The year of my divorce…
Leaves of iceberg lettuce dipped in a jar of Hellmann’s/Best Food mayo.
Thank you.
Peanuts out of the vending machine.
I was overseas and had a problem with my ATM card. I had money in my bank account, but I couldn’t access it, and for three weeks (until I got the problem fixed, which was a MAJOR hassle) I had to live off of the $100 my dad gave me on the way to the airport. Now, at first I didn’t realize that I was going to have this ATM problem, so I…you know, bought things with the $100. It wasn’t til I was running out of cash that I discovered I couldn’t get at my money.
And so, peanuts it was.
Hmm maybe I will just call mine blizzard supplies.
Another Hawaiian checking in. Spam Musubi are a bonefide feast. As is spam mixed with noodles and cabbage. Sorry, you are disqualified*
*I mean this in the nicest possible way
Clearly, the winners are the people who were actually homeless. Glad things are better for you now.
Honorable mention to all the others eating free condiments.
P.S. It was a 10 for $1 box of rice-a-roni. We usually live off of white rice and 10 for $1 chili, but I wanted to save those for lunch so my classmates wouldn’t give me strange looks.
Slices of cheese, with some mustard. Sometimes we had Top Ramen as a “treat”. I know cheese seems extravagant, but it was a gigantic block and at least 6 months old. We just kept cutting the moldy parts off.
Living with four single guys and also being poor is not fun.
During an “adventure” when I was 20, I drove across the country to stay with a friend in Chilicothe, Ohio in December. She had an old farmhouse, I had never seen so much snow, experienced such cold, or been so broke. For Christmas dinner we scraped together enough change to buy a couple cans of jack mackerel. Combined with a few sprouting potatoes, a rubbery onion, and some powdered milk, we had a fish soup. Smelled like cat food (probably tasted like it, but not having eaten cat food, I can’t say for certain) but we were so hungry we scarfed it as if it were a rich seafood chowder!
I have had some hard times, and while my kids prefer ramen to salmon, crab, scallops, etc. I do not eat ramen. Ever. Or jack mackerel, either!
Rice-a-Roni (given to me by a coworker), cooked with, instead of butter, what I had left of a bottle of Italian dressing from making pasta salad a few weeks ago when times were SO good! (Actually, I just don’t have a microwave, so I try to stick to meals that don’t require re-heating.) Plus, some juice from a can of black beans (from my mother) to keep the rice and dressing from burning, then put the beans in and simmer. Currently waiting on the result, but I’m thinking it’s going to be pretty great.
Now, of course, this is paired with my $2.50 bottle of Cabernet, because what kind of alcoholic would I be if I didn’t buy alcohol before food? Wheeeee.
Zomby threa, but intersting to read.
Welocm to the dope, Terry.
Fresh out of a bad relationship [I loaded what I could fit into a horizon] my first full paycheck from an illegal boiler room I managed to get a job in and drove to a slum apartment I was answering the ad for renting. $300 a month, $15 for electricity and gas for heat/hot water/cooking, $20 for a telephone [local calls only, required to get a job] and tank of gas a week for getting to and from work.
At the beginning of the month, I would buy a bag of rice, one of beans, and a couple flats of ramen. $1 would get me 2 pounds of chicken backs and necks, and $1 for a 24 hour pass to Lynnhaven Fishing Pier and a couple of tidewater nets and I would get 2 to 3 bushels of blue crab over the course of a day of crabbing. I would keep a couple dozen of the nicest crabs and swap the rest at a fish market near the Anchor Inn for other types of seafood, milk, lemons or whatever they sold there that I needed. Boil up the crab, pick the meat and then reboil the broken shells to make crab broth and cook up a batch of the rice in the broth and toss it in the freezer in a bunch of margarine tubs I stole from my Mom when I moved down to Virginia. I bought the damaged fruit and veggies and crunch and dent canned and boxed goods from 21st Street Farm Fresh. Overall, I would spend about $25 for a month of eating. I also would fish for free at that little beach at the mouth of the Lynnhaven Inlet, the flounder hit ok in the mornings and at sunset.
When I was unemployed in the early eighties I used to eat at Hardees a lot. At the time they had a “Works Bar”. It was all the condiments you might want to doctor your burger up the way you like it.
I got the cheapest burger that came in a clamshell cardboard box rather than a wrapper. I’d take the burger out and set it on the tray. Open the box and fill both sides with lettuce, onion and tomaato slices. Take one of the cups for catsup and mix up some thousand island dressing using catsup, mayo and pickle relish. Presto!..big filling salad, no extra charge.
Yeah…I’m the reason they dropped the works bar.
Frozen pickles and frozen canned carrots. In their frozen state.
I spent a while backpacking, while working fruit 'n veg related jobs, in NZ and Australia.
Unfortunately, it’s quite easy to get screwed over by dodgy farmers in some areas, and I wound up owing rent more than once. However people abandon all sorts of interesting things in backpacker cupboards, and even the dodgiest farmers tended not to mind you bringing back some of the unsalable and damaged fruit.
For future reference, living entirely off grapes for nearly a week does some really interesting things to your digestion, apples make a horrible sauce for pasta and kiwi fruit is useless for cooking in anything. I wasn’t at much risk for scurvy at least.
Whilst hitchhiking cross country, it was impossible to carry anything that required refrigeration. And so, except when we were in an actual town, not often, we survived largely on ramen, with onions and potatoes, soup.
Of course it wasn’t put of poverty as much as necessity. And we came to really love it, even looking back on it somewhat fondly. I suspect that may, in part, be because we were young, wild and free, cooking over a fire and in some beautiful pristine wilderness or other!
Kraft macaroni and cheese with frozen peas mixed in. I would stock up when the Shop and Save had the boxes on sale at 3 for a dollar. I could get 3 meals out of each box.
I still eat it for lunch occasionally. It’s also one of my comfort foods.
In 1969 we were newlyweds and as soon as my husband got his college diploma he was drafted. The government sent me a letter telling me not to join him at Fort Lewis, WA as we would not be able to live on his Private’s paycheck.
Of course I wasn’t having any of that so I packed up and drove out there.
The government was right. We could only afford to go to the PX right after his monthly payday so fresh food was at a premium.
My husband lucked into a great job - Post Dependent Youth Activities Director- so he had a lot of connections. Some of his friends were in the Mess Hall and he’d exchange use of sports equipment with them for whatever they could spare for us to eat. (While this is a practice as old as armies have existed, I’m still hoping the statute of limitations is past!)
But the “shipments” could be pretty strange. Once it was a crate of lettuce, Another time a box of lamb chops. Another yet, five gallons of chocolate milk.
What I’d do is talk to the neighbors and ask them to bring whatever they had in exchange for sharing what was in our refrigerator. We had some of the best parties in memory during those uncertain days. People were either coming back from, or getting ready to go to Vietnam and there was a real sense of closeness.
And somehow we all had money for beer and penny ante poker.
Recently divorced I was trying to pay my mortgage and car payment on a pretty small salary. Both had been taken on based on having two incomes.
Jiffy corn bread mix as corn muffins - freeze half.
Rice and beans
Potatoes
Off brand freezer sausage links were like $.50 for a box back then (you can still get them for $1.
Eggs were cheap for protein.
Oatmeal
Polenta
A HUGE pot of soup could be made off a soupbone, carrots, potatoes and a head of cabbage. The ingrediants were less than $5 and would feed me for a week.
Fried rice is leftover rice, one egg and a few frozen peas, plus soy sauce - which often did come in the form of packets from my parents from takeout Chinese (my sister was in high school at the time and worked in a Chinese restaurant, my parents had endless soy sauce packets).
I ate pretty well, but I had a kitchen with a freezer and am a pretty good “depression era” sort of cook. And food was, honestly, cheaper when I was broke.
My kids are off school this week and I’m making them do “menu planning on a budget” and told them it had to include a meal of soup.
I use to buy $1 pints of ice cream and bags of cookies, strictly to get the most calories for the buck. To hell with being healthy, I had to stay alive.
When I was first divorced with a baby and a 4 year old, I spent $25 a week on groceries. Usually that meant a loaf of bread, a bag of potatoes, a gallon of milk, macaroni, Ramen, some cheese, a few odds and ends. My big splurge was either a pound of hamburger or a jar of peanut butter. We ate Mom’s Famous French Fries a couple of nights a week, and the kids loved it. Luckily I taught at a tiny school where the cooks actually made the food from scratch, and they fed me many leftovers.
I’ve become a pantry hoarder too. Whatever happens financially, it’ll be a long, long time before we run out of food! I’m always urging my kids and friends to find a job that provides meals, too. If I had time for one more job, I’d try to get on as a closer at the local bagel company, so I could take home the discards.
10c pack of ramen. Couldn’t pay the gas bill, so no working stove. So I just broke them up, sprinkled the seasoning packet on them and at them raw. For 3 meals a day, for a week. I occasionally would get some pity food from coworkers, but it was essentially just the ramen.
When I was 18 I was homeless in NYC for a few months. That was when the Automats were still open. I would sit down at a table that someone had just vacated, and eat food that they hadn’t finished, always on the lookout for another vacated table. I also made tomato soup out of ketchup and boiling water. Once, a woman gave me a dollar.