Budget Bytes is the perennial cheap food website/blog, and the nice thing about trying to cut your grocery budget down but not being in a crisis is that you can take the suggestions at the end of recipe for making it fancier and then just do it. Or whatever sounds good! But you’re at least starting at a base of less spendy meals rather than “go spend $40 at the farmers market to feed two people and have a bunch of weird aspirational veg leftover.”
Seconding budget bytes. They're all very accessible meals with easy to find ingredients. We love her Teriyaki Meatball bowls and the tomato and spinach pasta
though not sure how non-depressing those are. Also! check if your library has cookbooks, I've found that super helpful for trying recipes I'm not sure about. and then I'm not annoyed when there's only like 3 recipes I like.
We do a lot of rice bowls in our house. Endlessly customizable for all my picky eaters. They can be as simple or as fancy as you want. I get the massive bag from Sam's Club and make a big batch in my ninja instant pot thing.
We make them with leftover protein (its amazing how you can transform one meal into another by slathering it with teriyaki sauce), air fried popcorn chicken (or even regular chicken nugs!), sauteed ground meats (ground turkey is always on sale in my area, please no one tell me why). Add veggies and whatever sauce you want, done. My younger kid eats hers covered in ketchup, regardless of what's in it, so what who cares.
This has made me realize how much I miss TJs ahi tuna :(
This! though I've been making with quinoa (my husband ordered a 25lb bag online??). My go to these days is 1/2 cup - 3/4 cup cooked quinoa, bunch of lightly steamed broccoli, and a protein. I'm lazy so 1/3 of a can of black beans is this week's protein, but whatever works. I then top with 2 tablespoons of some kind of sauce on it (think general tso's, bbq, lately a sweet chili sauce, but really whatever and if you want to make it cheaper by making your own sauce, go you!). Varying the sauce is enough variety for me, apparently. (recipe arrive at trying to find a "healthy" lunch I don't hate, cause salads are not actually food) I like this cause I can set up a week's worth on the weekend and then just grab and go, too.
Some of these things in isolation are just eccentric like the love ceremony but when you're talking to Elon Musk about autism "curing" implantable technology you've lost me.
An idea that clearly comes from a woman who hasn’t encountered perimenopause and also probably has used some sort of cycle regulating birth control most of her menstruating life.
One of my favorite very cheap, very easy meals is making bean burrito bowls (rice and beans and toppings) with the beans from Goya black bean soup instead of just plain canned black beans that I need to doctor myself. It's so much easier and tastes so much better.
My fave non- depressing budget meal is Italian rice. Brown some Italian sausage in a little olive oil (or not if veg/too $$) then sauté onion in drippings (after removing browned sausage) until soft and starting to brown around edges (basically to however well done you like your onions) then add some minced garlic. Lightly toast the garlic (you don’t want to burn it), add some crushed tomatoes, salt, pepper, basil (or whatever herbs you like in tomato sauce) and the sausage. Cook for 15 min or on medium, taste for seasoning. Cook some rice (I’ve traditionally used long grain white but brown/med/short grain would work fine). 1 large can of crushed tomatoes should sauce 2-3 C of rice, depending on how saucy you want it. One nice thing about this recipe is that it’s infinitely scalable and is great left over. Combine sauce and rice. You can eat it as is or put into an oven proof dish and bake 350 for 10 min or so, usually with Parm or pecorino grated on top.
hi Nicole! I am chagrined. I don't have any sort of actual good answer to your question given the time elapsed since I read the article and huge chasm between my dumb take and reality. My semi-sincere answer is: go surfing.
And for the record I would never suggest anyone implant anything and I’m much more interested in nature-based therapies for my daughter and helping her live the best possible life she can and to have the fullest capacity to heal. And for those in your comments who assumed it was my lifestyle that caused her Autism, you are wrong. In our case it was several environmental influences but the most harmful I believe was a MMR vaccine injury at age 6 months, and then proceeded by a series of infections in early childhood. Like all of you mothers, I am doing my best, and I am always open to learning more.
I follow this TikTok mom who does cheap/easy meals and her recipes are great. https://my.whisk.com/u/mac.larena Her whole thing is “we use what we have” and “it will be fine”. Very low stress recipes!
Re tornados: my father-in-law was sitting in his high rise in Evanston watching the storm roll in. His defense was that he lived in Oklahoma for 45 years of his adult life and absolutely knew more about them than our local Chicago meteorologists.
I find them sort of cozy. I feel like a real grownup now that I make sure to take the dog for a walk first if it seems like no actual cyclones are bearing down
They tend to get him and my husband started about how in oklahoma they have things pinpointed to ten and fifteen minute windows. In oklahoma they give you specific streets that border the area in question. In oklahoma . . .
You get the picture. I am usually just like cool cool but if I hear the sirens two blocks over, we are heading to the basement. This time we were in vacation in washington state and mostly unaware until I went to check if weather would mess with our flight back.
There's a level of fatalism hidden inside of experience, technology and humor that Oklahomans have that doesn't make sense to people elsewhere.
Second week of my new job one of my bosses said that he had tornadoes the night before in Denver, I said that it sounded like a good excuse to go outside and drink an extra beer. Apparently this was not good as the tornado went down the road half a mile away and people he knew had lost their homes. Whoops.
Our best non-depressing, also easy, relatively bargain meal is “Pasta, Pancetta, and Peas” by Sunny Anderson for the good network. It obviously isn’t so budget if you use pancetta but you can swap out bacon and use between a quarter of a pack to half a pack and it is awesome! And also I double the frozen peas. And you can usually use way less parm if you use a freshly grated one. We have been making it for like 12 years.
Budget Bytes is the perennial cheap food website/blog, and the nice thing about trying to cut your grocery budget down but not being in a crisis is that you can take the suggestions at the end of recipe for making it fancier and then just do it. Or whatever sounds good! But you’re at least starting at a base of less spendy meals rather than “go spend $40 at the farmers market to feed two people and have a bunch of weird aspirational veg leftover.”
Seconding budget bytes. They're all very accessible meals with easy to find ingredients. We love her Teriyaki Meatball bowls and the tomato and spinach pasta
I do think that she skimps on the seasonings, but that’s ok, and an easy thing to fix!
For example, my notes for myself in Keep for Garlic, Rosemary, White Bean Soup:
Ok, this is delicious, BUT! I did a bunch of extra optional things.
- I used bacon fat instead of olive oil
- Cut up a few carrots into small cubes and sautéed them a bit before adding the garlic
- Might have been a bit heavy with the rosemary and red pepper flakes
-chopped up a few pieces of leftover already cooked bacon and heated them in a small skillet before adding to the finished soup
- added some chopped spinach at the end
- squeezed in juice of half a lemon at the end
- Sprinkled Parmesan on top for serving
https://www.budgetbytes.com/easy-rosemary-garlic-white-bean-soup/
this topic makes me think of the £10 a week lady. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jul/20/10-pound-a-week-recipes
https://www.amazon.com/Cooking-Bootstrap-Simple-Budget-Recipes/dp/1509831118
though not sure how non-depressing those are. Also! check if your library has cookbooks, I've found that super helpful for trying recipes I'm not sure about. and then I'm not annoyed when there's only like 3 recipes I like.
We do a lot of rice bowls in our house. Endlessly customizable for all my picky eaters. They can be as simple or as fancy as you want. I get the massive bag from Sam's Club and make a big batch in my ninja instant pot thing.
We make them with leftover protein (its amazing how you can transform one meal into another by slathering it with teriyaki sauce), air fried popcorn chicken (or even regular chicken nugs!), sauteed ground meats (ground turkey is always on sale in my area, please no one tell me why). Add veggies and whatever sauce you want, done. My younger kid eats hers covered in ketchup, regardless of what's in it, so what who cares.
This has made me realize how much I miss TJs ahi tuna :(
This! though I've been making with quinoa (my husband ordered a 25lb bag online??). My go to these days is 1/2 cup - 3/4 cup cooked quinoa, bunch of lightly steamed broccoli, and a protein. I'm lazy so 1/3 of a can of black beans is this week's protein, but whatever works. I then top with 2 tablespoons of some kind of sauce on it (think general tso's, bbq, lately a sweet chili sauce, but really whatever and if you want to make it cheaper by making your own sauce, go you!). Varying the sauce is enough variety for me, apparently. (recipe arrive at trying to find a "healthy" lunch I don't hate, cause salads are not actually food) I like this cause I can set up a week's worth on the weekend and then just grab and go, too.
When I read that she’d “found new love” I was really hoping it would turn out to be with Grimes.
Alas.
I bet Grimes would be into it
Good and Cheap -> https://cookbooks.leannebrown.com/good-and-cheap.pdf
"Rich people, they're just like this" No they fuckin' aren't
Some of these things in isolation are just eccentric like the love ceremony but when you're talking to Elon Musk about autism "curing" implantable technology you've lost me.
What kind of abelist shit is this? So Autistic people are diseases?
I mean what does she tell her kid???
I'm stuck on this: She thinks they can improve quality of life for women by *lengthening the period of time* we have periods?
Between this, and Elon musk’s whole thing about people should have more children, I am not so sure
An idea that clearly comes from a woman who hasn’t encountered perimenopause and also probably has used some sort of cycle regulating birth control most of her menstruating life.
Yes!!! Who wants that?!?!?!?!?!!
a family favorite: https://www.shutterbean.com/2019/roasted-broccoli-and-white-beans/
One of my favorite very cheap, very easy meals is making bean burrito bowls (rice and beans and toppings) with the beans from Goya black bean soup instead of just plain canned black beans that I need to doctor myself. It's so much easier and tastes so much better.
That’s a good hint!
My fave non- depressing budget meal is Italian rice. Brown some Italian sausage in a little olive oil (or not if veg/too $$) then sauté onion in drippings (after removing browned sausage) until soft and starting to brown around edges (basically to however well done you like your onions) then add some minced garlic. Lightly toast the garlic (you don’t want to burn it), add some crushed tomatoes, salt, pepper, basil (or whatever herbs you like in tomato sauce) and the sausage. Cook for 15 min or on medium, taste for seasoning. Cook some rice (I’ve traditionally used long grain white but brown/med/short grain would work fine). 1 large can of crushed tomatoes should sauce 2-3 C of rice, depending on how saucy you want it. One nice thing about this recipe is that it’s infinitely scalable and is great left over. Combine sauce and rice. You can eat it as is or put into an oven proof dish and bake 350 for 10 min or so, usually with Parm or pecorino grated on top.
That sounds really good.
Hey Claire, this is Nicole Shanahan. Thanks for your interest in my story. What would you do if you were me? Sincerely curious.
hi Nicole! I am chagrined. I don't have any sort of actual good answer to your question given the time elapsed since I read the article and huge chasm between my dumb take and reality. My semi-sincere answer is: go surfing.
Thanks…
And for the record I would never suggest anyone implant anything and I’m much more interested in nature-based therapies for my daughter and helping her live the best possible life she can and to have the fullest capacity to heal. And for those in your comments who assumed it was my lifestyle that caused her Autism, you are wrong. In our case it was several environmental influences but the most harmful I believe was a MMR vaccine injury at age 6 months, and then proceeded by a series of infections in early childhood. Like all of you mothers, I am doing my best, and I am always open to learning more.
I follow this TikTok mom who does cheap/easy meals and her recipes are great. https://my.whisk.com/u/mac.larena Her whole thing is “we use what we have” and “it will be fine”. Very low stress recipes!
...but she is so self aware! Just look at that pop-out quote about being grounded!
(I needed this today; thank you.)
Re tornados: my father-in-law was sitting in his high rise in Evanston watching the storm roll in. His defense was that he lived in Oklahoma for 45 years of his adult life and absolutely knew more about them than our local Chicago meteorologists.
I find them sort of cozy. I feel like a real grownup now that I make sure to take the dog for a walk first if it seems like no actual cyclones are bearing down
They tend to get him and my husband started about how in oklahoma they have things pinpointed to ten and fifteen minute windows. In oklahoma they give you specific streets that border the area in question. In oklahoma . . .
You get the picture. I am usually just like cool cool but if I hear the sirens two blocks over, we are heading to the basement. This time we were in vacation in washington state and mostly unaware until I went to check if weather would mess with our flight back.
There's a level of fatalism hidden inside of experience, technology and humor that Oklahomans have that doesn't make sense to people elsewhere.
Second week of my new job one of my bosses said that he had tornadoes the night before in Denver, I said that it sounded like a good excuse to go outside and drink an extra beer. Apparently this was not good as the tornado went down the road half a mile away and people he knew had lost their homes. Whoops.
Our best non-depressing, also easy, relatively bargain meal is “Pasta, Pancetta, and Peas” by Sunny Anderson for the good network. It obviously isn’t so budget if you use pancetta but you can swap out bacon and use between a quarter of a pack to half a pack and it is awesome! And also I double the frozen peas. And you can usually use way less parm if you use a freshly grated one. We have been making it for like 12 years.
https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/sunny-anderson/pasta-pancetta-and-peas-recipe-1948507.amp
I’m very excited about the recipe suggestions. Just this morning I googled “one pot meals summer.”