml
- 2x onion heads
- 2x carrots
- 2tbsp paprika, 1tbsp smoked paprika
- cooking oil
- 1/2 tsp salt (or less) and 1/2tsp of MSG
- 2x chicken or beef cubes
- marinara/tomato puree/diced tomatoes/vinegar/some other acid
- Add beans with some water in a pot. Use OG bean water too.
- Chop onions and carrots in small pieces.
- Fry onions and carrots in a pan with oil.
- Once fry is done, add all the paprika and stir for 10-20s then pour into the pot, let it boil once.
- Add the beef/chicken cubes.
- Add spearmint, lots.
- Add some more oil if needed. Olive is great.
- Add 3-4tbsp marinara, diced tomatoes or balsamic vinegar.
- Add 1/2 tsp salt (or less) and 1/2tsp of MSG.
- Test for salt, it might be good enough.
Eat it with some bread or by itself. It goes well with any type of hot pepper too.
Spearmint!?
Yup, fresh or dried. If you’re curious about it, just try the recipe exactly as described and it should come out as intended. I don’t even taste during cooking anymore. I just do it with the right measurements and it comes right every time. It’s an Eastern European dish that has countless versions.
Wow that’s so interesting. I’m excited to try it, thanks for showing me some cool new ideas.
You’ve kind of made a variety of chili. All you’d really have to do to transform it, is add chili powder and cumin. Everybody thinks chili powder is what makes chili, but that only gives it the heat. Cumin is the real flavor of chili. Add both too taste, and it’s delicious.
BTW, a cheap meat to add to chili is ground pork. You can usually find it in one pound rolls near the breakfast sausage. It tends to be significantly cheaper than beef, and sometimes even chicken. It’s really cheap at Aldi. Add it to the beef to economically fill out the meat in your chili.
It’s very similar in ingredients but the taste profile is different since there’s no cumin. It’s also typically of a watery, soupy consistency although there are thicker versions.
I once made a batch, and was trying to figure out why it didn’t taste right. I added more chili pepper, but that wasn’t it. I finally remembered that I had forgotten to add cumin. Dumped some in, and it tasted great!
I have been in multiple debates about whether chili should be thick, like a stew, or more liquid, like a soup. I maintain that the proper consistency is right in the middle, but that’s hard to keep when it’s simmering on the stove, thickening up.
That’s interesting in that none of my chili recipes have cumin as an ingredient, so I’d say that is far from essential.
Recipe? I’ve been perfecting my chili game for decades, and I’ve never used a recipe. We don’t need no stinking recipes!
If it ain’t got cumin, it ain’t going to taste like chili. Period.
By recipe, I don’t mean some written down rigid list on ingredients and processes, I mean more in the way of each distinct type of chili. I also have perfected my various chilis over decades and only one, my white chicken chili (which barely counts as chili IMO), has cumin in it. I am sure your chili is great, but I’d almost certainly prefer mine as I consider it perfect.
As a vegan, this has been my main meal because I’m pretty lazy (usually wrapped in a tortilla with guacamole, but I also eat it plain)
The gas issues are only a problem for a few days / weeks until your gut biome adjusts !
Yes, I think it’s a sign that your diet lacks fiber and your gut is now adjusting to the heightened fiber-intake.
It’s the bean water that comes in the cans.
If you don’t use it - you don’t have the gas.
No idea what they put in it.
That is part of it, but not the complete story. I talked about the same things in a comment elsewhere here, but in a nutshell it’s the combination of fiber and the oligosaccharides in beans. The latter is what leeches out into the bean juice, which is why rinsing beans can go a long way toward reducing gas.
But for the fiber there is no getting around the need to just eat it everyday to get the microbiome adjusted to it. Where people go wrong is eating a ton of high fiber foods all at once and getting miserable with a ton of gas. It’s better to add those foods more gradually to get used to them.
Yeah, no. I cooked my own beans from dry and I was still overly gassy for a bit.
Also, if this sounds too boring to anyone - do not underestimate the power of keeping a bunch of fun hot sauces around. They don’t have to be too spicy, but something similarly vinegar based will have a decent shelf life and be pretty cheap per serving.
I’m not just eating pantry staples again, I’m enjoying a smoky chipotle bean stew on top of some fragrant mango-lime-habanero rice.
Something chili based is fantastic. I’ll use just chili powder if needed but something like a siracha is fantastic with so much stuff.
Brown rice, barley, or other whole grains have much more protein than white rice
White rice is pretty much pre-diabetic junk food that’s been stripped of most of its fibre and nutrients. I’d recommend always replacing with something like the above, or my favorite, steel-cut oats.
If you get dried beans, make sure you follow the directions to pre-soak them.
When cooking from dried, some baking soda in the heating process can greatly speed things up. The use of a potato masher here and there can also speed up the softening of the beans, and makes it easier to tell how far along they are.
Get some bulk garlic powder, paprika, cumin, crushed red pepper, black pepper, etc. Season and salt the pot to taste.
Don’t forget MSG, which boosts up the savory / umami taste. It’s cheap, you don’t need a lot, and there is no such thing as an MSG allergy. (altho very occasionally people can have sensitivity)
or my favorite, steel-cut oats.
If we’re talking about cheap meals steel-cut oats have almost excluded themselves these days. I used to be able to buy organic SCO in bulk for about $1.45/lbs. These days I can’t find any SCO for less than $3.50/lbs and that conventional, not organic.
Where are you getting cheap SCO these days?
Nowhere. It’s always been fairly pricey, at least for me.
So to summarise-- that was just me stating my personal pref, not recommending them to anyone as ‘cheap meal food.’ That said, it’s possible that rolled oats are a better, cheap alt to rice. They tend to turn out too mushy for me, but may indeed retain much of their fibre and nutrients…
Everything is more expensive now. Still though, $3.50/lb of dried oats is a good amount of food. Sure, there are cheaper options, but if you skip one fast food meal or something then you could buy 2-3 lbs, which is quite a lot when you add water. Not exactly “struggle meal” perfection, but still frugal.
If you prefer white rice to brown but actually want some nutrients I highly recommend trying out basmati rice - it’s relatively easy and inexpensive to get in bulk and I almost never eat any other type of rice anymore
Well… once I switched to SCO, I stopped eating rice and never looked back. It’s all-around healthier than any type of rice, last I checked. Plus, I greatly prefer the flavor, no offense intended.
Basmati does have quite a pleasant aroma, in any case!
Do you mix SCO with beans? Or in a curry?
It works great any time you might think of having rice, either as a side or in a meal.
I would say this, tho-- it can get a bit slimy (like oatmeal), so you might want to rinse it after cooking.
My kids call me “bean lady” for my love of beans. They are a perfect food.
Red beans and rice (red beans cooked with small chopped veg, long grain white rice)
Pinto beans on brown rice, with tahini.
Pinto beans on brown rice, with chili paste.
Pinto beans refried with breakfast.
Lentil dal with coconut milk and spinach (or lately with Hong Tsoi because it grows here, spinach is too fussy. )
Garbanzo bean soup with potatoes and chorizo.
Ful mudamas with pita and feta cheese and scallions
Channa masala so spicy, with chopped onion and mixed pickle, on white basmati
Red lentils and greens on sourdough toast. East with knife and fork.
Brothy enormous white beans cooked in veg broth but with a Parmesan rind or a bone.
I really truly love beans.
