Eating cheap

This summer I'm gonna eat beans, soup, grits, and oatmeal.

Then I'm going to bathe myself in excess money a la Scrooge McDuck

Yup yup... it doesn't get any cheaper than ramen. I just have to add hot sauce to liven it up.

Shit's so bad for you...delicious, but high in salt and sat fats

cheap hot dogs, mac n cheese, hot sauce.

i agree that hot sauce will make anything cheap taste better.

Egg sandwiches are great.
Hot dogs is one of those things though,
if it's the cheap stuff, I won't eat it.
Ball park franks are that weird median of decent hot dogs that I can actually ingest.
I do peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every day for lunch,
I eat out on wednesdays with coworkers.

I do like eating hamburgers though,
I usually buy 80/20 ground meat and make my own burgers.
I do like baking chicken too.
My actually eating costs ranges from 2-3 dollars a day.
Maybe a little more for the operating costs of using the range.

Segata_Sanshiro said:

Shit's so bad for you...delicious, but high in salt and sat fats

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Yes, noodles kill my stomach,
I usually get around to feeling it the next day in the morning if I eat at night.
Also, it's not delicious, it has msg.
The msg is a chemical that interacts with chemicial receptors in your brain
and tells those receptors that what you're eating tastes better than what it does.
Like putting a pretty bow on a javelina.
But yes, high in salt, and noodles are actually prepared by being flash fried in oil.
It's amazingly cheap, but I wouldn't recommend it more than a couple times a week.
I grew up on it as a kid and nowadays my stomach can't take eating it.

I was just thinking about this the other day - there is a Jimmy Johns right next door to me. I pick up a few day old breads for 48 cents. Buy a 3 or 4 dollar jar of spaghetti sauce and some cheese. It makes great pizza subs in the toaster oven. you have about 6 lunches for under 8$. Compare that to the 6 dollar meal you would spend if you bought the regular food there.

We buy that bread and use it for tons of other things as well - croutons, meatball subs, garlic bread.

During the week we eat fairly cheap and use Groupons on the weekends. When I'm on the road I eat delivery food every single night.... it gets old really fast. Thanks to per diem though I don't really have to pay for it

the whole chicken is a godsend for cheap eating. you can often get three here for 9 euro, bit of salt, bit of pepper, and some garlic powder. roast em up and you got enough to last you for a week if not more. that and a few tins of heinz beans=dinners for a week.

I've taken a facny to cous cous lately, cheap and pretty filling too. Add bit of smoked sausage into the mix and your good to go

The trick is to avoid ready-made stuff and prepare the food yourself. A few pounds of potatoes, onions, eggs, flour, beans, coffee and bacon, as well as fresh fruit and the occasional fish are enough to bring you over a month or two and will be considerably cheaper than feeding on overpriced frozen pizza, instant soups, burgers or other stuff like that.

Then again, quality food should be the last thing to skimp on.

Cous Cous?
Is that kind of like fried rice?
Sausage costs too much.
Every once in awhile I'll see sausages combo'd with coupons for other things.
That's the only time I ever (I can really afford to) pick them up.

Couscous looks like rice but AFAIK it's some sort of soaked wheat.

Not very fond of it tbh.

Takumaji said:

Not very fond of it.

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Neither am I.

Soup is one of the absolute best things to eat cheap, and it's incredibly easy to extend into a few meals. Just simmer some diced carrots and onions with some spices in chicken or beef broth, using either canned broth or bouillon since they're both really cheap and add considerably more to anything than just using water, and you've got a soup that's pretty good even though it is pretty basic. Knowing that, it's relatively easy to change up your soup a bit, in a separate pot, you can boil up some noodles or potatoes until they're ready, then drain them and add them into the soup a bit before you eat it(for the love of god do not put either of those into your soup to cook, otherwise the brother will taste like a starchy mess, and in the case of using noodles,everything will be boiled into a tasteless mush by the time your noodles are ready). Frozen vegetables are also really great with soups, since they're pretty much just precooked, are relatively cheap, and you can use a bag of them again and again until you're out. I don't recommend canned vegetables for anything, since canned vegetables have significantly inferior and different tastes from fresh or frozen ones, their textures are otherworldly, and almost every can of vegetables needs to be drained before you put them into a soup because the bizarre flavors of the liquids in them will probably make any soup's broth taste absolutely atrocious. The only real advantage canned vegetables have other frozen ones is that you don't need to keep them frozen.
When you know what you're doing, you can make a gallon of good soup for every dollar you spend on the materials you need to make it.

John Terry said:

the whole chicken is a godsend for cheap eating. you can often get three here for 9 euro, bit of salt, bit of pepper, and some garlic powder. roast em up and you got enough to last you for a week if not more. that and a few tins of heinz beans=dinners for a week.

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I think one of the big ways of eating cheap is either omitting meat or extending it as much as you possibly can, and chicken is like the absolute best with doing that. By yourself, you could deconstruct the entire thing and get full meal out of each breast, then two or three using the legs, wings, and thighs. Roasting is the absolute best when you want something that requires very little effort that gives a great meal(when I roast, I like to make a spread with fresh crushed garlic, kosher salt, black pepper, onion powder, paprika, butter, and olive oil. I rub that all over the chicken so that when it roasts, it has the absolute best crunchy skin. I also put the chicken on a bed of chopped carrots and onions, then put a few potatoes cut in half around it too, typically covering those potatoes with my garlic-butter spread too), I live with too other people and we can get a pretty decent meal out of roast chicken, then I'll save it over night and then on the next day, I'll pick off it's meat for a chicken soup.

Takumaji said:

The trick is to avoid ready-made stuff and prepare the food yourself. A few pounds of potatoes, onions, eggs, flour, beans, coffee and bacon, as well as fresh fruit and the occasional fish are enough to bring you over a month or two and will be considerably cheaper than feeding on overpriced frozen pizza, instant soups, burgers or other stuff like that.

Then again, quality food should be the last thing to skimp on.

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I agree with the above. Noting beats preparing a fresh king salmon meal that comes out to only around $5.00-$6.00 per person. Only downside is its rather time consuming to prepare a full meal from scratch. I don't mind doing so as cooking, especially BBQing, is a hobby of mine but I can see why some people don't want to deal with it.

gum_drops said:

I agree with the above. Noting beats preparing a fresh king salmon meal that comes out to only around $5.00-$6.00 per person. Only downside is its rather time consuming to prepare a full meal from scratch. I don't mind doing so as cooking, especially BBQing, is a hobby of mine but I can see why some people don't want to deal with it.

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Practice makes perfect, the more you cook, the faster you'll get. I still remember the days when making a normal pasta sauce was a challenge, now it's something I do between two beers, and all I need are a couple of ripe tomatoes, onions, garlic, salt, pepper and oregano. For about $5, you'll get enough pasta sauce for four, add another buck or two for two packs of spaghetti and you'll have an inexpensive and fresh meal. I have a thing for simple but tasty recipes like that.

The problem with soup is the typically high amount of sodium in it.

Takumaji said:

Couscous looks like rice but AFAIK it's some sort of soaked wheat.

Not very fond of it tbh.

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Broback said:

Neither am I.

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I'm Scottish, used to eating shite and thinking it's Raymond Blanc's finest creation

When I was in high school, my daily lunch consisted of 2 Dr. Peppers and a Cup O Noodle. Looking back on it, it's a miracle of science that I survived.

In my high school days I'd often just eat a honey bun and some milk, and save the extra dollar to buy SNES and Genesis games after a couple of weeks. How the hell did I live like that?

trader joes makes an extremely good (for a jarred) pasta sauce for $1.00. combine with a pound of pasta and you have a few meals for $2. eating cheap doesnt mean eating bad. start using coupons. a dozen eggs can be had for less than $1 at aldi. also aldi (if there is one near you) is a great place for food on the cheap. there is a lot of great food there not just ultra generics. just sayin.

GohanX said:

In my high school days I'd often just eat a honey bun and some milk, and save the extra dollar to buy SNES and Genesis games after a couple of weeks. How the hell did I live like that?

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For the longest time I would eat that as a snack along with milk when I worked nights.
If it wasn't for the old housekeeping ladies that invited me to eat with them at night,
that's all I would have ever ate.

fuck the soup and noodles...
water and toast is where it's at. j\k

I get a lunch where I work. We get a ridiculous amount of food (soup or salad and an entree), so I either save some for dinner or eat it all and I won't be hungry for dinner. I'm sure its ridiculous unhealthy to eat it everyday but I consider it part of my total compensation and take full advantage of it.

While in college, I survived off Turkey sandwiches, quesadillas with canned beans, pasta with marinara sauce and chicken and rice. All cheap shit, if you buy on sale. Also, I used to buy beef jerky in bulk and mixed-nuts packettes to snack on during the day.