Pasta and easy sauces. For $3 You can have a ok spaghetti dinner. Pasta, canned sauce and bread. Add $3 more have a salad too.
Good luck.
For calories/$, it’s hard to beat peanut butter, especially if it’s low sugar.
For vitamins, there’s a guy who fasted for 1 year without significant health problems and he did it with multivitamins, potassium and yeast. That’s not exactly your situation but it shows that a few supplements can be enough for your non-energy-related needs.
https://coach.nine.com.au/2016/04/06/17/01/the-mystery-behind-the-207kg-scotsman-who-fasted-for-over-a-year
You should probably steam beans and rice rather than boil them as boiling leeches nutrients away.
Well, “boiling” rice usually means just enough liquid that the rice will absorb it, so there’s no big problem there. But yes, steaming is usually better than boiling for most veggies. Or most of them can just be eaten raw.
You try to steam dry beans and you’ll be there forever. But you save the bean water and make soup. In fact, soup should become a regular part of your weekly diet. Leftovers, vegetable trimmings and scraps, meat trimmings…all go in the pot for stock.
Many grocery stores sell soon-to-expire perishables at a discount. (Fareway is a local example of this.) You can get some real bargains this way.
Contact your local Food Bank.
You could very well be eligible.
And you’ll eat better.
You can live on potatoes alone, you’ll want to add some fat, like butter.
Eating the peels helps.
I used to have an old paperback of The Frugal Gourmet that had a peanut sauce recipe that went well with pasta. It’s been long enough that I don’t remember how useful the rest of his recipes were, but you could check the library and see if it has anything useful to you.
It used to be you could get chicken wings for much less than other cuts, but buffalo wings killed that. Now you can sometimes find low priced necks and/or backs, but only at stores that do their own dismembering. A lot of meat sections just buy chicken pieces in big bags/boxes, so that they only order exactly the pieces that they know will sell.
Necks and backs are no good for eating, but good for soup.
Yeah. But also rice. A 50 lb bag is maybe $18, which will provide roughly 5000 calories per dollar.
The closer a food is to a staple crop, the more calories per dollar. Wheat, corn and rice. Look for foods as close to the staple that farmers make if you want to save money. Things made out of corn meal, flour, rice, oil, peanut butter, margarine, etc. provide the most calories per dollar.
If you don’t mind eating a ton of rice, cornbread, pancakes, etc. then you can feed yourself on 50 cents a day.
Hit the $.99 store or Dollar General and stock up on condiments as well. The problem with eating basic foods all the time is that they get so damn boring. But a few varied spices and condiments can go a long way in keeping your food interesting and tasty.
Also explore any local ethnic markets. I know I can stock up on Mexican foods a heck of a lot cheaper at the local Meximart than at Vons or Albertsons. Staples are dirt-cheap, and the various proteins available are 30% cheaper (and tastier) as well.
Also seconding nearwildheaven’s suggestion about the discount bin at the grocery store. Great deals on stuff that is still perfectly good. Just dented or near the “expiration” date.
I was born into modest circumstances, then I was poor by choice til 40 when I accidentally ended up with a s.o. who has a 6 figure income. I cook up St Louis ribs, fresh shrimp, lobster, and king crab anytime I want now, but back in the day…
!st thing is, all a human needs nutritionally can be had from combining a legume and a whole grain. Rice and garbanzos, corn and pinto beans, barley and lentils. Western civilization survived a millennium on fermented barley, lentils, and a bit of spoiled pork, and if you were doing poorly you went out in earliest spring foraging for mustard, dandelion, and docks.
The absolute least I could live on would be buying or trading for coarse grain corn meal and lard and harvesting mesquite beans (whole grain and legume), making corn cakes with a bit of lard and grinding the mesquite beans whole and also cooking them with lard, that is a nutritionally complete meal and, though it is Xmas we’re having a warm December and there is some mustard up early and I could have some fresh greens, plus I know where there is some Wapiti, water potato…
I used to make a great poor man’s stew with leeks, potato, tomato, and celery, if you have a spare egg crack it and let it drop in the stew near the end, then it’s a treasure hunt for that sucker…
My favorite treat was slop, you buy a 16 oz can of pork and beans and a brown potato, heat the beans and boil the potato, then mix 'em together with salt, pepper, and ketchup you got for free at a convenience store.
Remember that the white potato and sweet potato are considered super foods, and always eat the peel.
Feast! Buy a bag of cheap frozen shrimp, thaw them, roll them in cornstarch, fry 'em up! This is called Tempura. Works with any veg, too. Asian cooking was originally about conserving resources, the Wok and the Hibachi requiring only small amounts of wood or charcoal and oil to prepare food.
Best meal I ever ate: some illegal aliens I worked with invited me to dinner at a huge construction disposal site (honest!). They had gone together on a whole hog butchered into fist sized chunks, and they had a big copper kettle. We gathered a bunch of construction waste, old pallet wood mostly, made a big fire and heated up a couple cubes of lard in the kettle, threw in some pork til crisp, and we ate it on corn tortillas with a salsa cruda of serranos, tomato, and onion backed up by copious amounts of beer and tequila. Repeat til the pig is gone…Trumpachev! Build that wall!
America is a great place to be poor! All our poor people are fat! Yay!
Be nice to friends, relatives and co-workers. Get invited to eat with them. Cheap eats!
The most important thing is to vary your diet. Eating just about the same thing everyday opens you up to missing vital nutrients. Also you will probably get sick of a steady diet of rice and beans very quickly and you’ll be forced to switch to more expensive foods.
Split red lentils are perhaps a better alternative than beans. They are more digestible and cook quickly. Add some salt and spices, a little oil or butter, and a tomato and it’s delicious with rice. A few fresh vegetables with it are good too.
Potatoes are cheap and filling. Eggs, cheap canned fish like pilchards, cheap fruit like apples and bananas, cheap vegetables like carrots. As others have said, vary your diet as much as possible. Look around for bargains.
It needn’t be costly to have a variety of interesting flavors in your diet.
Have you ever had Vegemite? If not, give it a try. You might find you enjoy it. It has what I would describe as a concentrated flavor of yeast and malt, like a strongly flavored dark beer, combined with the flavor of soy sauce. A little bit of it spread on a piece of bread is a good meal, and I’ve also found that it acts as an appetite suppressant, probably to do with the astringent properties of the vegemite. You will feel satisfied and not want to stuff yourself. A little bit of it goes a long way, you don’t want to slather it on thick like peanut butter, you just want a light coating of it. It’s not for everyone though, some people despise the tast. Seems to be a love/hate thing.
Get a container of Greek seasoning (I like the Cavender’s brand, a container of curry powder, some cayenne pepper, some garlic powder, a bottle of good soy sauce, a jar of horseradish, some good stone-ground mustard, some apple cider vinegar, a bottle of “Liquid Smoke”, and a large bottle of inexpensive ketchup. All of these seasonings can be combined in various quantities to make customized sauces that will rival anything from a restaurant.
Once you have this arsenal of seasonings, it becomes easy and fun to make interesting meals using basic ingredients of rice, beans, some green vegetables like broccoli, spinach, peppers, onions, mushrooms, and a bit of whatever kind of protein you can get - or tofu.
Large bags of frozen fish can usually be found at supermarkets. They are a good deal. You can usually get huge bags of wild caught whitefish, pollock, and cod. Also, if you’re near a decent sized body of water, fish! A fishing license is usually inexpensive and if you can find a good spot, just keep hitting it until you fill your cooler. I found that a REALLY reliable bait for panfish is Berkley “Crappie Nibbles.” When all else fails, bluegills and crappies will hit those. They’re fun to fight on ultralight tackle!!
If you have friends or relatives who hunt, ask them for some extra game, they usually wind up with MORE than they need and would be happy to give it away. If you have friends with large vegetable gardens, ask politely for extra tomatoes, peppers, squash, etc. Again gardners typically wind up growing MORE than they need, and give it away to anyone who will take it.
Also, good quality smoked sardines in olive oil make an EXCELLENT addition to any dish of pasta or rice, and you can usually get cans of them cheaply. Go to an “International” market that has a large Arabic clientele. There should be cans of Moroccan sardines, often marked down on sale. Excellent and extremely healthy.
I used to have
- boiled rice with veggies and sometimes beans and egg. Flavoured with soya sauce.
- You can use scarps for soup
- Most bread is edible if toasted.
- There are lots of cheap instant noodles available.
YouTube has a ton of videos showing you how to make tasty food cheaply. Also don’t be afraid to experiment. You’ll often end up making stuff thats actually pretty good. I once made chicken fried in egg and cheese and tossed in rice. It was farily nice.
Finally, do save up and occassionally treat yourself. It’ll make you feel better.
I’d caution against this, as they tend to have off-the-charts levels of sodium. Most Americans eat WAY too much sodium to begin with. Take a look at the nutritional chart on a lot of that instant ramen stuff and you’ll see something like 38% of daily sodium value in 1 serving, and one package is 3 servings or whatever. Watch that sodium! I guess you could simply omit the seasoning packets and season them instead with a combination of your own seasonings, with a more restrained amount of the ol’ Na.
Hello Everyone, OP Here
First of all, thanks for the money-saving and helpful suggestions!
Second, thanks for the offers of help. You guys are too kind! For the time being, I will respectfully decline offers of help; I’m not going to go hungry, as I have family and other resources available to me.
Third, as for the nuts & bolts of the situation: long story short, the industry I work in (online publishing) is in a yuge downturn at the moment, and my income went from “not much” to “barely anything.” I also live in a region where jobs are scarce. I’m trying to scare up income in other ways (I’ve spent the previous two nights Skyping with a guy in China in order to possibly get some contracts tutoring English to Chinese students). As to how long this situation will last: it could very well turn around tomorrow, it could never recover. Who knows.