Poverty Meals

Ingredients: -1 tablespoon of olive oil -1 onion, chopped -2 cloves of garlic, minced -1 teaspoon of ground ginger -4 cups of pumpkin puree -4 cups of vegetable broth -1/2 teaspoon of ground nutmeg -1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon -Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions:

1. Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan over medium heat.
2. Add the onion and garlic and sauté until the onion is tender, about 5 minutes.
3. Add the ground ginger and cook for another minute.
4. Stir in the pumpkin puree and vegetable broth and bring to a boil.
5. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for 10 minutes.
6. Stir in the nutmeg, cinnamon, salt, and pepper.
7. Simmer for another 10 minutes.
8. Taste and adjust seasonings if needed.
9. Serve the soup warm. Enjoy!

If you’ve found knotweed growing near you it sucks, but at least there’s some food at no cost.

This recipe was given to me by a family friend and it's amazing. It makes a chili oil base that keeps for a year on the counter and you can do everything with it. I use it for my chilli to replace pure chili powder as it has more flavour.

I call it a chili oil but it's not just seasoned oil, it's definitely closer to a spice.

You will need:

• 30 grams of one kind of pepper flakes
• 30 grams of another, flaked too

The point of doing two different types of pepper is that you use a hot one, and a milder one. You don't want your oil to be entirely spicy, and so the milder pepper will give flavour instead of heat.

I like cayenne pepper for one half, and for the other half really whatever is very spicy that I can find flaked. If you don't like spice then you can use paprika and milder pepper, for example.

• 250-300 millilitres of oil of your choice
• 8 grams of salt
• 8 grams of toasted sesame seeds
• 1 clove of garlic
• a bit of black pepper, either whole or grounded (we use either differently)
• a mason jar or similar that can hold everything.

Keep in mind you will be getting ~400ml in volume at the end, I actually need to use two jars when I make this because they're too small to hold everything in just one.

Cut up the clove of garlic pre-emptively. The finer the better, you can even press it in one of those mashers.

Pour the 60g of chilli flakes in a bowl along with the garlic and salt and mix with a spoon until it's properly homogenous. We will use the sesame seeds at the very end.

Heat up the oil in a sauce pan. There's not really any suggestion here; I do it with olive oil, my friend does it with canola oil. It will change the taste but whichever oil you prefer is fine.

You can add a few peppercorns in the oil as it heats up if you want, or grind a bit of pepper on the flakes directly.

Don't bring the oil to its smoking point! This is more difficult with olive oil but basically, once it's very very hot, take it off the heat and put it back on as needed.

This is the tricky part (it's not really tricky but it requires care). Once the oil is hot, you will pour just a tiny bit of it in the bowl of chili flakes, and then stir. By "tiny bit", I mean not even enough to cover the top layer of the bowl. This prevents the garlic and flakes from burning or overcooking.

Pour a tiny bit, put the pan down, and stir with the spoon for several seconds. Be careful with oil as it's much hotter than water, it just doesn't boil at the same temperature.

Bring the oil back up to heat if needed, and then pour the same amount on the flakes again.

Essentially repeat that process until you feel there's enough oil in the bowl -- oil is unhealthy in these quantities comrades, so you should definitely cut down on it as much as possible 😉

That's why I recommend between 250ml of oil to 300ml; it will depend on your ingredients as well as just how much you want in there. If you don't have enough, you can quickly heat up some more oil as needed; the chilli isn't going anywhere. I would definitely start at 250ml and work my way up from there.

The consistency of the chilli oil that I prefer is when there is just enough of it to still be stirrable. If you don't use a lot of oil, the flakes will harden and be difficult to use.

At the end, add the sesame seeds and stir evenly again. The idea is that the sesame seeds are more sensitive to heat, and so we add them at the end to prevent them from burning.

Then wait until it cools down and transfer the contents of the bowl into the jar and close it up.

You can use this oil as is but I find that to really release all the flavours, you should mix it with mayonnaise, which is emulsified fat and thus can dissolve oil. You can probably get low-fat mayo which helps cut down on what is essentially pure calories.

That way it can also be used as a cold sauce.

It works by itself too like on pizza, or in your homemade chilli, but in those cases to me it just tastes very very spicy lol

It keeps for one year in a sealed jar on the shelf, no refrigeration required. Doing this process above lasts me months, it's very low maintenance and while 300ml of oil sounds like a lot (it is), you only eat one tea spoon at a time.

Some time back, a user posted their chilli recipe. I've had to have a few tries, but I got pretty good at it (at least good to my sensibilities).

You need:

• 1 kg ground beef, preferably reasonably fatty
• 2 onions
• a few cloves of garlic
• a bit of red wine
• and a bit of oil to start the onions and beef
• 1 bellpepper, if you want
• 1 can black beans
• 1 can kidney beans
• 1 more can of whichever beans you prefer
• 1-2 cans crushed tomatoes
• all the spices you like. I like nutmeg, marjoram, bay leaves (2), salt, pepper, oregano, and of course cumin (a lot of cumin for chilli)
• just a bit of four or five spices mix if you want to try it, it could add an interesting sweet/savoury combination, but it's very potent. Just two-three pinches should be more than enough.
• if you feel bougie, pine seeds. Yes, pine seeds.
• for the heat, I use my own chili oil which I will also post about right after this

Does this not look like a normal chilli? You're right, it's 10 times better.

What happens with the beans and meat is the fat and fibers seem to interact and create something very specific in terms of texture and flavour, which we can improve with the use of seasoning and herbs.

This makes around 2.4 kilograms of chilli which will make 6-8 portions. You can also easily freeze it, it works great.

First things first, prep time. Cut your onions in half and slice them. Dice your garlic -- the more you crush garlic, the better it gets. Cut your bellpepper in squares or triangles.

Then let's start cooking. Cook up the meat in a sliver of oil inside a very deep pan on high heat. The pan should be able to hold 5 litres in volume and you'll have to stir as you add ingredients to reduce the space they take. It definitely works in a 5 litre pan but you'll need to give it some help.

Once the meat is around 70% cooked, add the onions. Stir the meat constantly to get it cooked evenly.

Once both are cooked (meat is browned and onions get translucent), add a dash of red wine and stir until mostly evaporated.

Then, add all the cans as well as the bellpepper that you've cut up. You can also add the garlic at this stage as it cannot overcook in liquids. Stir until it forms a homogenous mix and at this point, I would wait until the content starts boiling and then reduce the heat to medium so that it keeps cooking but doesn't boil on you.

Stir until everything is even and integrated, and then add the spices and the pine seeds if you have them as well as your chili pepper. Add 2 bay leaves and don't forget to remove them later (though fun fact, you can eat bay leaves obviously and if you crush them very finely, you can just leave them in the chilli. They taste good).

If you need more liquid, add another can of tomatoes. Chilli is not a soup, the point of the water content (from the can of tomatoes) is that it helps dissolve the spices and cook everything evenly. You really don't need a lot of liquid.

Once you've stirred enough, taste it and adjust spices as needed. Honestly you can go ahead with the seasoning, you have 2 and a half kilos of chilli in there. I find I prefer salted chilli, it gives it a more "natural" flavour.

And that's it. Leave it on low-medium heat for 45 minutes or more (just be careful about boiling off all the water, you still want just a bit). Afterwards, let it cool down to room temperature, portion your chilli in containers and freeze them!

My girlfriend and I on average spend 30-40 euro's a week on groceries. This is below half of what the country's average weekly shopping budget is for 2 people.

Are my girlfriend and I frugal? No. We're also not even broke or anything. We just happen to have found a 'smart' way of doing groceries.

The best thing we changed in our routine is to plan our meals for the entire week. On monday we do the grocery shopping and we have a meal plan for every day of the week. This helps us to have a clear overview of what we need to buy and also lets us combine ingredients for multiple days. It also helps to buy everything at once, compared to daily grocery shopping. I've found that we were spending a lot more when we did daily groceries, oftentimes at least doubling our current weekly budget.

We also buy things in bulk. When we buy rice, we will buy a big bag of at least 2kgs which will last us weeks. It might seem excessive to buy large quantities of stuff if you don't know what you will eat for the next few weeks, but in my experience it's far cheaper than buying new things every week, in smaller sizes.

Eat green. Going vegetarian or even vegan can be a touchy subject in ML circles, as some comrades find it very privileged to be able to go vega(n). If your idea of vega(n) is the Wholefoods Californian Hipster type, then you might be right. But a lot of cultures around the world are already partly or completely vega(n) and there's a lot of things we can learn from their cuisines. Eating meat in my eyes is a privilege and meat in The West is heavily subsidized to make it cheaper than it should be. Still, cutting meat out of my diet greatly lowered my weekly spendings on food. Meat is expensive, and the alternatives (lentils, beans, soy, tofu, seitan etc) are almost always far cheaper and probably healthier. Going vega(n) is not about changing the piece of meat on your plate for a plant based meat option, it's about changing your entire view on your diet and being open to other cultures and their cuisines.

Routine. I have accepted a routine for my breakfast and lunch which I rarely change. I have been eating the same things for breakfast and lunch for more than a year now. It is nutritious and helps me with my gym life, and it's cheap. If you find meals that work for you, sticking to it can really help you with reducing costs. My breakfast and lunch combo costs me 1.50-2 euro's a day max, and I never get tired of it. Having this routine not only saved me money, it saved me time and it allowed me to have a healthy base to build upon. I also don't have to think about what to eat that much.

Discount shopping. Supermarkets around here have weekly discounts that change every week. It's a good strategy to look what will be in the discount section for the next week and to add it to your meal plan. It can save you multiple euro's each week.

Don't buy brands. Another really big thing that helped me cut spending is to stop buying brands and focus on the cheapest option in the store. I used to drink lots of soda, mostly name brand, and that alone takes up a big part of your budget. I only drink water or sometimes lemonade these days, but if you have to drink soda, buy the cheapest option. The difference in taste is often minimal and your just paying for the name anyway. This goes for a lot of things. Store brand stuff is oftentimes as good as the name brand one, but can be several euro's cheaper.

Be consistent, not perfect. Don't be too hard on yourself if things don't always work out. But be consistent. Have a plan and stick to it for at least 80% of the time. Find out how much money you can spend on food and how much you're willing to spend. And stick to it. Withdraw the weekly amount in cash if you have to, so you can physically see what you have left to spend. But stick to it. That's the important part.

I love chili. Most of the ingredients are super cheap. Can be omnivorous, vegetarian, or vegan. There's like 1,000 varieties. If you eat meat it extends that meat to save on cost. If you don't...well it still extends your meat alternatives to also save on cost. lol. Is an easy vector to add in other protein sources with minimal impact to flavor. And you can make a shit load of it in one big go and then just live off of it for a week or so.

I'll make like 4-5 gallons of chili, freeze 2/3 of it in smaller bowls, then eat chili for a whole damn week. Then have like 2-3 days of chili for the next few weeks. Then do it all over again. Each time I try a change or two to my recipe and write it all down. I got like 5 main recipes now. Some use more store bought ingredients, some use almost entirely home grown tomato products. Like homemade tomato paste etc. Those recipes beat the dogshit out of the store bought recipes. All of them include fermented beans.

I got some recipes that, while not giving away my secret ingredients, I will share the basics if anyone is interested? I personally do include meat in my chili. If there are those who wish to take any of my recipes and offer meatless alternatives that would be awesome. Like tofu chili or something idk

I like hot food a lot more than cold, so I usually toast the bread and microwave the ham and cheese separately from the bread and then put it together. It tastes so good when you make it warm and not cold in the middle or soggy bread.

So TVP is sometimes known as hamburger helper, meat extender, or meatless crumbles and if you've ever eaten a cafeteria meal at school or had a processed meal which included ground beef then you've almost definitely eaten TVP before. (Back when there was the European horse meat scandal and the EU was testing meat products for horse, they discovered that one particular brand of meat pie on sale there actually contained zero meat products — it was all TVP!)

TVP, or Textured Vegetable Protein, is made from soybeans, and it's the leftovers from soy oil pressing which then undergoes some processing before being extruded into different shapes.

Nutritionally it's virtually fat-free and mostly protein when dried. When rehydrated it has a protein content comparable to ground beef.

TVP is ideal because you can store it dried for a year (or more - I have and it's no big deal), you can leave it in your cupboard and it doesn't take up too much space, and it's perfect for those times in between paychecks where the fridge is bare and the cupboard isn't looking much better. TVP goes particularly well in chili, bolognese, and other sauce-heavy dishes, which is great because all you need is some rice or pasta, a tin of tomatoes, and a few spices before you have yourself a hearty and nutritious meal on the cheap.

Depending on how it's cooked, TVP rehydrates at around a 2:1 ratio, meaning that if you buy 5 ounces of TVP you effectively have a pound of "meat" waiting to happen so you can really stretch your money using this stuff, and that's exactly why it gets used in so many processed foods.

I made a post here about how to get the best texture out of TVP which is good for using in recipes that feature ground meat as the star of the dish such as Keema Mattar, and I will make a post about how to flavor TVP soon too, but in the meantime you can simply grab a handful or two of TVP, shake off the dust using a sieve, and throw it in a dish when you are frying your ground meat (for best results) or you can even add it towards the end of cooking when you're making something like a bolognese, just remember to allow it a few minutes to rehydrate in the sauce before serving. If you are new to eating it, try adding TVP at up to a 50:50 ratio your meat — you probably won't even notice it's there.

So there you have it: TVP is cheap, healthy, simple, long-life, high protein, and easier to use than ground beef so I'd strongly recommend giving it a try to anyone, rich or poor. (Plus it's more environmentally friendly than eating meat to boot!)

I get lots of dry good from the food bank, which works out okay because at least for now I have access to a stove. I was completely out of what I'd normally eat the other day so I threw together probably the simplest split pea soup possible.

Ingredients

• 16oz dry peas (I think that would be about 2 1/2 cups?)
• 8 cups water or broth
• literally any other vegetables and/or meats and/or protein you have to hand
• Spices to taste

Rinse the peas and pick out any stones. Put the peas and water in a big pot on the stove or over a fire, bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to low and simmer for about an hour and a half to two hours, stirring occasionally and being mindful of scorching the bottom of the pot.

Add any and all extras, including spices, after it's done cooking.

I got away with adding a can of green beans and seasoning with salt, pepper, turmeric, paprika, and a few other random spices I had access to. Basil, parsley, and thyme also make for a pleasing combo.

16oz peas and 8 cups of water made about 4-5 days worth of lunch for me. This is a pretty basic meal, but it's filling and hearty. Peas are high in protein and will carry you through times when you haven't got much else.

Carrots and potatoes always go well in split pea soup, and if you add some meat on the bone at the start you can make it into a hearty broth as well.

Vegans I have known have added coconut milk for added body and flavor. If you add coconut milk and curry spices you'd end up with a pretty tasty curry-like dish that could also go really well with rice.

what i like to do is chop up half a packet of bacon and fry until crispy, at the same time i also boil 50-100 grams of farfalle and i add it to the pan with the bacon. after that i add a dollop of french cream and lots of freshly ground black pepper. this meal doesn't need salt since it already comes with the pasta and bacon. i flush it down with some vitamin supplements and omega 3 pills. in my second meal i eat about 150 grams of oatmeal cookies, these give me good amount of fiber and more energy.

in my country Finland this meal is extremely cheap and feeds you well since it has lots of calories and fiber. two weeks worth of this stuff for one person is around 30 euros if you're buying from lidl.

don't be worried about the amount of grease. i have lost lots of weight while in this diet and i haven't got any health complications from it.