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Cheap meal ideas
Sipex
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Okay, due to circumstances out of my control I've got $74 for two people to last us until end of day next (ie: 1 week + 1 day) thursday. This is Canadian dollars but the prices will probably be similar being food items.
Anyways, I need some ideas on how to stretch this out without eating KD or hot dogs every night, suggestions?
Anyways, I need some ideas on how to stretch this out without eating KD or hot dogs every night, suggestions?
Sipex on
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Burritos!
Those Kraft Pasta Salads are pretty good and like a buck a piece. Off brand box Mac n Cheese for 50c a box. You can get a giant bag of pasta and a can of marinara and not spend over 5$ and that will last a while.
Peanut butter and bread.
There is a particular brand of frozen pizza that I like that are usually 1.50 a piece.
Not gonna be healthy.
Get you a pound of rice and some frozen veggies.
You can make your own sauce in a crock-pot (2 29 oz cans sauce + 1 18 oz can paste + spices to taste), cheap noodles, either serve as is with spaghetti or get some penne and bake with cheese. I think I worked it out to about US$1.50/serving for baked penne back in the college days. Lasagna's pretty inexpensive too, though ricotta will add to the price, but you can flesh it out by adding in fresh veggies, which are cheap and filling.
Making your own pizza is fun and much less expensive than buying it out. Dough's pretty simple to make, just flour and oil and yeast mostly (plenty recipes out there), you can use the aforementioned sauce, load up on whatever toppings you like that are not too expensive. 8 oz of cheese will cover a 16" pizza, easily.
You can usually get ground beef pretty cheaply if you want to make chili or something like that, especially if you're willing to make a fair bit of it. This ground beef can also be used for Esh's burritos, which are another good cheap idea.
Chicken leg quarters can usually be picked up for not too much money per pound, and are quite good baked with potatoes and vegetables - simple, but inexpensive.
Stock up on fruits and vegetables, they're much less expensive to eat than meat. Avoid any convenience foods like frozen dinners, which are usually fairly pricey. It's almost always cheaper to bake from scratch than to buy, so keep that in mind.
Also, if you have a lot of time and the inclination, homemade noodles are extremely inexpensive and really delicious. They're a bit of a hassle, though.
Beans and rice is cheap, and can be a good base (for burritos) or side dish, or sometimes I just eat it with cheese and onions (kinda like a veggie chili).
Also, brown rice is ridiculously cheap and pretty damn healthy and can fill out a ton of meals.
You make lentils like you make rice, but it's about twice as much water as you've got lentil in the pot. Bring the pot to a boil. Cover with a lid, reduce heat to low and check back in 30 minutes or so. When it's all soft and soaked up the water, add spices. Ground coriander, ground cumin, ground chili powder, garlic powder and ground turmeric. All have wonderful flavours and lots of health benefits. Add some salt (I prefer kosher but it's your call) and it's fucking delicious.
Serve next to a roughly equal sized heap of jasmine rice, combine both rice and lentil on your fork with each bite and you're in heaven. It's two of the cheapest things you can buy, you can store them in bulk forever if you keep them dry and sealed up, and it's incredibly good for you. It's all fibre and protein and a tiny amount of good fat.
Tips:
Never add any kind of spice or salt to the lentils until after they are cooked. When cooking them, only allow water into the pot.
You want the texture of the lentils to be like a thick or heavy paste almost. Like a pate, not quite like peanut butter but closer to peanut butter than to soup.
You can add a bit of oil to liven them up if they're a little dry after being cooked. I recommend grapeseed for its health benefits (it actually reduces cholesterol levels), or either extra virgin olive or peanut oil for their flavours.
It's the definition of cheap, simple food.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
Saute the chicken breast in whatever you've got lying around, (butter, olive oil, other oils etc).
cook rice, when rice is done stir in half packet of taco seasoning. serve with the chicken.
If you like eggs and hot sauce, that is.
I'd go online and stretch your dollar with some coupons.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
Other than that look for no name versions of pizza pockets and stuff like that to fill a couple meals because they're fairly cheap and not all that awful tasting.
I'm trying to think of healthy things that are cheap but none really come to mind. If you have a costco membership buy some bulk stuff since that'll stretch out your budget even if you might get bored of eating the same stuff repeatedly.
make chilli, a BIG batch - ground up turkey, beans, chilli powder, whatever you have - bet that'll make enough for half a week in itself
when i was poor (we're talking 25$ of food stamps for a week, here) i would buy curry packages and add carrots, mushrooms, chicken, and a big thing of rice - and thatd always work for around 5 days
i also had a jar of PB and a loaf of bread, as well as ramen noodles
i live in vancouver, bc - safeway is where i did my shopping - there and superstore
here's a big tip, though - look in your cupboards first, and work your way out. canned things you havent used? spices? figure out what you need to add to include those in your meal.
When I need to eat on the cheap I usually revert to stuff in cans.
Rice and beans go a long way and it's pretty filling... a lot you can do with that. (Add turkey for chili or just make rice and red/black beans with some taco sauce and it's pretty delicious)
Cans of chili are also really damn cheap and each one of those is a meal.
Cans of chicken (or if you can find a cheap piece of real chicken) shred it up and mix in mayo (I prefer miracle whip) and voila! Chicken salad! if you can find a cheap enough rotisserie chicken there is enough meat on there for MANY days of chicken salad.
Thanks a lot!
Dandelions also make good eating, and you can make a tasty flour out of acorns if you do it right (not a very reliably source of food, but a fun way to spend a day off).
I do this pretty frequently. Sometimes just adding a can of tuna. Or if you want to get a little fancier take a can of hormel chili mix in a can of black beans and a can of corn. You can use that mixture directly with mac and cheese. Also shoudl be plenty left over to put on top of a baked potato for another meal.
Scrambled eggs in mac and cheese is also pretty rad.
Stove top can actually make a meal on it's own. Throw some random stuff off the spice rack into it, chop up a bit of garlic (real garlic's cheap, too. I just got two cloves for 50c and that'll last a couple months, even putting it on almost everything).
Somebody mentioned those Kraft pasta salads, but in the same aisle there should be some little packets of pasta or rice. Usually about $1, but you don't get as much out of them as an Uncle Ben's pack, you'll need something else to go with it.
There's also Viola, which is just frozen pasta... stuff. Comes in a lot of varieties. $2 meal for two people there. I think there's even a cheaper brand of the same stuff.
Check out the frozen stir fry, too. There's a lot of brands, even the expensive ones will make a decent $3 meal, and they taste good.
Somebody mentioned cheap frozen pizza, they're talking about Totinos. For two people, though, get Tony's. $2.50 instead of $1.50 like Totinos, but two people can split a Tony's pizza where Totino's are a lot smaller personal pizzas and you'll each easily eat one.
$70 for two people for a week isn't too bad as long as you don't just order a pizza when you don't feel like cooking.