Most of the above suggestions can easily be made in advance and refridgerated/frozen until needed. Between a couple of kinds of beans, a couple of kinds of rice, a few fresh veggies and some spices, you can eat a different set of meals every day for weeks without a repeat.
Also check out farm stands in your area. Most of them have a bin for “less-than-perfect” fruits/veggies that go for uber-cheap. If they are going into a soup/stew or smoothie, it doesn’t matter if they are bruised a bit.
Chickpeas. They’re very versatile.
I found the OP’s question odd. My husband, who is not vegetarian, would hardly ever have meat in his apartment (before we were married) because it’s expensive compared to a vegetarian diet.
Beans, rice, chickpeas, frozen vegetables (get 'em on sale; they often will have more nutrients than fresh vegetables since they’re flash frozen right at picking), lentils lentils lentils lentils. Do you think poor people in India or China have hunks of meat every day?
Maybe. If you consider .02 lbs. of rice and .02 lbs beans to be a serving. At about 350 calories per pound for beans and 600 calories per pound for rice I’m not sure many folks would agree with you.
The caveat is that you will have to eat about 400 servings per meal…
How much are you looking to spend? I’ve been doing this ‘cheap vegetarian’ thing for about a year and a half now. On average, I spend around $4 per day (for one person) for all my food. I think the advice that’s been given so far has generally been pretty good. My two cents:
Avoid eating out. People think nothing of spending $8-10 for a meal at a restaurant, but I convert that into “Hey, I could eat for two whole days on that kind of money!”
Rice and beans are great, but they can get boring very quickly. Try varying your staples and include everything from split peas and lentils to couscous and quinoa.
Stir fried noodles with a bunch of veggies, curry paste, and a coconut milk is filling and delicious.
Load up on veggies, fresh or frozen (though do some comparison pricing…sometimes frozen is extremely expensive).
Popcorn as a snack is delicious.
The whole protein thing is vastly overrated in my opinion. If you eat a variety of staples and consume dairy, you should not be anywhere near protein insufficiency.
Absolutely it can be done!
You need protein (this is easier than you think), vegetables, and grains. You will also need some fats but for most folks this usually isn’t a problem.
You’re looking for “complete protein”, or food combinations or items that give a comparable amount of usable protein per serving as meat. Some easy to remember ones:
Rice + beans/legumes
Grain of any sort + beans/legumes
Potato + dairy
Eggs
Legumes are beans, peas, chickpeas/garbonzos and lentils They come in a bajillion varieties and you can mix and match all you want.
Rice and other grains are, well, rice, wheat, barley, millet, buckwheat, quinoa (technically not a grain, but it’s used as one), sorghum, teff, and some even more exotic stuff. Whole grains are preferred, but things like white rice and white bread are OK if you get sufficient nutrients elsewhere. If cost is a consideration white rice is enormously cheaper than most other grains in the US.
Potatoes comes in different varieties. Dairy is milk, cheese, yoghurt and the like.
Eggs - well, you know what eggs are.
The important thing is to eat some of the above at every meal during the day. So eggs for breakfast and maybe a baked potato for lunch and a bowl of bean soup at dinner would provide PLENTY of protein for the average adult. You can get quite obsessive about the whole business, but by eating a varied diet you can avoid most problems.
Now, add vegetables and fruit to the basic protein. You can get “bruised” selections. Frozen vegetables can be extremely convenient for the busy poor person and during the off-season they can be cheaper than fresh.
These are all guidelines. There are tens of thousands of recipes on line for you to try. Other Dopers can direct you to them. Isn’t there a site where you type in the ingredient you have or want to use and it will call up recipes for them? I can’t remember the name of it.
Now, you also mentioned an issue with time. A pressure cooker or rice cooker can help with that, as you can set them and go do something else, then come back to properly cooked food. I, too, am poor and busy. I set aside a half day when I have a day off and go nuts - I cook big pots of stew or soup, then subdivide them into portion-sized containers then pop them in the freezer. When I’m busy I can come home, pop one in the microwave, and get a healthy hot meal with minimal problems. Currently, I have beef and chicken stew and a beet-and-kale soup in the freezer. I also make my own dashi, which is easy to make vegetarian if you want and again there a bajillion recipes on line. Some of the ingredients are kinda pricey per pound, but they’re available dried so you buy them by the ounce and given the quantity of broth you get it’s actually reasonable.
You didn’t say where you were located, but if you let me know I’ll try to find if there’s an Aldi near you. I’m a big fan of them and I’ve been able to help people find them in the past.
One more thing about the protein thing that can save you some worry: you need not have rice and beans (or any other grain / legume combination) together in the same meal, or even in the same day. You just can’t subsist exclusively one one for an extended period of time.
an ounce of rice, and an ounce of beans BOTH DRY MEASURE, a tablespoon of tomato sauce, a quarter of an onion actually does come out to darn near a serving. You are under the impression a serving is half a serving platter heaped with a huge amount of food… a serving of rice and beans is a 4 oz scoop of each. believe me, I have been doing portion control since 1980, one thing I can do is portion control and you measure rice and beans by dry measure BEFORE cooking. :rolleyes:
What have you been eating? A vegetarian diet is pretty cheap as most have mentioned. It would be helpful to know what your standard of living is now so that we can suggest substitutes, although what’s been mentioned so far is going to get you about as cheap as you can go.
I’m not a vegetarian, but right after I lost my job I had to severely cut my budget in order to make the bills. I bought steel cut oats from the bulk bin to make for breakfast (more on the oats later), had PB&J’s for lunch, and rice and beans dishes for dinner. I was eating about $1 a day’s worth of food.
For steel cut oats, you can save time by doing them in a slow cooker. You need a bowl that will hold 4 cups of liquid plus 1 cup of oats that will fit in your cooker with the lid. Place the bowl inside the cooker with 4 cups of water and 1 cup of oats, then pour water around the outside of the inner bowl coming up about halfway. Set your cooker to low and 8 hours later or so, wake up to a steaming hot bowl of oatmeal. I add a touch of brown sugar to mine. This recipe makes 4 servings, and the leftovers can be put into storage bowls and refrigerated. It reheats well.
You can make them without the inner bowl, but I found that the edges would burn and cleanup was a hassle. Using the inner bowl, the oats don’t burn at all and cleaning it is a breeze.
I just threw two pounds of dry black beans into the crock pot with twelve cups of water, some salt, and a bay leaf. I don’t remember what I spent on them, but the per-meal cost is pennies. I’ll freeze about half of then and use the rest in bean salad (great for lunch!), acorn squash stuffed with beans, and quick easy black bean tacos or quesadillas. Total involved time - maybe two minutes to sort and make sure there weren’t any rocks, and a minute before I go to bed to pack 'em up. We especially love the acorn squash thing, even my ultra-carnivore boyfriend, and that’s in the microwave! Fifteen minutes, you cut the squash in half, scrape out the guts, nuke it for twelve minutes cut side down and two cut side up, then fill with warmed black beans mixed with salsa, or as we prefer it a chopped adobo chile with some of the adobo sauce. Top with plain yogurt. Nutritious, delicious, and nice enough for company. I do it with a rice salad I do in my rice cooker - a cup of rice (I like basmati) cooked, I do it in chicken broth but you don’t have to, and when it’s done and still hot and steaming you throw in a cup of shredded carrots, a cup of raisins, and a cup of toasted walnuts. Very tasty, beautiful, and won’t make anybody feel deprived at all.
Of course, I’ve got raisins and nuts and tons of rice and the appliances and such, which is all a benefit to this sort of thing. Pantry ingredients, you know. However, I could have this whole thing on the table, good enough for company, just in the time it takes the rice to cook and then five minutes to steam the mix-ins in. There’s no reason for cooking from dead scratch to be time consuming if you plan ahead (do the beans once a week) and know what you’re doing. If you want to do it cheaper, cut out the nuts. Cheaper still, forget the squash and eat your bean mixture on tortillas, but the squash is so healthy and inexpensive this time of year I don’t see a reason not to buy it. Save the seeds and grow your own next year.
ETA - I make my own yogurt, too. I think it’s fun in a science experiment sort of way, and it’s cheaper and you know exactly what’s in it. Again, very little active time.
Lots of soy & gluten based mock chicken patties, bean burgers, and the like. We have some veg recipe books & been trying the recipes seeing what we like, but some of the recipes call for expensive ingredients like fancy cheeses, kalamata olives, etc. Trips to the store back in my meat eating days used to run $100-$200 and they still seem to be about as high.
As for standard of living, we manage to live paycheck to paycheck on what should be ample income. In a few months I’ll suddenly become unable to work for a while and might not get my job back after recovering - and jobs are hard to come by nowadays. It’s tough now but it’ll get a lot tougher when that time comes.
I can almost assure you that you’ll like stuff that isn’t pretending to be meat a lot better. I know I sound like a broken record, but seriously - take a look at cookforgood.com. Between the last post I made and now, I whisked up dough for two pizzas each of which are enough for two people which I can make any time in the next week. The bowl of dough just goes in the fridge and I use it whenever I need it. The sauce is ridiculously simple, the toppings are whatever you like but simple is best, and the whole thing requires shockingly little work time. No kneading. Make the sauce ahead if you like. Get cheese when shredded cheese is on a huge sale, which seems to be all the time.
First off, no more processed fake meat, and no convenience meals. You’ve got to get the best bang for your buck now. Next, put your cookbooks away for a while. You won’t be buying fancy cheeses for a while. Third, do some internet searches, especially for Asian style veg dishes. Spaghetti noodles, a little tofu, a little fresh brocolli or carrots, and some soy sauce and you can make something fantastic. Don’t worry if there is a fancy ingredient in there…leave it out or find a substitute. Lastly on the food, give yourself a little leeway to treat yourselves every now and then.
On the finances, I’d recommend starting your new food budget and your cheaper diet right now. Figure out what you have been spending on food, subtract your new food budget amount and take the leftover amount and start throwing it at the bills right now. Hopefully that will take some of the stess off you during the time you are out of work.
You can make your own veggie burgers cheap. I like yams, black beans and rice plus spices but you can experiment according to your own taste. Less expensive than store bought veggie burgers and they taste better too.
Whether vegetarian or carnivore, processed foods cost more. You need to learn to cook from scratch in an efficient way.
I swear there is a crowd out there that has to make cooking anything into something complicated and expensive.
In many cases less expensive cheeses can be substituted for the fancy ones. There are many ways to substitute ingredients.
So - do you have a slow cooker? Do you have a rice cooker? Those two appliances alone will making cooking from scratch VASTLY easier for you. Walmart has a rice cooker model under $30. There are a bunch under $50 commonly available. Here is an appliance that is a rice cooker, slow cooker, and steamer in one for just under $50. Want to make beans? Put them in with the water, set the appliance, then walk away, go off to work, clean house, nap, whatever. Come back later and your beans are cooked, no baby-sitting the stove required.
Learn to cook in large batches and use your freezer. For example, when I make bread I make four loaves at once, which take no longer than making one, then freeze three of them for later use. (Or buy a bread machine, where you put the ingredients in, set the machine, and walk away just like making beans or rice in a cooker - but if you get a bread machine find recipes you can assemble yourself instead of buying pre-mix) When I cook stew it’s never less than 8 quarts, most which is frozen into portion size containers. If I work late, I’m tired, the family has the flu, whatever, I can just pop the containers in the microwave, heat, and we have a meal in minutes with little to no effort.
If you have a recipe with fancy/expensive ingredients post it here - there are lots of Dopers who can help you modify it to meet your needs.
It has hardly any protein at all. Max is 10% according to this table, but most of it gets boiled out.
When I was broke I learned to make my own bread, which only saves a little bit of money but it’s fun and delicious, and I made a lot of veg soups, and once a week I used to do a spicy left-over vegetable/potato/cheese bake with a can of tomatoes in it, that would last me about 5 days.
Moved IMHO --> Cafe Society, where the cooks hang out.
During my broke/post meat-packing plant days I subsisted on rice & lentils, eggs, spaghetti and sauce, ‘egg drop’ ramen w/scallions (scramble an egg and drip into boiling water before the noodles). Grilled cheese, french toast, omelets. Breakfast for dinner! My diet gave me wicked gas that made me the life of the party. I also used to put molasses on my grapenuts or whatever crunchy cereal I was eating at the time for some reason (minerals?). Good pork chops can be had for cheap if you want to take a meat break.
If you are under the impression that two hundredths of a pound is an ounce, you have been doing it wrong since 1980. Perhaps if you stopped rolling your eyes you could see that.
My figures were for dry measure, by the way.