I’m sad that this is worth mentioning. But if you are dealing with hunger amid threats to SNAP benefits, rice and beans are very cheap per meal and can be bought in bulk. Here’s some tricks I’ve learned:
If you get dried beans, make sure you follow the directions to pre-soak them. Canned beans are easier to prepare, just dump in near the end of cooking to heat them up. Dried lentils don’t need to be pre-soaked, but I prefer to cook them separately and drain the water they boil in.
Brown rice, barley, or other whole grains have much more protein than white rice and I find them more filling. Whole grains take longer to cook than white grains.
Frying diced onions in the pot before adding the grains and water is an easy way to kick the flavor up a notch. Use a generous amount of cooking oil (light olive oil is healthiest) for cost effective calories and help making the meal more filling.
Big carrots or celery in bulk are pretty cheap too. I like to dice carrots by partially cutting length wise into quarters, but leave the small end intact to keep the carrot together to make it easier to dice down the side. Add them to the same pot as the grains after the grains start to soften. Beets are also great; skin and cube then boil separately until soft. Change up your veggie to get a mix of vitamins
Get some bulk garlic powder, hot sauce, paprika, cumin, crushed red pepper, black pepper, etc. Season and salt the pot to taste.
You’ll only need 1-2 pots and a cutting knife/board for veggies.
I recommend Harvard’s Nutrition Source for science-based nutrition information and they have some recipes too
Edit: discussing big changes in diet with a primary care doctor or registered dietician is generally a good idea.
Probiotic supplements may help with gas.
As a bonus this sort of meal has a very small environmental footprint.
It’s the return of depression meals, 1930s style
Unlike my dumbass family back then I’m not afraid of spicing my rice and beans like people with melanin
I can’t imagine spices were exactly cheap. When you’re at the point of making water pie I’m gunna guess that spices are an easy enough thing to let go of.
I’m not talking spices from around the globe or some shit. I’m talking jalapenos, serranos, chipotles…
Ya know, cheap staple crops from my region of the world that grow like weeds and add flavor for cheap.
Ok, with as little intended rudeness as possible: Spicing is a weird word, and usualy for clarity anything to do with heat would be “spicing” or “making spicy”.
And yea those are definitely not too expensive at all. I really enjoy using spiciness as a way to add a a lot of depth basically for free. Everything is better with some red pepper flakes.
Frankly I disagree, chili powder and paprika are spices commonly sold as spices and are just dried then crushed chilies. It’s just a preservation method and in Asia chilies are preserved in chili oils so not technically a spice but is used for flavor like a spice.
Really the only problem here is that the language we are using is so fucking bad at describing flavor and cooking.
I mean, a little yes but if you’re specifically talking hot peppers, and you said that you were, then the bulk of what they bring to the table is heat. Flavour for sure a little, but I wouldn’t consider them spices.
I can agree that the language is a little vague. Like at what point does ginger become a spice and not a normal ingredient? Only when it’s dried and powdered?
I’m sorry but if you think chilies only add a little flavor there’s no point continuing this. Have a good one.
Can anyone recommend an economical and tasty gruel brand?
Also a very underrated flavoring that’s unjustly stigmatized because of racism is MSG. You can get really big bags of them for super cheap, and it’s an easy way to make any meal taste savory.
MSG is my secret weapon for making my cooking better than his mother’s.
MSG has been a godsend in the kitchen for us. It just makes everything taste better!
It stands for Magical Savory Goodness
You get it! My wife and I use the term “the sacred MeSsaGe”
To reduce gas with beans:
- soak with baking soda (1tsp per cup of beans)
- before cooking boil some water and in a bowl cover the beans with the boiled water, after 5 minutes drain and wash them and throw them in to whatever you are cooking
- ferment the beans, best results but more work
Also remember that as your body gets used to it, the gas is reduced.
And NGL everyone farts, you’re fine. Just use common etiquette.
Rice, oil, little tomato paste or *sauce, pinch of sugar, whatever spices you have -> mexican rice
Large skillet of cooked rice, 1 scrambled egg, salt. Stir egg in to rice over heat and mix until cooked. Eggs and rice. Decent flavor, super filling, reheats well.
Rice, soaked black or soaked red beans, Filé powder, chilli powder, salt. cook like it’s just rice. red/black beans and rice, heartly flavor, super filling.
1 single sausage patty cooked and chopped super fine, file powder, skillet of cooked rice, salt - > dirty rice.
1 serving of cheap uncooked spaghetti broken into 1/2 inch pieces, 3C uncooked rice, 2 tlbs of high heat oil, stir until pasta browns a bit, water barely to cover, stir in salt, dry italian herbs, butter if you have it, tight lid. stir occasionally, DIY Rice-A-Roni.
Throw a single uncooked chicken wing in a large pot of uncooked rice and water, cook normally. it will flavor the rice and you can still eat the wing or tear the meat off into the pot.
Also, for what it’s worth, hot sauce also makes you feel way more full/less hungry. If you need an addition.
If there’s science for this you have I’d love to see it. I’m the exact opposite. Some good hot sauce on beans and rice and I eat twice as much it’s so good.
a relatively cheap NON-VEGE way to add protein to this base is pork butt/shoulder (same thing) cooked slow all day, either slow cooker or oven at 250F. Its a cheaper cut of meat and one of them is enough to add protein to like 6 servings or rice+beans. Also, bone-in skin-on chicken thighs are great and less expensive- if you render some of the chicken fat out in your cooking vessel before cooking the rice and beans it is a big flavor boost.
Don’t “skin” beets with a vegetable peeler. Blanch them and slide them out of their skins. It sounds like more work, but it’s so much less work.
Pro-tip: If you have an Instant Pot, you throw the beets in there and pressure cook them for 20 minutes. Slow release and then let them cool a bit. The peels come right off and they are cooked perfectly. No need for any spices at all.
Great if you want steamed beets. You can just blanch them if you want them roasted.
Celery is good for an additive for flavoring, but has near zero nutrition as it has such a low caloric amount. Chewing on celery burns more calories than intake.
That’s why you put peanut butter on it
Celery has vitamins which is helpful
lentils in particular can be mixed with rice and cooked up right in a rice cooker. easiest meal to make.
Lentils are another good legume. Look up a daal recipe for any lentil you find, and basmati rice
I’ve been making a Lebanese dish. It’s lentils mixed with rice and sautéed onions. Top it off with a dollop of sour cream.
That sounds pretty good
I’m anaphylactic to lentils and peanuts, and less allergic to other legumes too. If I ever became vegetarian or vegan I think I’d starve to death.
I’m not currently requiring budget protein (I’m still poor-ish but not as bad as some) but my bills are about to skyrocket soon (need to upsize apartment, looking at around ~$600 increase per month) so I might need to look at budget options soon.
Edit: TIL soy is a legume lol.
There are some good soy protein options too. Tofu can be cooked a bunch of different ways, and there’s tempeh which is similar but different. One of the lesser knowns is TVP or textured vegetable protein, which is soy, but comes in different forms like mince or chunks (like ground beef). Its pretty cheap (especially in bulk), shelf stable and has good protein.
Soy is also a legume.
TIL lol. Thinking more deeply about that I should have guessed
Basmati is usually quite expensive, no?
TBH any white rice would work. Basmati is generally $2-3/kg or $1.50/kg if you buy a big bag. (Canadian Dollars)
How do you make the cheaper brown ones not super bitter?
Something like this. Spices, lentils, tomatoes.
Skip the olive oil. If you’re buying it on a beans and rice budget, its gonna be fake olive oil anyway. Just use corn/canola/veg oil.
Fortified short grain white rice… hit up Costco or Sam’s, or your local Asian market, and you can score a 20 lb bag for like $15 which comes out to literally a few cents per meal. (well… pre-tariffs at least… nowadays idk)
From there, add beans, or eggs, or chicken broth, or literally almost anything else: shit off the clearance wrack, from the food pantry, w/e. If it’s a meat or veggie, it’ll go with rice. In the case of the pantry, if you’re not actually sure what it is, it’ll still probably go with rice. Got a bag of spicy cheetos you forgot to close and now it’s all stale? Don’t throw that shit away, smash it up and throw it in with your next batch of rice - now it’s spicy! (I’ve done it - texture’s a little weird, but otherwise came out better than expected). Rice is ridiculously versatile.
Disregard the hate for white rice being nutritionless junkfood - it is, but when money’s that tight, you don’t give a fuck. The fortified rice mitigates that a bit, and in my experience is usually cheaper. It’s a starting point: add what you can to make it less shit; and even if it’s a meal of just straight rice, that’s still better than an empty stomach.
It’s a bit of a misunderstanding to think white rice is only “nutritionless junkfood”. As you said the fortification does make it kind of like a multivitamin in addition to providing decent macros. The main issue is the loss of fiber and other nutrients bound up with it. This can be mitigated though. If you include other high fiber foods like broccoli, legumes, and/or other vegetables in the same meal it will balance the way the rice digests a little and reduce the glycemic load. Another thing you can do is cook, then chill, then reheat the rice - this will cause resistant starches to form, which have somewhat similar properties to fiber and also are good for our gut microbiome.
Your basic rice jazzes up well, too. Scoop of soup stock, scoop of turmeric, scoop of cumin, can of peas, cook it all together in the instant pot or rice cooker. Soy sauce and a raw egg, whip it together.
Cooked plain rice freezes well too. I cook a big batch and use a small bowl to split it into individual portions. I wrap those in a little plastic wrap, and freeze it. ~2 mins in the microwave (reusing the wrap as a cover for the bowl) and I’ve got almost-as-good-as-fresh rice.
Careful with reheating rice. If you immediately freeze it or throw it in the fridge right after cooking you’ll (probably) be fine but cooked rice that has been sitting at room temperature for a couple hours can become a breeding ground for bacteria.
https://rightasrain.uwmedicine.org/body/food/leftover-rice-bacillus-cereus-food-poisoning
Yes, and to be clear, a huge part of the risk is that even after heated, the bacteria will die but leave behind toxins that will make you very sick. This Chubbyemu video (a doctor that makes videos covering odd, scary, or “interesting” medical cases) is about the same bacteria and the resulting death from it. While death seems to be pretty rare, it will still make you very sick.
Yeah, it’s not a great idea to leave it out for hours and hours; I usually portion and freeze a half hour or so after cooking – it’s usually cooled off enough that I can handle it by then.
To each their own. Brown rice comes in 20lbs bags too. The biggest benefit in my opinion is brown rice keeps me feeling fuller longer.
totally agree on chicken broth adding that extra something
Imagine living in a country with 900+ billionaires, with growing tendency, where regular people are discussing about the best ways not to starve.
Not thar it’s much better where I live, but damn, what the hell is wrong with this world?
The problem is less that people can’t afford to eat, it’s that they’ve been alienated from their food and don’t know what to do to feed themselves without being exploited by gouging opportunists.
The elite have always been vampires living on the blood of us peons… it feels new to us because we are living it now, but history shows its been this way a long time, and it was probably the same in prerecorded history too… we, as humans tend to suck…
part of it is that the working class, poor to people who incorrectly think they’re middle class included, basically everyone who is not ownership class (where owning things is the primary means of making them money), utterly fail to organize, and sometimes actively work against their own interests (like the “lets make a third party!” morons, the “I am morally superior for not voting” morons, and or course the actively malicious “I let the billionaires tell me that them fucking me was actually brown people’s fault” morons.
I hate the use of working class that excludes front line workers who very much still work for a living. Why call it working class if it’s just a fancy name for lower class instead of fully including all workers?
???
I certainly include them in my definition.
I took. > Incorrectly think they’re middle class
As to assume you didn’t. But clearly my assumption was wrong
What I was meaning to say is that people who are working class think that they are middle class because they aren’t destitute, yet they have no significant assets, and could not survive an extreme financial event.
I just feel that politicians use middle class as a weapon where when they talk about policies benefitting the middle class they often benefit people far richer than the median but people think they mean them.
Yup. Most people think they’re middle class. Not many actually are
As the saying goes, “most of the working class are just temporarily embarrassed millionaires”
I don’t even think they think this. I think its small potatoes compared to the ones who are convinced that skin colour is like shirt colour in middle school sports, and that means they’re all on one team and the ones who don’t think that are traitors.
Rice is way cheaper.
What is this po ta toes of which you speak?
