I had very large icy shake that was so filling. 10 bananas with some ice. They actually have a huge amount of nutrition in them and burn fat. It's just a couple of dollars.
Honestly? Whatever I have at home. It's always way cheaper to eat at home than it is to eat out, and while my husband and I do go out for date nights sometime we still like to cook and eat at home. It's a great way for us to bond over cooking, plus I know exactly what's going into my food. It's kinda fun to get creative with what you have in the pantry too, because if we're low on food and only have a few things we like to try and figure out what type of meal we can make with what we have.
Oats. I’d been eating them for breakfast, but I’ve recently figured out I function way better with protein in the morning and a fairly small amount of carbs later in the day. Spice it up, mix in some peanut butter, sunflower kernels, and maybe a sprinkling of raisins… delicious and fairly cheap.
When we don't have much time and not much budget to spend for dinner, we sautee canned food particularly sardines or corned beef. But we make a variation. For sardines, we add camote tops - fresh leaves of sweet potato. For corned beef, we add shredded cabbage and potato. That would extend the corned beef and add to the volume.
In this summer season, I usually just eat a lot of watermelon. It doesn't contain any kind of fat and it helps a lot with your intestine problems, if you've got any. But overall, it's a pretty good fruit for a rather low budget. Where I live, a kilogram costs about $0.50 per kilogram! Now that's what I call "bang for the buck", hahaha.
Hmm I'm really surprised how we all think alike sometimes LOL I honestly thought I was the only one out who does the corned beef thing and the oat with peanut LOL Sometimes you do have to get creative when money's tight. One other thing my husband and I like to do is get a whole roast chicken from a supermarket and use it towards a roast dinner. Of course, we put the veggies and gravy together at home, and then use the rest of the chicken for other meals; whether it's sandwiches or a chicken stir fry. It just seems to go a very long way, at least three meals
Hey that sounds good, is canned meat/fish popular in the Philippines? I eat corned beef and herring all the time but never really buy the canned variety but they are so much cheaper!
While I know bananas are good for you, I haven't heard that they burn fat. And 7 bananas is over 700 calories just for a drink like that. I'm not sure that's necessarily good for you considering how much sugar you're intaking in a single setting, too.
This is why I always keep plenty of pasta stocked up in my pantry - absolute worse case scenario, I could get buy on some pasta with olive oil, fresh garlic, parsley and some romano cheese, and it costs me hardly anything. Plus I don't feel like I'm deprived of anything, because I eat pasta even when I'm not broke. I was watching an episode of America's Test Kitchen yesterday where they even made a home made version of Rice A Roni, and it looked way better than the processed stuff, without hardly costing any more than it, if at all. Rice is cheap, vermicelli is cheap, beyond that all you need is a little chicken broth (a jar of Better Than Bouillion is cheap and much better than the powdered stuff), a little vegetable oil, and some fresh parsley. They soaked the rice in a bowl of water in advance so it would cook at the same time as the pasta, then toasted the broken vermicelli up in the oil, added the stock and rice and let it all simmer, then finished it off with fresh parsley and a little butter. Same thing with cans of tuna, though I usually prefer the pouches but if the canned variety is on sale I will stock up on those. It's easy to dress up a plain tuna sandwich with just some hot sauce, mayo, and whatever cheese you got left, and then grill it for even more flavor. Tuna is an inexpensive protein. I wish I could be more disciplined with oats though, because they can be a huge money saver in addition to being good for you. I just bought a large bag of Bob's Red Mill brand Steel Cut Oats and I've been trying to incorporate it more into my diet. But at only $4 a bag (at Big Lots of all places!) there is way more than enough to last me for a couple weeks at least. Plus Steel Cut Oats reheat very well, unlike the instant variety, so you can make a large batch in advance and portion it out for the next few days if you are pressed for time.
We have some cheap restaurants around here where you could get takeout for the whole family for just a little over ten dollars and I think they are worth the purchase if you consider that you'd also be spending some time and gas for cooking anyway and the amount won't come out to too much difference. That, and you could also indulge on some meal preparations that you otherwise could have never cooked yourself or would take too much time and effort to do.
Canned food is actually the cheapest here that's why it is called the food of the pauper. A can of corned beef that can feed a family of 6 adults is sold at $3. For canned fish or even squid, it is sold as low as 30 cents. So if we don't have the luxury of time and we have no budget for food, we just resort to canned goods for the moment until we recover the bearings... of our pocket.
I will go with the "whatever I have at home" -- which was not really how I used to think when I still was a very big meat-lover (the whole "it needs meat to be a dish attitude!") Becoming vegetarian sort of made me think differently -- and sometimes more lazy, like "Oh, I have these diverse staple foods. I can probably make a meal out of that!" without trying to make it a Big Thing (I love to cook for hours!) every time. Being okay with simple, filling food. Curry lentil soup is a big favorite of mine. Or rice, lentils and whatever stir fry. Yummy and cheap.
I've been eating a lot of chicken recently, instead of red meats, to save money. Ground Beef and other red meat has just gone through the roof in pricing. For example, Tri-Tip used to be $4.00 where I lived and the most recent one I bought was $8.00 a pound. Chicken is still a very reasonable price and healthier for you to eat. I'm just hoping that chicken prices don't go up as well, otherwise I might have to become a vegetarian in order for me to afford to eat!
