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A Tough-Love Guide to Eating for Poors by Nautatrol Rx: I'm going to write out a few rules and avenues of education that will allow you to improve your quality and variety of food while not breaking the bank. None of this will be haute cuisine, but it's better than eating mashed potatoes and pasta for every meal. Rule 1) Stop being a poor. Poors deprive innocent businesses like Wal-Mart of their hard-earned money. Also, it's just gross. Eww. Rule 2) Google is your friend. To really get the best out of your budget, you need to learn how to cook properly from scratch. Heating food someone else made and packaged is not cooking. For example, pouring Prego spaghetti sauce from a jar into a pan and adding a couple vegetables (I don't know if you do that) isn't cooking so much as heating. With the power of the internet, you have the opportunity to get a firm grasp on the science of cooking--why those recipes tell you to do something like browning meat before you cook it again. This knowledge empowers you to get away from recipes and start freestyling in the kitchen. That alone will allow you to combine ingredients and flavors in ways that will make you more satisfied in the kitchen and at the dinner table, and you will have a firm grasp on what you can leave out of a recipe, what can be substituted, and you can DIY some things you would otherwise buy canned. To start, crack out on Alton Brown's show Good Eats. It's a very entertaining and informative series that will give you a basic background in cooking. You can find it on Youtube. Rule 3) Carefully consider your food purchases for price vs quantity. As a poor, you need to be sure you're getting the max bang for your buck. Instead of shopping based on recipes, you should form ideas for things to make as you shop for deals. Stew meat, for example, is one of the cheapest cuts of meat, but it's surprisingly versatile. There's far better cuts out there, but that's beside the point entirely. Another example of a great buy is a package of ends-and-pieces bacon. You get a ton of bacon for much less than the nicely placed strips. It's the same idea as the stew meat. Rule 4) Bigger is better. When cooking every-day fare, bigger is better. If you don't have a giant pot for chili and stew, you should get one. Cooking large and freezing leftovers will keep you from falling into the money-sink of buying small bits of ingredients for each meal. Buy big on anything you can, and you'll save in the long run. Cook big, and you won't have ingredients going to waste, and you'll always have a backup plan in the fridge. If it's frozen, you can have it next week or the week after if you're tired of it. Rule 5) Hard work saves you money. Carrots? Don't buy those little baby carrots that are peeled and such. Buy adult carrots and do it yourself, baby killer. When you buy onions, buy the huge bags of onions. You can never have enough onions. Eat the fuckers like apples. When you buy chicken, don't buy boneless, skinless chicken breasts. Aside from the dark meat actually being the best part of the chicken, chicken breasts are expensive. Buy whole chickens or bags of fryer legs and thighs. You can always cut off the meat from the bone. Or, you can Rule 6) Fry it. Frying things is awesome, and all you need is some flour, spices, egg/milk, and some veggie oil. All are relatively cheap, and you'll probably have them on hand. Again, there's a ton of videos out there that will show you, step by step, how to fry stuff. However, you should stress learning the process that goes on during the frying rather than just following directions. Remember: recipes are the enemy. Rule 7) Waste is an anathema. That whole chicken or the big bag of frying parts--you don't want to throw away dem bones. Bones on anything (hams, beef, chicken) are what you use to make stock. Boil those bones into stock, and any rice or beans you cook with that stock will be extra delicious. Buy a head of lettuce for a salad and have some salad left over? Slap that sucker on a sandwich. If you have leftovers that just won't go away, think of new ways to recombine them into other dishes. Rule 8) Shop where other poors shop. Being a poor and shopping where normal people shop causes stress and discomfort for all parties. Look and ask around for the places that poors shop. Places like ALDI are where poors go to get their sustenance even over Wal-Mart. Follow suit, and you may find more money in your pocket. Rule 9) Be creative. Most people that don't cook do so because all they know of cooking is using recipes that they try to follow to the letter and still end up like crap. Really, cooking is about experimentation. It's very, very rare that I'll break out any sort of measuring device when I cook. The one exception is if I'm using Baking Powder or Soda in a quick-bread because of the potential nasty taste if it's too much. Otherwise, it's a free-for-all of pinches, grabs, and tosses. It really doesn't take long to be able to eyeball most of what you do in a kitchen. Again, the main point of all this is to learn the science of cooking and why certain things happen when you combine A with B and cook it a certain way. Once you have that under your belt, you no longer need to follow silly recipes. You can look at it for inspiration, but then you take the general idea and make it your own. Surprisingly, this will save you a lot of money because you can work with what is on hand rather than going to the store. Rule 10) Poors are lazy and don't like to work. Poors are poors because they can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Granted, we stole their bootstraps and sold it back to them on credit as stew meat, but it's still their fault. Chances are, the work required to get a solid grasp of the processes behind cooking will put you off. Granted, it's mostly sitting on your duff while surfing the internet and learning the skills and ideas that allow you to ask the right questions, but poors are too lazy for that and that's why they're poors. Out of pity, I will offer you some quick foodstuffs recipes: Cream of Chicken/Mushroom and rice: Buy a can of cream of chicken or mushroom. Add it to pasta or rice, and add any veggies/extra meat. It's cheap, filling, fast, and it doesn't taste that bad. Casseroles: Use cream of chicken, chunks of chicken, rice, and vegetables in a oven-safe container and bake until hot and the top is crispy. You can look up other cheap casserole recipes online. Quesadilla: Take a couple tortillas and put cheese, cooked veggies and meat between them and either microwave until cheese is melted or put in the oven until the same. Bootstrap Soup: Contact your local non-poor and offer him/her your bootstraps. They will then offer to sell you the bootstraps necessary for bootstrap soup. Place in boiling water/tears until tender. (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST) Erik Shawn-Bohner fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Oct 9, 2011 |
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Oct 9, 2011 23:31
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| # ¿ May 2, 2024 10:41 |
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^^^^^ Poors are not humans and therefore have different biologies and require different nutrients to survive. Cream of chicken is one of their basic food groups. Also, regular bread is worth the effort. Your no-knead bread is an anathema. My Little Puni posted:Wow that was extremely helpful and yet insulting at the same time. I will assume that you were being facetious and was only commentary on our social order, not a direct insult. So thank you, maybe this will help me become not lazy and I can stop feeding on the dirt caked on the bottom of my shoes when I get home from doing poor people stuff (mostly doing drugs and walking around wal-mart) and will slowly become a useful member of society. Maybe one day I can even start paying people off in order to make myself look better to other people paying people off. I can dream right? One day, silly poor. One day you may. I also thought of another trick that I continue to use to this day. Spices are very intimidating to a new cook because you're taking a little bit of something and it changes the flavor massively. They all work together in different ways and can produce some really off flavors if you don't know what you're doing. My way of dealing with that is to sniff and taste a spice before I use it every time. I'll bend down and sniff whatever I'm cooking, sniff the spice bottle, and maybe take a bit on my finger to taste while smelling the food. It will give you a good idea of what the end result will be in terms of scent/flavor, and it will give you a memory map of what spices work well together so you can do your own spice blends. Spices make a huge difference. It's what turns a cooked meat into a dish. Also, never buy lemon pepper or garlic salt. They are an anathema. Also, gravies. Learn how to make a roux. It's essentially cooked fat and flour used for thickening a liquid into a gravy. For biscuits and gravy, it's awesome, and biscuits are easy to make by hand too. Combine with a couple over-easy eggs and some sausage, and you've got food fit for a king. My dad and I eat "breakfast" for dinner often just because it's filling and delicious. You can also use the roux to make a gravy basted stew, aka a fricassee, with chicken and veggies. Think of it like the inside of a pot pie--or dump the fricassee inside some biscuit dough (you learned how to make biscuit dough for biscuits and gravy, right? It's easy as hell) formed into a shell, and you actually have a pot pie! You mention Wal-Mart, so I assume you have access to one. Hidden somewhere on the meat isle are tubes of ground turkey. They're soul-crushingly cheap (the size of a roll of ground sausage, but they're only about a dollar a piece), and they're reasonably quality meat. Add spices, and you've got a cheaper alternative to beef and chicken. Also, look at the cheaper rolls of ground sausage. They're absolutely packed with flavor, and it makes an incredible substitution for beef in pasta sauces. I try to use sausage instead of beef whenever I can. It also helps that it's cheaper. When you cook sausage or bacon. Never throw out the resulting grease. That's pure flavor you can use in a roux, for frying, in soups, in bread if you like to make your own bread, and prettymuch anywhere you'd use oil. Fried mushrooms and onions in bacon fat are food of the gods. The grease will solidify and turn into a white paste that can be stored in a coffee mug in the fridge or whatever you like. Also, you can get creative with your potatoes. Fried Yankee Potatoes (as we call'm in the South) are large-cut slices of peeled potato fried up in grease (or oil) with bacon and onion. Look up how to make cornbread (real cornbread has no sugar), and you'll have yourself a very filling, delicious meal. I would highly suggest making your own bread. It's slightly more expensive, but it's far better tasting, and you're actually getting way more food. Bagged sandwich bread is mostly air. This is more of a luxury item, but it's not that far off the budget, and it will make you happy. It's a fun place to experiment with nuts, raisins, fruits, and spices. I make all of mine without the assistance of machines, and to make sure it comes out super-tender, I cover it with tin foil for the first 30 minutes of baking and then do a egg-wash rub on the outside and let it cook until golden brown. Once you have bread-making under your belt, you can make your own pizza crust and therefore your own pizza. This is where you get into truly gourmet territory. Oil-spice rubs instead of red sauce, fine cheeses, whatever ingredients you like to your heart's desire. Shove in oven at 450 until the top is brown and the dough browned, eat, orgasm. It's also the same bread recipe for making bagels and pretzels with slight cooking variations. Once you learn to bake a loaf of bread, it opens up whole new avenues of cooking. (start with the Good Eats episode on pizza... check wikipedia for a listing of the episodes and the foods it covers) Have you ever made potato pancakes? Take those same home-made mashed potatoes you love so much, add some more black pepper, then plop a glob onto a hot skillet with a little oil/butter like you would a pancake. It makes those old potatoes fantastic. Plenty of things will go with them whether it's breakfast or dinner. Don't take my posting as a sign of fondness. I still am disgusted with poors. I'll post other ideas/avenues of exploration as I think of them. You can also try to ask some (more specific) questions, and I'll do my best to answer them as I assume everyone else will. It's comedy, Dr. Poor, not trolling. Plus, the rest I gave is good advice. Why don't you contribute something with effort if you want to whine? VVVVV (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Oct 10, 2011 00:40
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