I don’t know if this is the type of thing you were asking, but it’s one I’ve been using about once a week lately.
I was listening to How I Built This with Guy Raz, and he had on a lady that wanted to eliminate food waste. She started the app Too Good To Go.
Partner businesses will pack up about $15 of food at the end of the shift, and instead of tossing it, they put it in a to go box for you for $5.
Tonight we had jerk chicken and sides from a Caribbean place, another time we got 4 big pizza slices overloaded with toppings, and our favorite is the Manhattan Bagels gives us 15-17 bagels. We’ve also tried a vegan bakery, which is way too expensive for us, but for my girlfriend’s nephew with a severe egg allergy was a great surprise.
These are all places we wouldn’t normally go, but they’ve all been really tasty, helped eliminate some waste, and let us try some new restaurants for a fiver. We’re kinda in the country, so there aren’t too many options, but I looked in the nearby city and there are a lot, and the app started in Europe, so you non-US people don’t have to miss out.
So maybe not the super cheap lentil curry recipe I have, but this was an intriguing things I recently learned about and have been looking to share awareness about.
Even if you don’t have much cash, it still feels nice to be able to get restaurant food sometimes too, and this is a cheap and mutually beneficial way to do that.
I remember back in the day a few food court places did this. They’d preload a to-go container with a ton of food and mark it for $5 about 30 minutes before the mall closed. I haven’t seen a food court do this since 2008 though.
This sounds pretty much exactly like that. It’s about the only downside, as it’s first come (to reserve a box in the app), first served, and you get a half hour pickup window.
The way they sell it to places is they make it so it’s no more work than just tossing it would be, but you get a sale.
We found it too and it’s awesome. A huge bag of tamales and pastries from our local Mexican bakery, $6.
Exactly! I wish I had tamales near me!
Though I do make a mean tamale pie, and that’s a pretty good cheap way to stretch out leftover protein when it isn’t enough left to feed the both of us.
Not healthy, but damn good for leftovers! 😁
This is a great tip. We this in Berlin. It’s great to just walk to a random area in the evening, open the app up and see what’s available for pickup in the area.
That was another thing that had gotten my interest about it. I recently started a new job that was in an area I wasn’t familiar with, so I’ve gotten to get a sampling of the restaurants there for next to nothing.
When you order pizza, ask for extra sauce, not cheese. They typically don’t charge for that but often include extra toppings to make the pizza look “normal”
Sous vide cooking. It’s easy to buy a bulk quantity of food, vac-pack and cook it, then freeze it. This saves time and money both on purchase, initial prep, and mealtime prep.
For example, we buy a whole, locally-grown, grass-fed chuck flap. We trim, bag, and cook the entire flap in one day. This provides my partner and me about six weeks of meals with high quality protein. Added bonus: the juice and gelatin in the bag after cooking makes excellent soup stock or cooking liquid for beans. Double added bonus: a sous vide chuck steak is just as good as the best ribeye fillet.
Also learn to use an entire chicken. For example, spatchcock and roast the chicken for dinner. Break down the carcass to get every scrap of meat. Make chicken salad the next day. Roast the bones, make a mirepoix, and make chicken stock. Use that to make chicken and dumplings or chicken soup. The two of us eat for a week from one chicken.
Learn about food preservation and safety: reusable containers, dangerous food conditions, fermentation, canning, making stocks… A huge part of saving money on food is not wasting any of it. Being able to buy in-season food when it’s cheaper and more nutritive is a big deal.
And on that note: avoid cheap, low-nutrition food. Sure, that industrial, NPK produce and ultra-processed box meal might be “affordable.” But those tend to be empty calories; you have to eat more of it to feel sated and get the nutrition you need. Locally grown, in-season foods tend to be better food values since you need to eat less of them to get the same micronutrients. See: “The Doritos Effect,” by Mark Schatzker.
This is quite the rabbit hole!
Any resources for someone starting off?
I did not know it was safe to freeze after the sous vide water-bath.
Thanks for that!
Meal planning carefully to take advantage of sales, buy in bulk when possible, and eliminate food waste. I have my meals planned out through the end of January and I do this every month. The money I spend on groceries has halved since I started using this approach.
As weird as it sounds, paying for a meal delivery service has really cut down our cost for food. We used to be poor planners, so would just go to the store and buy staples without having actual meals planned out in advance. More often than not, nothing really looked good or we wouldn’t have all the ingredients to make a meal, so we’d order out.
For the price of ordering out once a week, we now have ingredients for 3 or 4 meals delivered to the house every week. Then it takes the guess work out of planning, because it narrows down our options to what we had delivered.
Sure, it’s more expensive than doing the planning ourselves and going to the store to buy the ingredients. But it sure does save us a lot of money overall, since we now eat out less than once a week, instead of multiple times per week.
If you’re one of the people who like the bowls from fast casual places like Chipotle, Qdoba, or even those poke bowl places, get their non-protein/vegetarian option then go home and add your own protein. This saves about $2-$4 a bowl and can possibly extend the bowl’s lifespan into two meals.
I bring it home my bowl and add in my own falafel, chicken, shrimp, or whatever protein I have on hand. Getting frozen protein and airfrying it is the easiest. I guess I could also grill stuff but I’m usually short on time.
Haha my buddy used to do the exact opposite. He would go into Chipotle and ask for a bowl of nothing but chicken. Then he would go home and add it to salads, rice bowls, whatever for the rest of the week.
Get a rice cooker with a steam tray. Make a cup of rice, with frozen veggies in the tray. Spice the rice if you want (a little cumin with pepper slices makes excellent fajitas).
When I was in college I put rice in everything because it disgusted my flatmates. I could cook a meal and repel mooches at the same time.
I don’t want to meet anyone who is disgusted by rice. I’m sorry you had to endure that.
You can substitute ~75% of your meals volume with rice and come out just a satisfied with a fraction of the cost.
Got any go-to recipes?
Lately I’ve been doing an instant pot basmati rice cooked in beef broth and finished with lime zest and cilantro.
One idea is to buy frozen pot stickers/dumplings. Those dipped in some soy sauce with rice is cheap and delicious.
If you want to cook a little, add egg, cabbage (thinly sliced), garlic, ginger, and carrots. Basically turns into an egg roll
I have yet to eat anything from budget bytes that wasn’t delicious.
Burger with taco seasoning + rice is cheap and delicious
Instant pot. Throw your leftovers or whatever into it and press the button. Cook beans from dry to tender in less than an hour. Dump bag of Trader Joe frozen kung pao chicken (all the little inner bags of ingredients) and cook for 4 minutes, etc. Better than a microwave, really. You can actually cook stuff in it.
Literally just finished cooking Mexican chicken in one for Taco Tuesday. One of our favorite small appliances.
Dr Pepper and Cold Brew make a fantastic mixed drink; it tastes similar to spiced rum with no alcohol.
1 cup of lentils, can tomatoes, carrots, celery, onions, 5 to 6 cups of water, 1 tsp salt. From there season with whatever. Want an Italian taste add oregano, basil, etc. Want more Indian add curry powder, cumin, ginger. It really takes on the flavor profile of whatever you add to it. Inexpensive and very healthy.
Cabbages, dried beans/peas/lentils, and collards. Learn to cook these “poor foods” in ways you like - they are cheap and plentiful and amenable to lots of different methods (cabbage, especially). Extend/bulk all the above with rice, farro, polenta, tortillas, or a solid southern cornbread recipe (not sweet and more cornmeal than flour).
I do both collards and beans in an instant pot (not together, though), which cuts down on mess and time. One of my favorite things to do with cabbage is make Kim chi or sauerkraut. Kraut is easier (and a little cheaper, it’s just cabbage, salt, and time) and opens up a realm of easy Euro-ish meals (kraut, lentils/potatoes, and sausages, for example, is highly economical, tasty, and filling).
Good stuff.
Also, kimchi, one word.
I think that was autocorrect…for whatever reason in decided to capitalize Kim and separate chi…
If you buy milk alternatives regularly it might be worth getting a high powered blender and a nut milk bag and making your own nut milk. Any high powered (2200W) blender will work, you don’t need a $500 Vitamix, there are some brands for around $100 on Amazon- CasaCosa is a good one. But a regular or compact blender will not work.
There are shockingly few nuts in a half gallon of almond milk and it takes like 5 minutes including clean up. It only lasts about 4 days in the fridge, so it’s twice a week kind of thing, but it’s really not difficult. If you use cashews you don’t even have to strain it, since they have very little fiber.
If you do use a high fiber nut, like almonds or walnuts, you can save the pulp and use it instead of (or in addition to) regular flour to make quick breads (pumpkin, banana, zucchini, etc.) and pancakes.
One thing I’ve realised after many years of trying to eat cheap and healthy is that not all cheap and healthy food advice applies in every region - you really need local advice to make the best choices possible.
For example, I’ve often read the advice to eat rice to stay cheap, but where I live, potatoes usually come out to be cheaper, especially just after harvesting. Potatoes are also arguably a better choice from a health perspective.
Strongly agree. Potatoes down here are never cheap. Same with apples. But I can often get pineapple for $2, bananas are cheap here too. And lots of the Latin American food is reasonable. A huge bag of rice is very cheap per lb here.
The highest rated recipe on BBC Good Food is Chilli con Carne. It’s cheap and easy to make, and can be dumped on top of a big pile of rice
Soak dried Porcini or Shiitake mushroom in a bowl of warm water for about 20 min (can boil the mushrooms if fresh). The mushrooms then can be used as an ingredient to a variety of recipes but more importantly, the bowl of water is now an umami bomb, and can be used as a broth or seasoning to add a ton of flavor to a bunch of dishes (pasta sauce, soup, stir-fry…)
Porcini in particular has an earthly, nutty taste and can be used to create complex sauces with a “beefy” taste.
You can get powdered porcini. That won’t require the soak.
