My family was poor, but my mom always had a hot meal for dinner, anything from fried bologna and eggs, spam and eggs, meatloaf, greenbeans and mashed taters, and on Fridays it was always bread pudding made from the leftover bread from the past week. Please list your cheap but delicious meals your mom served you. As the economy falters many of us will be serving those tasty meals of the past.
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (160)
sorted by:
Beef is really expensive in the country I live in. No meatloaf for me. Lots of cheap ground pork here though. I wonder if that would work well enough.
A pound of ground beef (they sell it in roughly 200g packs here) ends up being like ten bucks.
I've been trying to eat cheaply lately because of income problems, mostly due to pureblood status. I'm fine, I have savings, I just don't want to go through much of that if I don't need to.
I've been finding that with some basic vegetables, pasta, beans, cheap canned fish and stuff like that, you can do a lot.
Look up Tuna fritters. Turn a can of tuna into a hamburger patty of sorts that's actually really nice.
A can of mackerel into a pot of soup comes out pretty nice. Dump some potatoes in there and it's very filling. You can buy a bag of dried beans really cheaply here. You can add those to anything for some protein too
I keep meaning to cook up some "Hoover stew" which is supposedly what they gave out at soup kitchens during the Great Depression, and looks like with a little seasoning and maybe an extra vegetable or two would be some pretty good stuff.
What's really cheap and what the locals eat is rice. I haven't gotten into that much yet, but if I wanted to follow the local diet instead of a roughly American one that would be the way to go.
Pizza is really easy and fun to make from scratch at home. The dough is flour, and a little salt and sugar. Add yeast with warm water. Mix.
I have trouble finding appropriate toppings here... Can't find pepperoni. I can do a Hawaiian pretty easily though.
A few rings of pineapple and two or three slices of ham and it's already overflowing with toppings.. you barely need anything to put on a pizza.
Cheese is the expensive part, but that's not a big deal.
Anyway... I enjoy cooking and experimenting. I didn't do it a lot because I always had people taking care of me.
There are YouTube videos where people take challenges like eating on one dollar/pound per day, and end up making some pretty decent looking stuff.
The limitation is what makes it interesting to me.
Restaurants and fancy stuff are out there if need be. But it's been very enjoyable to "scrimp and save" so far.
I now always make meatloaf with sausage. Sausage, some eggs, some quick brown rice, salt pepper garlic powder minced onions mustard, bake, last 10-15 minutes top with canned tomato sauce mixed with mustard and a little sweetener