what are /ck's best ways to save money on food
i make a decent living but i have expensive hobbies so i like to stretch my food budget out and still eat well
i buy in bulk and can my own food in season
i'd like to grow my own food but i live in an apartment with no yard and bad natural light
>>7489867
Dry beans such as pinto are the most imperushable and inexpensive sustenance period. Best method of cooling then is an effortless approach featuring la crock pot. Once made they can be seasoned and stewed with beef and tomato sauce for chili. Smashed into refried beans for burritos. Served in a bowl with a hunk of cornbread like the hillbillies do. There's beans n rice. Your ghetto ass don't have to starve.
The best advice I can give is to learn where and when to shop, when to sacrifice quality for lower price and when to stick to your guns and buy the costlier item, which foods are economic to make at home and which aren't, seldom to never buy canned beans (especially not lentils)* and how to use a freezer.
>* 1lb bags of dry beans cost anywhere between 99¢ - $1.49 here and can cook up into 28oz or so of beans on average (lentils cook up to 32oz!), while 14-15oz tins of beans cost the same price, meaning you're paying $1.49 for the equivalent of a half pound of dry beans
The only time you should be canned beans is if they're priced under 50¢ per 14oz can.
>>7489905
i buy dry beans and can them myself.. it's only slightly more work than cooking a big batch and i get the convenience of canned without the cost and preservatives
Fun fact about dry beans: they're not just a meal, they're a crop! After the smoke clears and the dust settles, you can pull through the rebuilding phase of the zombie apocalypse planting what's left of your cache, thereby multiplying it.
Beans are pretty tight nutritionally, too. Featuring or protein and carbs, iron etc. Naturally you will use a price of ham of bacon to season so there is your fat if desired.
>>7489867
What are your expensive hobbies?
I feel we may well be in the same boat.
>>7489913
I cook them from dry in my pressure cooker (which you obviously have if you're canning things) a half pound at a time and fridge them. Said half pound lasts me about a week.
And now, I just realised that I go through about 25lbs of beans of various sorts each year. That's a lot.
>>7489867
get a whole ribeye and cut your own steaks, do the same with tenderloin for filet, stuffs still a lil pricey but way cheaper than buying it in the grocery store as steaks
>>7489938
i have 4 motorcycles and i am squirreling away all my extra cash to buy a few acres of land
>>7489867
onion soup. buy a large bag of onions and pick up some beef broth or bouillon or even beef ramen packets, anything like that works. grapeseed oil is my favorite to sautee the onions in, but you can even use butter if you are poor enough. you then boil water and add the beef juices and throw in the sauteed onions. let it simmer for a few minutes, then serve with a slice of havardi on top. if you cant afford cheese, serve without. gives you your sodium and veggie load, at least for a little bit. you can also add celery to the soup if you want more cheap nutrition.
>>7489915
>zombie apocalypse
hey reddit
>>7489913
I don't bother with canning, just cook em straight from dry whenever I feel like beens, I mean sure it takes a couple three four hours but it's not like I can't do other shit while it's goin
>>7489956 brotip for when you get your land, if you do a few improvements like put in a well and electricity, even if you're not planning to live there, I believe just that would qualify you for a homestead exemption which would help you at tax time
>>7489867
get a job as a chef. smoke all day then just drink booze when you get home. zero money spent on food
>>7489905
>Comparing cost of beans by weight
God, this is so American it hurts. All you have to do is compare the calories per unit of weight to calculate how much of it is still beans (which can vary depending on method)
>>7489970
>buying broth
for a little work you can make your own for way cheap, talk to the butcher at the grocery store or if you have an actual butcher even better, you can usually get bones from them for free/cheap and make stock from that
>>7489974
Do I belong on Reddit because of that? Maybe I'll visit the play store later...
>>7489976
>hours
>to cook beans
I wanna know what magical world everyone on /ck/ lives in where beans take hours to cook from dry. It takes me a little over one hour.
>>7489986
i usually just use leftover bones from buying beef in bulk from a local rancher. i pick up a quarter of a cow and find myself supplied with steaks, roasts, and ground beef for months at a time. bones are included, no extra cost.
>>7489992
you use a pressure cooker or do you just like firm beans? or are you a soakfag?
>>7489992
>not slow cooking beans for the ultimate experience
i like being able to put em on when i leave for work and come home to a batch of hot soft steamy beans, ready to eat.
>>7489994
do you butcher it yourself? what quarter?
>>7490004
Slow cooking beans is a good way to kill yourself
>>7490007
i buy it from my rancher butchered. i buy chuck, sirloin, tenderloin, and round. sometimes i spoil myself and buy flank to make fajitas.
>>7489985
Here's your reply. That's what you wanted, right? To get replies in the hopes of derailing a good thread with useless, unhelpful posts and baseless accusations, yeah? Also, see >>7489942 (my other post ITT) and tell me why you're wrong. I'll wait. :-)
>>7489986
Be sure to tell Anon that he needs to specify that they're meant as soup bones lest he gets scrap bones that have touched the floor and shit like that. Local supermarkets around here sell chicken backs for 39¢/lb, which is really rather nice for stock. A dollar worth of backs makes a litre/quart of stock. Beef knees and pork tails for stock making are a bit costlier, 89¢ and 59¢, respectively.
Anybody eat anything other than beans for a healthy diet, or have I stepped into the hobo community?
>>7490020
>Accusing others of baiting
>:-)
wew
>>7490020
im that anon. as i said here >>7490019 i ask for the bones and get em with my mass order of beef. i know my local rancher fairly well, as she and my mom worked together at a point. i trust that she wont give me floor bones, and she washes them off and vacuum packages them beforehand anyway.
>>7490027
why you hatin on beans? it's not so much a hobo thing as the fact that op asked for cheap options
>>7490027
beans and corn can comprise of an inexpensive diet with all the proteins and carbohydrates you need to survive. add some spinach and bananas in there and you have yourself a solid diet.
>>7490037
Wheat is a lot cheaper in most of the West
>>7490044
brotip: produce is usually dirt cheap at the mexican grocery
>>7490027
My life is pinto beans. love those things.
>>7490044
i hate bananas
i drink gerolsteiner for potassium
>>7490049
can you even find whole wheat as opposed to flour easily? do you have any recipes for using wheat? bout the only thing I know to do with whole grains is barley soup which is admittedly very good
>>7490055
>hating bananas
what planet are you from? bananas are god-tier. one before and one after a hard workout ensures maximum energy and assists in gains. plus, banana bread exists.
>>7489996
The only beans I soak are garbanzos.
I use a pressure cooker now, but before I did, it only took me an 1¼-1½hours to cook up a pot of beans. They were always nicely softened.
They're perfectly edible at that point, but if I'm making pottage or beans and pasta or something like that, I boil them longer or, more aptly, a second time.
>>7490068
I usually slow cook mine and reduce the liquid a couple of times. use chicken broth and beer for the liquid
>>7490061
i know it's weird.. i'm not even a food autist
banana's are literally the only food i hate
>>7490052
Asian ones, too. Because there's a lot less shrinkage from produce going off because Ricers and Beaners actually buy and eat lots of veg. Ever notice how everyone at the Beaner/Ricer stores has a cart half full of vegetables?
Anyway, shrinkage inflates costs. It's the same reason why bulk purchasing is cheaper than buying in smaller amounts.
>>7490053
If'n ya live near a Save A Lot, maybe yours sells 4lb bags of mixed pinto and kidney beans for under $3 like the ones in my area do. They also sell 200g/7oz bags of Mexican pasta for 25¢ each. Pasta and beans, mofo. Cheap, filling and nutritious.
>>7490049
Not around here it isn't. Madame Gougousse, a food brand marketed towards the growing Haitian community in my area, sells 24oz packages of wheat for $1.99 and it's by far the cheapest brand of wheat sold. As said, dry beans can be had for 99¢/lb. Better to buy beans and eat it with rice or cheap pasta than to buy cooking wheat.
>>7490058
Your supermarket might actually carry it, but you've never taken notice or bothered to look. Check next time you go. Otherwise, Caribbean, Middle Eastern and hippy-dippy stores sell it.
>>7490111
ok, so I can find wheat, what then? what do I do with it?
>>7489867
Noodles
Rice
Beans
Potatoes
Vegetables that are on sale
Basic pancakes
>>7490114
I use it in soups and salads, generally, but you can also combine it with millet to use in place of rice.
Look up ble/blé recipes online.
Frozen veggies in bulk. For fresh salads buy veggies at the end of the day when it's marked down 50%.
Even in a small apartment I have a setup like pic related right outside my window. Just for herbs. They don't need a lot of space and require similar amounts of water/sun and do well enough in dim light.
Buy things in season duh. Talk with your butcher, figure whens the best time to come for meat on sale. Make your own bread, saves crazy cash. Beans and rice to bulk up a meal is a valid meme. If time is an issue figure some good freezer meals. Set up your meats/veggies on a sunday when you have some free times, sort, season, package, freeze. Then when you want it's just a quick thaw + cook.
A slow cooker is a good investment for making cheap tough meat into some delicious tender fall apart meal.
Coupon up. Look for discount/damaged-goods kind of grocery stores.
Instant potatoes are a hell of a bargain. And they store away for up to a year. I like to whip mine up with some canned corn and Spam. I call it "camp meal", cuz I "invented" it in a campout. Instant gratification factor can't be emphasized enough here with this one.
>>7490196
real potatoes are plenty cheap bruh, plus they have the added bonus of if you let them sprout eyes, you can plant and grow your own
>>7490196
This is good advice. The logistics savings are so great on potato powder that it works out to be cheaper than actual potatoes despite all the additional processing steps that go into it. Nutritional value is basically unaffected, but it can be a good idea to check out and compare the preservatives used in various brands (some of them are harmless, others not so much)
>>7490228
that's ignoring the fact that instant potatoes taste like cardboard
>>7490228
Let's say you have a bunn coffee maker at work, the kind with hot water spigot for making tea. If you've filled an old lunchmeat Tupperware with a measure of instant taters, after adding ho t water and stirring you have a piping hot meal ready to eat. If you've added butter of sweet peas, or "corn and spam", you've made good on your nutritional requirments too.
>>7490258
I mean the processing steps the producer has to perform. Typically more processing means higher prices since you're paying for work. But potatoes are perishable and 80% water, so if you can make your product 80% smaller and lighter, put it in a rectangular box and keep it on the shelf until somebody buys it, the price can still end up lower
>>7490285
I know, muh man, I know. Instamash is glorious.
