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I'm not completely poor, but I'm having a hard time staying in budget. And at least for shared dinners, I need to avoid gluten, lactose, beans, added sugar, or pineapple. So it's kind of difficult to find recipes. I got a recipe for sticky rice that I want to try, and I'm going to make fried rice. But I need some cheap recipes for some pretty strict dietary restrictions. Any ideas? For my own recipes, I'm making chili (with beans) and baked beans, because beans are cheap, and if I'm feeling like it, I can toss both of them on some rice to make it stretch even farther.
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May 16, 2015 02:33
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I like putting leftover chilli on rice to stretch it. Throw some corn in there too, then you got a nice microwave lunch to take to work. Tomato season is nearly upon us. Once they start hitting 75 and 50c a lb, start making endless amounts of salsa. My favorite is just throw the tomato, hot pepper, and onion on the grill in halves, let them get roasty toasty, then throw them in the food processor. Put the onion in first, blitz, then some hot pepper, blitz, then tomato and line juice. Coarse blend on tomato. Test for heat, add hot pepper seeds until you get your desired heat level. Fold in the cillantro, epazote, and pinch of salt to taste. Serve on chips you can totally make cheap and easy from corn tortillas. Cut torts up into 8's, put on pan in toaster oven or regular-rear end oven, bake at 450ish for 4 minutes. Flip, spritz with lime water, sprinkle with salt. Toast 'till crispy. Hot and fresh and delish.
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May 16, 2015 03:21
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I do pretty much the exact same process when making salsa, but I throw in some garlic on the grill as well. When the garlic is done you don't even need to peel it, just squeeze it out.
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May 16, 2015 13:48
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22 Eargesplitten posted:I need to avoid gluten, lactose, beans, added sugar, or pineapple. So it's kind of difficult to find recipes. I got a recipe for sticky rice that I want to try, and I'm going to make fried rice. But I need some cheap recipes for some pretty strict dietary restrictions. Any ideas?
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May 16, 2015 14:08
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22 Eargesplitten posted:I'm not completely poor, but I'm having a hard time staying in budget. And at least for shared dinners, I need to avoid gluten, lactose, beans, added sugar, or pineapple. So it's kind of difficult to find recipes. I got a recipe for sticky rice that I want to try, and I'm going to make fried rice. But I need some cheap recipes for some pretty strict dietary restrictions. Any ideas? Here is one of my favourite vietnamese things and it's gluten free. It's not sugar free though http://www.tarasmulticulturaltable.com/bun-thit-nuong-vietnamese-grilled-pork-with-rice-noodles/
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May 16, 2015 15:34
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You can make fried rice w/ gluten free soy sauce, there are a lot of alternatives out there. If you can't find any at your local grocer, the internet will definitely ship some to your residence.
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May 16, 2015 16:16
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Yeah, we can find tamari around here. That's what you mean, right? What are some cheap vegetables to put in fried rice? I know my mom used to make a fried rice with cabbage, onion, carrots, peas, and I'm not sure what else. I just have very little experience with cooking or shopping, so I don't want to buy stuff that's cheap and have it be awful in fried rice. I figure fried rice lets me use rice (cheap), eggs (cheap), and some cheap dark meat chicken, so it's a good fit.
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May 16, 2015 16:21
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Yeah, we can find tamari around here. That's what you mean, right? Well, cabbage onion carrots and peas are usually about as cheap as they come.
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May 16, 2015 17:30
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Fried rice is all about the eggs, rice and sauce/seasoning. I usually don't use meat in it, but if I did it would be left over already cooked/roasted pork or chicken (I like a bit of hoisin sauce with pork). A lot of people/restaurants use baby shrimp or ham though. For veg, I just use peas and green onion/scallion/spring onion. Sometimes carrot or some sort of frozen vegetable mix long forgotten in freezer that may have bell pepper or corn if that needs to be gone; but peas and green onion is enough generally. I can't see the point of cabbage specially for it. If you're buying some cabbage just to use a little of it in fried rice, then you're going to be cooking something else all week with cabbage - I do that a fair bit, ie "welcome to cabbage week - stir frys, colcannon mash, slaws, braised cabbage and tikil gomen" etc, but I wouldn't buy cabbage if the only planned meal on my mind was a fried rice and nothing else that needs cabbage. E: If you are doing soups and stews etc that need celery anyway, you could put some finely chopped celery in your fried rice instead of cabbage, I've done that a few times. Fo3 fucked around with this message at 18:21 on May 16, 2015 |
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May 16, 2015 18:13
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22 Eargesplitten posted:I'm not completely poor, but I'm having a hard time staying in budget. And at least for shared dinners, I need to avoid gluten, lactose, beans, added sugar, or pineapple. So it's kind of difficult to find recipes. I got a recipe for sticky rice that I want to try, and I'm going to make fried rice. But I need some cheap recipes for some pretty strict dietary restrictions. Any ideas? You can live your whole life with meat, starch, and veggie. Make the starch potatoes, sweet potatoes, beets, turnips, parsnips, rutabagas, or rice. Make the meat something cheap like chicken thighs, chicken legs, pork shoulder, and pork country ribs. Make the veggie whatever the hell is on sale - hopefully some type of leafy green because they're delicious and great for you. Flavor your poo poo properly. Citrus owns, fresh garlic and ginger own, and spices and herbs will fit your restrictions unless you're buying some stupid rear end spice mix. Get some gluten free bouillon/stocks, soy sauce, and hot sauce. Use them to make delicious food. Use salt, use fresh ground pepper, and MSG is everyone's friend in the kitchen. If you wanna get fancy add a fruit sauce. If you wanna get wintery turn them into a soup. If you wanna get delicious toss a fried egg on top. You may think your restrictions are damning you to terrible food forever, but 70% of the planet would literally kill you to shop at your local grocery store with the restrictions you listed.
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May 17, 2015 02:17
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niss posted:I do pretty much the exact same process when making salsa, but I throw in some garlic on the grill as well. When the garlic is done you don't even need to peel it, just squeeze it out. Good idea, but I don't really like garlic in my salsa. I like to have a limey acidy spicy thing going, the garlic just does not fit for me alongside the epazote and cilantro. However, my recipe and method for making vegy chicken salad (chicken in a vegy sauce base as opposed to a dairy one) is quite similar to my salsa making and that benefits from roasted garlic. That's just roasted tomato and onion and garlic.. roughly pureed? What's it called when you're liquefying something of high hydration but it's still got chunks? Anyhoo, do that, add salt pepper spices to taste, a dollop of good mayo, and fold in cold cubed chicken. It's a darn treat to eat cold.
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May 17, 2015 03:02
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Tofu in the regular grocery store here is 12 USD per pound (200 NOK per kg) for a 350g packet with 12% soy content. So yeah, that's not really viable as a food staple here. Got to check out the Asian food markets instead. And yeah, freezers. We have one big one, but people around here will typically have several to store self-picked berries, meat from moose/deer hunting etc. The bad thing about this is if we get a rare power cut or lightning strike. My aunt's freezer in an outbuilding was destroyed by a direct lighting strike last summer, and the contents of the other two ended up partly spoiled by the resulting power outage.  As a big fan of prepping, I'm a bit skeptical of putting so many "eggs in one basket" so I won't have more than one freezer. Around Christmas, pork sides go on deep discount sale here in Norway since the food chains count on that traditional Christmas food to bring in the punters, and to earn back their margins by selling all the other stuff that goes with it. So we've gotten extra prok ribs for the freezer. This has also been picked up on by the (non-Kosher, non-Halal) immigrants, so they filled up their shopping carts with *only* pork sides, and the stores started putting quotas on it. Same thing happens with diapers - diapers are massively cheaper in Norway than in e.g. Russia. So if you're Russian, come to Norway and stock up on diapers; only buy pork before Christmas, otherwise it's chaper in Sweden. Be sure to observe customs regulations though- filling up a white van with only diapers for the whole neighborhood is not a good idea. I'm steaming some frozen sheep ribs from Christmas time right now, by the way. One thing that has helped my parents a lot is to re-introduce the pantry concept. Having all the canned and jarred food easily browsable has cut down on waste. They're considering getting a produce/wine-cooler for the stuff like bananas which will spoil in summer temperatures and will also be destroyed by a regular fridge; the problem is they can only get groceries once each week. I know some of you are thinking "root cellar!" right now, but the house is sitting on pretty marshy land. Will that still work?
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May 17, 2015 14:00
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Yeah, we can find tamari around here. That's what you mean, right? Broccoli stalks.
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May 17, 2015 22:22
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nm posted:Broccoli stalks. Am I the only one that hates broccoli stalks with a passion? It seems that every bag of frozen broccoli I buy is about 1/4 tender crowns and 3/4 horrible, fibrous, cellery-stalk-like broccoli stalks. I stopped eating them after biting into 5 pieces of stalk in a row and getting tough fibers caught in my teeth. Yeah, there are some pieces of stalk that are tender, but they tend to be the core of the stalk. Fresh broccoli has this problem less often, but it still happens a lot for my tastes.
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May 18, 2015 01:03
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neogeo0823 posted:Am I the only one that hates broccoli stalks with a passion? It seems that every bag of frozen broccoli I buy is about 1/4 tender crowns and 3/4 horrible, fibrous, cellery-stalk-like broccoli stalks. I stopped eating them after biting into 5 pieces of stalk in a row and getting tough fibers caught in my teeth. Yeah, there are some pieces of stalk that are tender, but they tend to be the core of the stalk. Fresh broccoli has this problem less often, but it still happens a lot for my tastes. You're supposed to peel the stalks, but the mechanically produced frozen poo poo is usually half inedible for me as well. Stalks are great if you DIY
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May 18, 2015 03:55
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neogeo0823 posted:Am I the only one that hates broccoli stalks with a passion? It seems that every bag of frozen broccoli
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May 18, 2015 05:16
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feelz good man posted:Found your problem. False Frozen broccoli is really loving great so I don't get your complaint There's definitely forms that are less stalk and I am blanking on them Also TBH if you are having problems you might not be cooking it well enough. Frozen is almost always better than fresh due to the fact that fresh is picked prior to ripeness
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May 18, 2015 08:30
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It's a texture thing, anytime I had frozen broccoli the stalks were fine but the rosettes were all limp and squishy like boiled-to-death grannybroc'. If you don't like stalks much but don't want to throw them away: cauliflower and broccoli stalks make a great base for a full-bodied vegetable soup. Adds a creamy texture without an overpowering flavour so you can throw in whatever else you want. I like turning it into bean soup.
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May 18, 2015 09:03
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PiratePing posted:It's a texture thing, anytime I had frozen broccoli the stalks were fine but the rosettes were all limp and squishy like boiled-to-death grannybroc'. I like using broccoli and cauliflower with brussels sprouts and stirring a bit of cream (or fermented cream) into it at the table to make a great fall/winter soup. It's pretty cheap, too, if you go to the farmer's market when brussels sprouts are in season.
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May 18, 2015 10:27
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I moved to a place where the farmer's market is actually more expensive than the supermarket. They make in-season stuff MORE expensive until it's nearly rotten, you have to pay more because it's better you see?  I dearly miss my giant piles of awesome veg, but in exchange I get to live within a 15 minute walk of one Chinese, one Thai, one Korean and one Moroccan supermarket. Life is flavourful in a different way now!
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May 18, 2015 11:05
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PiratePing posted:I moved to a place where the farmer's market is actually more expensive than the supermarket. They make in-season stuff MORE expensive until it's nearly rotten, you have to pay more because it's better you see? Wait there are places where farmer's markets are cheaper than supermarkets??
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May 18, 2015 11:42
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silvergoose posted:Wait there are places where farmer's markets are cheaper than supermarkets?? For in-season stuff I find this to be true more often than not. At least for standard vegetables.
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May 18, 2015 12:03
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That Works posted:For in-season stuff I find this to be true more often than not. At least for standard vegetables. I've never seen that, ever, at my local ones in eastern MA. Stupid rocky cold land.
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May 18, 2015 12:28
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silvergoose posted:Wait there are places where farmer's markets are cheaper than supermarkets?? Yeah. When I lived in a primarily agricultural community, the farmer's markets were cheap as hell: go buy a 50 lb bag of unwashed, unsorted potatoes from the Hutterites for like $3. Now I live in a primarily bureaucratic city, and they're ridiculously expensive and populated by "artisanal" products.
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May 18, 2015 15:57
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CommonShore posted:Yeah. When I lived in a primarily agricultural community, the farmer's markets were cheap as hell: go buy a 50 lb bag of unwashed, unsorted potatoes from the Hutterites for like $3. Now I live in a primarily bureaucratic city, and they're ridiculously expensive and populated by "artisanal" products. I mean, to be fair, stuff doesn't grow in the northeast yet so there was literally two tiny stands of grown things and everything else was, as you said, expensive artisanal products. But even during prime growing season, everything is expensive, definitely moreso than grocery stores.
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May 18, 2015 16:30
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Where I lived it depended on how you approach it. If you go there to get specific stuff with a recipe in mind it's more expensive than the supermarket. If you go with an open mind and just eat whatever is cheap and beautiful at the moment you have a wonderful time. Quality/variety/price change weekly at a farmer's market so it's more effort but also more fun. I lived almost purely off of farmer's market produce for 2-3 years as a poor dumb undergrad student. You get less control over what you eat at what time of the year but the pay-off is more variety and always eating stuff at its best. Here in Belgium it's mostly artisanal frills too. The one in my town had the good stuff: cheap, plentiful, ugly but good eatin'. Disclaimer: This was in the Netherlands, YMMV. PiratePing fucked around with this message at 16:50 on May 18, 2015 |
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May 18, 2015 16:45
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PiratePing posted:Where I lived it depended on how you approach it. If you go there to get specific stuff with a recipe in mind it's more expensive Yeah, if you go after making a menu and shopping list and must buy everything on that list to make the recipes, shopping can be expensive. Where I am there are some independent supermarkets as cheap as markets, and the supermarkets are a lot closer. Sucks to only have Coles or Woolworths as options for buying groceries though But I'm lucky I live near those independent supermarkets as I have cheap accommodation in a very very high income area and lots of competition. The lower income suburbs on the outskirts of the city often have no choice but to shop at Coles or Woolworths in Australia. I have the luxury of going to markets, farmer jacks, and still picking up the loss leader special at coles or woolworths (who often are still more expensive than a good IGA special) But back to the point, I never shop off a menu/meal planner, only get vague ideas and then customize meals to what I can get in season or on special. Often it means two trips to the shop a week, but they're only 5 min away so no big deal. Fo3 fucked around with this message at 17:11 on May 18, 2015 |
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May 18, 2015 17:06
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This is the farmer's market I go to... always some things that are cheap, but you can spend a fortune if you aren't buying at the right times or looking for specific items. Even Kroger/Publix can be cheaper at times and they are usually expensive as hell. On the broccoli discussion. If you steam the stalks they will mash up pretty decently - I've been in a habit of mixing them with potatoes when I do mashed potatoes. Really good imo.
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May 18, 2015 23:38
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neogeo0823 posted:Am I the only one that hates broccoli stalks with a passion? It seems that every bag of frozen broccoli I buy is about 1/4 tender crowns and 3/4 horrible, fibrous, cellery-stalk-like broccoli stalks. I stopped eating them after biting into 5 pieces of stalk in a row and getting tough fibers caught in my teeth. Yeah, there are some pieces of stalk that are tender, but they tend to be the core of the stalk. Fresh broccoli has this problem less often, but it still happens a lot for my tastes. I know you're talking about frozen, but for fresh, the Alton brown technique works pretty well. Cut the stalks off and into 1/4" slices. Put them down in thr pot with just enough water to cover, then pile the florets on top.
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May 20, 2015 17:03
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For fresh stalks, peel and roast them, they are fantastic. For frozen (I buy it a lot out of season, but only for stir frys), chop of most of the stalks, defrost and drain/dry and much as possible beforehand, and stir fry the hell out of them in plenty of oil. Fo3 fucked around with this message at 13:38 on May 21, 2015 |
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May 21, 2015 13:35
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stuxracer posted:This is the farmer's market I go to... always some things that are cheap, but you can spend a fortune if you aren't buying at the right times or looking for specific items. Is this DeKalb? This remains bar none the best farmer's market I've ever been to. I still have spices from them from like 2-3 years ago.
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Jun 5, 2015 16:19
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Is this DeKalb? This remains bar none the best farmer's market I've ever been to. I still have spices from them from like 2-3 years ago.
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Jun 5, 2015 23:14
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It's so loving good. Good selection of teas, amazing seafood and their turkey chorizo was really fantastic.
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Jun 5, 2015 23:22
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Alright, since meat is pretty expensive I'll be fine with a semi-vegetarian diet for $167/month via SNAP. Already bought beans, spices, and rice. Lots of affordable groceries in Flushing, Queens which is nice. The only downside is that I really dislike cooking meals are there any sites that teach people how to do do batch cooking with few ingredients? That way I could prepare meals over the weekend and not be stressed during weekdays. I have access to a shared kitchen but no microwave/oven appliances. In the past I lived off sandwiches and fruit 
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Jun 12, 2015 22:46
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yes, reddit sucks but there is a group just for bulk meal planning if you're looking for ideas https://www.reddit.com/r/MealPrepSunday/ another suggestion for ideas is BudgetBytes. the author of the blog did a SNAP challenge last year and posted about it, well worth reading over: http://www.budgetbytes.com/2014/09/feeding-america-snap-challenge/
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Jun 12, 2015 22:56
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A good cheap meal I like to make is beans and rice with chicken. I slow cook red beans with cumin, cayenne, salt and pepper. I bake the chicken thighs with garlic and lemon. Usually I chop up & sautee some kale in garlic and hit it with balsamic vinegar right at the end for a nice side dish.
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Jun 12, 2015 23:37
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Sometimes you can find discount steaks in the discount meat section at the supermarket. Just liberally apply salt and pepper to both sides, heat up a pan, and cook those bad boys to a nice medium rare! Don't forget to hold them up and sear the sides if they're thick because you don't want to get worms
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Jun 12, 2015 23:39
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clammy posted:Sometimes you can find discount steaks in the discount meat section at the supermarket. Just liberally apply salt and pepper to both sides, heat up a pan, and cook those bad boys to a nice medium rare! Don't forget to hold them up and sear the sides if they're thick because you don't want to get worms I think I'll keep the  and buy some more beans. Too much nightmare fuel.
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Jun 13, 2015 00:04
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Manager special meat bin is awesome, especially beef (which is usually good longer than its use by date). Sometimes can find bottom round or similar for less than $2 a pound. Sliced thinly and marinated (see chinese food thread) it makes awesome stir fry meat on a hot wok. Or pound it out and chicken fry for some comfort food.
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Jun 13, 2015 00:08
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copen posted:Manager special meat bin is awesome, especially beef (which is usually good longer than its use by date). Pound it out and chicken fry with thyme and sage, serve with black pepper mushroom gravy and biscuits or grits. Cheap and delicious. Next day, pack a bowl of grits with cut up chicken fried steak, grits, and gravy for lunch.
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Jun 13, 2015 02:08
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