Real Cheap Food

Dried Beans

If there is any food more economical and nutritious than dried beans, I don’t know what it is. Oh, sure, there are plenty of other economical, nutritious foods, but I don’t think any of them is MORE economical and nutritious than dried beans.

Canned beans are cheap and good. Dried beans are AT LEAST two-thirds cheaper, and don’t have all that salt in them.

Beans are excellent for your health!

Beans are delicious!

Beans are super-cheap!

Beans are versatile! Bean Pie!? Lentil Cake?? Oh, Baby! YEAH!

Do you refrain from buying dried beans because you don’t know how to cook them? Are you intimidated by the daunting task of putting a cup or two of dry beans into a bowl and soaking them in water overnight? Well, stop it! Geezie-Pete! It’s easy!! Fox, at SquawkFox.com, has Ten Reasons Soaking Dried Beans Can Change Your Life.

Cooked beans freeze well! So you can cook a bunch and keep them in the freezer to eat any time, without having to soak them overnight… because they’re already cooked, right?

Lentils cook faster than other kinds of dried beans. Excellent food… definitely excellent food.

Pinto Beans Recipes

Black Beans seem to have special health benefits.

Garbanzo Beans are Chickpeas are Garbanzo Beans are amazingly versatile – make hummus, falafel, cook them with peanut butter and tomatoes!

Dried Lima Beans — Lima casserole, lima beans curry, lima bean and corn soup… and much, much more

Fava Beans “are great steamed and served with olive oil, salt, and lemon. They can also be added to soups and pastas, ground into purees, grilled, or enjoyed in artichoke risotto.”

Red Beans — it’s difficult to even say “red beans” without saying “rice”

Adzuki Beans, “The Mercedes of beans” — “The most yang of beans”

Mung Beans, can be sprouted, but don’t have to be.

Navy Beans are tried and true!

Kidney Beans “are not only available throughout the year; they are an excellent and inexpensive form of protein.”

MORE MORE MORE BEANS!

Pickled Eggs

Pickle some eggs and you’ll have easily portable, high-quality protein ready to go any time! It’s awfully simple. Hard boil the eggs, peel them, let them cool, boil the vinegar with whatever spices or flavorings you like (I like to add beet juice). Quick, easy, simple, cheap, good food ready to go, on hand whenever you want it.

Some useful web links for information, recipes, etc.:

General information about pickled eggs, including advice about storing in refrigerator, even though pickled eggs have been around longer than refrigeration. This informative article also advises to start with eggs that are 2 or 3 weeks old. Eggs too fresh are nearly impossible to peel once they are hard-boiled!

Pickled Eggs with Ginger, Beetroot Pickled Eggs, and British Pub Pickled Eggs

Safety tips, what to do to help peel the eggs, and several recipes (including Pineapple Pickled Eggs!) from National Center for Home Food Preparation.

Halloween is coming… try these Pickled Dragon Eggs!

Hot and Spicy Pickled Eggs

Sweet Pickled Eggs — a 5 star recipe at AllRecipes.com

How Clarence got his crazy lust for things pickled and invented Eggs From Hell — Idaho, that is.

Chopped Liver

Even though liver has enormous health benefits, and even though it’s extremely affordable, some people will just not like it. OK. People like different things. Me? I like food that’s delicious and nutritious and doesn’t cost much money. Liver is one of those kinds of foods.

If you’re just not going to eat liver no matter what, that’s cool. I hope you like some of the other ideas I suggest.

If you do like liver, or are willing to try it, check this out:

One of my favorite ways to prepare liver is to make chopped liver. The name is the basic recipe. Cook liver, chop it. Variations? Infinite! I like to eat it as a spread on bread or as a dip with crackers.

Nutritious, delicious, easy and cheap. What is it, chopped liver?!

Continue reading Chopped Liver

Putting Food By

If you stock up, you gotta store it and keep it from going bad.

My sister gave me a huge bag of apples that she picked from a tree growing as part of the landscaping at her condo. My mother has recently been giving me more peaches than I can eat before they go bad. Mulberries grow like crazy around here, in a suburban setting. I find lots of peppermint and lemon balm and other herbs growing as weeds. Sometimes food is on sale at exceptionally low prices, far lower than normal.

What do you do when you have more food than you can consume in a short time? How can you take advantage of seasonal abundance, free gifts of food, and unusually low sale prices and manage to keep that food to eat later in the year?

Food preservation. Doing stuff to food so it won’t spoil. Yes, processing. Processing at home. (Actually, ALL food preparation is some kind of processing, after all.) It’s what folks call “putting food by.”

Freezing, canning, dehydrating, or even just careful storage under the right conditions of humidity and temperature are ways to keep food good to eat for a long time.

What did I do with all those apples?

Continue reading Putting Food By

Food Bars

Protein bars, breakfast bars, high-protein cookies, energy bars, meal bars, maybe there are other names, too. I guess “food bars” covers it all. It’s nice to have easily-portable, no-mess hunks of food that provides good protein, minerals and vitamins. You can take them hiking, use them as a simple lunch away from home, or keep them in the car or backpack or purse just to be prepared for times when you need to eat something.

Portable nutrition for 25¢

There are many different recipes around the Internet. Protein bars are easy to make, don’t take long, freezable, storable, you can put your lunch in your pocket. And by making them yourself, you control the ingredients, you know there’s no funny stuff in there, and – of course – you save money.

I’ve been experimenting with making these bars recently, and today’s version looks like a cookie, tastes like a cookie, too. Each of these contains 12 grams of protein, as much as a fancy storebought protein bar, but at about one-fifth the price. (Luna brand protein bars, for instance, cost between $1.50 and $2.00, and contain 12 grams of protein.) Today’s food bars cost me about 25 cents each to make.

I used a blender, a food processor, and an oven. The versatility of the idea is such that you don’t actually HAVE to use any of those things. Many recipes would not require a blender, some wouldn’t need a food processor, and some people like to use a food dehydrator, which could even be a solar dehydrator if that’s what you have. Some recipes require no cooking.

Here’s the deal on the things I made today:

I started with the blender because I wanted to grind up the raw quinoa. I also put the flax and sunflower seeds in the blender. Then when that was all ground up the way I liked it, I put that mixture in the food processor and added the rest of the stuff.

I used

1 cup of white quinoa

1/2 cup of red quinoa

1 cup of sunflower seeds

1/4 cup of flax seeds

grind, grind, grind…

I used the blender just smooth out the texture. Optional.

You could stir stuff by hand, instead of using this thing.

then in the food processor that went, along with…

2 Tablespoons of honey

1 cup of mashed banana

1 cup (packed) of dried pineapple

1 cup of peanuts and 1/2 cup of peanut butter

whir, whir whir…

Then it was just a matter of forming the shapes and baking them. I baked them at 350 degrees for about half an hour. I baked them on parchment paper, but that’s not really necessary.

Nutritional analysis at nutritiondata.com sayeth that the “meal cookies” I made today have 12 grams of protein each, along with 7 grams of dietary fiber, 25% daily vitamin C, 18% daily iron, 13% daily vitamin E, and good amounts of several other vitamins and minerals. They also pack over 300 calories – remember, one of these things is most of a meal.

Everybody likes different stuff. Let’s see what other kinds of food bars are out there.

Here’s a body-builder’s protein bar with oats, milk and egg whites, very easy to make.

Make your own whey-protein bars without cooking.

Energy bars recipe at Food Network gets terrific ratings from users.

Homemade energy bars, super easy, tasty, and cheap, with excellent notes about energy bars in general, including the calorie thing.

“Bird Seed” energy bars — crunchy and yummy.

Bicyclists’ special energy, high-carb bars recipes.

Eat-and-Run breakfast bars.

Four healthy granola bar recipes at best-ever-cookie-collection.com