I've got a fair few, but I'm starting to get bored of them because most of them have a base of garlic, onion, and canned tomatoes.
That said, I just had chipotle shakshuka. It was pretty solid.
come on lad every comrade must learn to cook it's dead easy
ye cannot trust premade stuff in this world it's full of additives and god knows what
also for blokes especially if you're a male leftist it's your duty not to be a useless culinary partner lest ye succumb to traditional gender roles
i have a different problem. nobody in the house knows how to cook except me
You’re the person I’m gonna reply to itt with links to good and cheap. It’s a cookbook that assumes little to no equipment and provides a buying guide and meals that meet the $4 per day per person food stamp food allowance.
mm I love the curry bricks especially the katsu ones but I've never thought of doing it like a pot meal before
big fan of this I love coming back for fourths
Yesss that's a secret low-key banger
step up from that is authentic Italian carbonara... Parmesan, garlic, egg yolk, pancetta, pasta. So simple.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx317Z-FVhw
if you're looking for inspiration, I've wanted to try this vegetarian carbonara for a while now. It looks goddamn incredible
My wife likes making potato tacos. Its just mashed potatoes in tortillas and you fry it in a pan with some oil. Throw on some hot sauce and they are great.
Dump a can of rinsed chickpeas onto a plate, add salt, garlic powder, and paprika, and microwave for ~5 minutes. In the meantime, skin and dice a big cucumber and dice a Roma tomato and an onion and add to a salad bowl. Then add some chopped kalamata olives to your own taste. Add a half of a lemons worth of lemon juice and ~4 tablespoons of olive oil to a container and stir to combine with a pinch of salt and fresh cracked pepper. Combine everything in the salad bowl. I eat this with rice I cook with a bit of turmeric, salt, and two cloves of garlic. It's pretty tasty, not a lot of protein but you can add more chickpeas to the ratio to dial that in. And it's vegan
hahaha fuck yeah I love roasted chickpeas idk how I never considered I can just microwave them if I need them quicker than the oven can do it
It works really well, but if you let it go for too long then they pop. That happens around the 5:30 mark in my microwave but YMMV
I really really recommend getting a pressure cooker to cut down on bean costs! Around me, beans are about $1.30 for a 16 oz. can and dry beans go for about that much per pound, with a pound of dry beans coming out to about 8 cans. I usually make a pound every two weeks and put half in the freezer, and scoop the other half as needed. Most beans cook from dry in 40-50 minutes, so most of the active time is just picking spices, bagging, and cleaning.
My favorite cheap meal is black bean tostada's
I get a big thing of corn tortillas from the store, fry them up in a little oil until they're crisp, put them in an airtight container with some paper towels and they stay good for a long time
Then I just take a big can of black beans, put them in a pot with some seasonings (usually some garlic, cumin and chipotle, but when I'm really tired, I just put generic taco seasoning) and mush it into a fine paste while I heat it up
Then you just assemble it on the tortillas, add whatever fixings you want and eat it
It's cheap, it's filling, it tastes good and you usually end up with plenty of leftovers for the next couple of days
It was likely the final straw that broke my gallbladder back in the day, but you can make some solid curry with a scoop of curry paste, a cup of coconut cream, simmered with some onions and potatoes and thrown on top of some white rice. Go to an Asian market and you can make a cheap meal that comes out to under $8 when it's all priced up. Avoid supermarkets, as they jack up prices on "ethnic" food.
The combination of beans and rice is pretty much a peasant food staple around the world and I'd recommend getting into that because you can make some really good variations on this, especially if you have a few spices on hand, and I'd recommend cooking a batch and freezing the bean portions so you have ready meals on hand to reach for when you're tempted to order takeout:
Mexican black beans and rice makes for a great base for burrito bowls, just add some cilantro, diced tomato, pickled onions (or raw), sour cream, avocado, roasted poblano peppers, carrot, corn, lettuce etc.
India has a huge array of curried beans/lentils and I'm partial to Mughal cuisine so here's one of my favourite websites for this style of cooking:
https://www.spiceupthecurry.com/category/dals-beans/
Channa masala, palak chole, dal tarka, rajma masala, and dal makhani are some of the absolute favourites. Although it can be expensive buying the spices, if you buy them in a larger quantity from an indian grocer it will be more economical in the long run and once you have your array of spices you'll be set for a long time.
Chinese food is really adaptable and if you can get fresh green beans or frozen soy beans and you're comfortable with a wok, you can make lots of dishes. Just adapt the sauce to what you're making. Some of my Chinese favourites are Yu Xiang-style stir frys and green beans in XO sauce (you can get vegan XO sauce if you hunt for it.)
Here's a recipe for Yu Xiang eggplant that can be adapted to green beans or soy beans (extra points if you throw some tofu in):
https://www.seriouseats.com/sichuan-braised-eggplant-vegan-experience-food-lab-recipe
(Kenji has a video of how to prepare this on YouTube as well.)
Note that with stir frys, you can add in other vegetables too - pretty much whatever you have on hand.
I'd also recommend buying dried TVP mince. You can cut your ground beef with it 50/50 and you won't even notice or, if you want to go all the way with it, here's how to prepare TVP so that it is very close to actual ground beef. There's additional info about adjusting this to be vegan but you can rehydrate your TVP in beef broth if you aren't vegan/vegetarian.
mm yeah I'm already a beanlord and I love a daal but those all look great I had no structure to mine it was just meal + bean/pea of some kind
- Show
Remember that when you're making a dal you can always fry some chunks of eggplant or zucchini (or other things like squash or potato) and add them in so you're getting extra veggies. Or if you're tired, even a few handfuls of frozen peas at the end of cooking a plain dal goes really well too.
Actually making that image reminded me of one of my favourite desserts which happens to be beans and rice lol.
This is something that is probably more to your taste if you appreciate Asian style sweet bean desserts so you might not love it but there's this Vietnamese dish called Che Dau Trang which is black eyed peas and sticky rice with coconut milk.
Here's one recipe for it but if you're making it on the cheap just use padan essence. I tend to add sugar to the beans and rice and skip the coconut sauce step, opting to pour unsweetened coconut cream over the rice instead because it's simpler and just as good.
Viets eat this hot which is nice in winter but tbh I really enjoy the dish at least as much when it's cold, straight out of the fridge.
Can of black beans rinsed, put in bowl, nuked in microwave. add two scoops of salsa. Healthy 450 cal lunch :bean
Also leguming hard, but split pea and condiment soup is one of my go-to almost instant meals. I just put about a half pound of peas in my (important!) InstaPot along with some jam, mustard, spices, oil, boullion, and leftover tomato sauce if I have some. Currently, I have a bunch of prepared mirepoix in my freezer than I sautee first, but it isn't the main part. Sometimes I thicken it with flour or add whatever veggies are about to go bad. It make about 4 decent portions, and scales very well!
Mujaddarah! Easy to make it in bulk, cheap ass ingredients, and nutritious as hell. At the base, it is just lentils, onions, cumin, rice and oil. Just make sure you really fry those onions till they are crispy. I also like making a mint yogurt to serve with it. That is, just mint, (vegan, for me) yogurt, and olive oil blended together with some salt.
Daal is also easy and lentil based, as well as chana masala, which is chickpeas.
Vegan yogurt? I didn't know that was a thing. What's it made out of?
Usually it's cashew based! I make my own in a blender. I know you can make it from soy as well, and that is quite good.
Pretty basic breakfast but, Tofu and soy chorizo scramble, spice as desired (I do garlic salt, turmeric and a mushroom powder msg replacement). Top that baby up with some fresh cilantro and/or hot sauce. If you want to get fancy, saute some peppers, onions and mushroom before you throw the tofu in. I eat this for breakfast basically everyday.
Interesting choice going for tofu as well as a meat option, ya don't see that often
Meat substitute, but yeah. It's got the protein that the swoletariat craves.
Cannelini bean and kale soup. Chuck onions, garlic, and olive oil into a large pot, fry till fragrant, then toss in beans, stew for a few hours till the beans are just about to fall apart, toss in some chopped up kale, and serve with crusty bread. Incredible on a cold day. I also use chickenless stock when i make it, and add a dash of white wine right at the end. Plus plenty of salt and pepper.
