Where could you even find healthy ingredients for under $10 that will last a few days?
It can’t be beans and rice again, all the time.
Okay I don’t live in America but I routinely make healthy meals for the local equivalent of under 5 bucks, which should be equivalent to about 10 in America according to a quick Google. And for the record I mean proper meals, not beans and rice. For example Walmart sells a pound of lentils online for two bucks, an onion for about one buck and half a dozen carrots (actual carrots, not baby carrots) for less than three bucks, or about 50 cents per carrot. A pound of lentils, an onion and a carrot will make enough lentil soup for five days*, or about a $0.75 per dinner. For the full experience you can add half a disk of pita bread for $0.5 per meal, or you can substitute with tortillas for less than 15 cents per meal. We’re still a full order of magnitude below the ten bucks limit. And this isn’t poverty food; where I’m from people actually eat this because they want to. It’s not labor-intensive either, but it does need a food processor (cheapest I could find was 6 bucks on Amazon, but I didn’t look very hard).
Point being: Maybe I’m missing something, but even with recent price increases there’s plenty of good food one could have without getting any close to the 10 bucks limit.
*There’s no need to make the five days’ worth all at once; lentils will last for months outside the fridge.
Beans, peas, lentils, peanuts, they’re all off the menu at our house because allergy.
Ow, admittedly I hadn’t considered allergies. In that case I suspect you’d find something like pasta with bechamel (100 grams of chicken stir fried, 100mL of bechamel sauce, served with pasta) to be similarly affordable. Basic fried rice with stir fried chicken is also dirt cheap. Really chicken in general is the load-bearing pillar of non-vegetarian cheap cooking, though since you say “our house” I suspect you already know that.
It can’t be beans and rice again
Ok… Onions and potatoes it is. 🤷♂️
There’s surely got to be something like this on YouTube
I did a bid upstate…well here downstate. And one of the best meals I had was top ramen and crunched up flamin cheetos. But doesn’t feel the same when making it now.
Huh, despite eating both extremely rarely, I’d try that! Don’t laugh, but do you have any tips? Just cook Top Ramen and add Flaming Hot Cheetos to it, or are there measurements or techniques I should aim for?
The jail technique is to crush both, throw them in a bag with optional pickles, sausage, whatever the vending machine has. Dump in just enough very hot water to soak everything, then knead it a bit until it forms kind of a loaf.
Every match ends with an 8 way tie of
Welp, it’s edible! You Win
This sounds like most daytime television anytime I catch it tbh
In my family of five well four now we cook a big meal every sunday and it always lasts till at least wed or thur
Oh no, what happened? Did you have to eat the fifth?
There are like nine seasons of a show called Struggle Meals.
Cool will check it out
Emmymade on YouTube has a series on depression era and similar recipes. Not all winners, but its a decent sized series on that theme
I watch that lady, and she makes entertaining videos, but she makes Martha Stewart seem chill.
Martha before or after a J?
Omg, thank you! TIL. Wonderful videos!
Dollar Tree Dinners on FB
Cooking shows are funded by product placement and advertising deals. You can probably figure out the rest.
Unless your local prices are seriously outrageous, most traditional cuisine from anywhere will fit that bill. At least the stuff I make comfortably stays below that number. If anything how would a home-cooked meal even get close to $10 per meal?
Grocery prices in my city are kinda nuts if you want to add fish, chicken, beef or pork to your meal. A salmon filet is easily over $16/400g, before any other ingredients.
if you know what you’re looking for and now how to cook.
one problem i see/have with cookbooks on traditional cuisine is that a lot of the better one focus on traditional sunday roast style fancy recipes (schweinebraten mit kraut und knödeln), and while good they are not cheap. what is more difficult to find is the saisonal poor mans cuisine. except maybe cucina povera from Italy.
Fair enough. The best way to learn traditional cuisine from somewhere is probably to have someone from there who can cook recommend recipes.
yes absolutely! but sometimes i have the impression that there is a intergenerational rupture such that the grandparents technically knew these recipes, but this knowledge did not get passed on to the parents’ generation. so depending on your age there maybe one or even two generations which just don’t know these recipes, hence the reliance on cookbooks, which involves trends, marketing, being fashionable, etc.
(also, lots of old recipes require quite some prep time and/or planning, which is why there used to be different recipes for different days of the week. e.g., Saturday was reserved for washing, with little time for meal prep, so Eintopf it is. i think what I’m getting at is that this kind of cooking is quite different to the modern idea of i can decide on the spot what’s for dinner. the old stuff just doesn’t work that way. sorry for rambling)
well no, you kinda need access to the ingredients for that cuisine… Like, nordic (and even a lot of central european) grocery stores don’t just have galangal or whatever. Plus if they do it’s gonna be horribly expensive, since it’s imported.
Mythical Kitchen is that, a lot of the time. When they actually fucking cook anymore, anyway. I am not a fan of the talk show type shit they started doing; I want 7/11 junk food turned into gourmet dining, damn it!
But a lot of home chefs on YouTube are exactly what you’re looking for.
Because no one watches cooking shows anymore.
And now you can know why… As we’re all broke.
Surprised nobody’s mentioning Joshua Weissman’s “but cheaper” series. You get the impression he’s a little into himself, but the recipes are solid.
Because cooking Rice & Beans is just a 5 minute YouTube video, not a culinary series.
BUT exploring how the addition of stuff like rice to regional dishes in order to increase yield… how techniques of necessity like that helped evolve traditional cuisine in the south, Cajun and Creole cooking… also how ingredients of necessity like potatoes are not just a random starch but a life blood and the source of a thousand dishes… stuff like that is worth a series.
I think there really could be a great cooking show that highlights stuff like that; especially as a vehicle to show how to turn traditional wisdom into practice.
A lot of shows start with this idea. The chef goes in to it with the idea that they’re going to show people how to make good food with what they have that they can afford.
Then when they’ve kinda done all they can with that in a season or two it starts to go off the rails.
Then eventually you have Alton Brown lowering an entire turkey in to a boiling 25 gallon pot with a ladder and a pully system in the back yard of his studio house.
Because these shows are entertainment first, cooking second.
Plug for BeyondFoodMarket
He’s got a lot of short videos where he makes something for $10 or less (his lowest was $2 if I remember right).
There are a number of cooks who did that, even as series or cook books. Low budget cooking or student cooking are the terms to look out for.
If you want low budget cooking, you can also look into food prepping and freezing, as large batch cooking is often a very money-conscious idea. I often cook large batches of some meals, usually 12-15 liters. Portion it off as needed and freeze it. One day of work when you’ve got the time and the ingredients are on sale, and countless hours saved on everyday cooking.
