Eating healthy and being poor

[ThrashO]

Currently I'm working alot, and in my free time I workout and run (on top of playing videogames and guitar) and I'm trying to find some tasty food that isn't absolutely terrible for you. Working it into a budget would be helpful too but not required.

This is hard to do when you smoke reefer though, so for the entire month of december I'm not going to smoke at all.

Anyways, I love fruit. Oranges, pears, apples, grapes and plums. Shit is expensive though and I probably could comfortably eat about $10 worth of fruit a day.

Currently one of my favorite healthy things to eat are about a half bag of the grilled chicken strips in the lunchmeat aisle, in a frying pan with some olive oil until it starts getting brown, some strawberry balsamic reduction (its in the salad dressing aisle, about 4 bucks and it lasts forever) and then on a plate with diced tomatoes on top. It's really good. Same thing on top of lettuce for a salad is pretty great too.

In the mornings I eat about 3 egg whites and one yolk just scrambled up. Eggs are cheap as shit. an 18 pack lasts about a week and goes from about $1.50 to $2.00

also, I used to drink whole milk all the time as a kid, anything less was like water. 2% is great though. Anything less than that and I personally can't do it.

steamed broccoli is great with a little salt (I like it plain) and it's easy to steam if you're super poor and just have a pot. Take a sheet of tinfoil, make it into a bowl/boat shape, toss the broccoli in it, float it in a pot of boiling water with a lid.

Also, if you have to have them, fat free mayo and fat free sour cream taste just as good as regular. Stuff like fat free ranch and ice cream and the like taste like shit and I'd rather just cut them out all together.

And my favorite thing right now is cottage cheese. reduced fat and light taste just as good as regular. one of my ex's got me into cottage cheese and she just ate it plain with black pepper. it's pretty good but I like a scoop with some cut up fresh fruit, lately I cut up about 10 seedless green grapes and throw them in and it's tasty as SHIT.

Can anyone suggest anything else?

(alright thread, good luck!)

[Babs]

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/07/30/16-ways-to-eat-healthy-while-keeping-it-cheap/

Seems to be what you're looking for.

[Zomboid]

What the fuck? Why do people think that this is a good place to ask these questions? Just PM Chojin, and...OH! You want us to know that you're working out.

[kahljorn]

how is fruit expensive

[Aaarg]

fruit is v expensive but also delicious and it's clementine season i guess because that's all i fucking eat

also rice is good and i guess it's good for you since east asians live to be 90 and look 50 and also rice is delicious give me some

[Fathom Zero]

Currently one of my favorite healthy things to eat are about a half bag of the grilled chicken strips in the lunchmeat aisle,...

Can anyone suggest anything else?

(alright thread, good luck!)

Yeah, stop buying precooked food. Get a whole chicken for five bucks and do whatever you want with it.

Rice is good, as is a bag of fucking potatoes. It's not hard to eat cheaply (and well) - I was homeless for two months of my last semester and I made it through.

[Aaarg]

the problem i have is potatoes is i forget i have them and then they start growing

also because it takes forever to cook them

[Fathom Zero]

Sure, if you're a pussy and don't want to cut them into medallions and pan fry them in the runoff from the chicken.

1/3rd of my diet is potato. I run through them too much to forget I've got them, although that did happen once where I kept them near my drier and they got wet. The smell and what was dripping off of them was unimaginable.

[Esuohlim]

Ramen and multivitamins.

Cooking is an incredibly easy thing to learn and all you need is, like, two pots and one pan. Threads like these are made by people who are afraid to or too lazy to cook (OR, IN THIS CASE, PEOPLE WHO "COOK" PRE-MADE CHICKEN STRIPS WITH SALAD DRESSING). Honestly, things seem expensive until you realize that if you don't buy prepared food you can cook yourself some shit with maybe, MAYBE, $10 worth of ingredients and make it last three or four goddamn days.

Buy a chicken and some vegetables. Bake it, cut that shit up, chop the vegetables, you've got a few meals and then you can make pot of soup out of the scraps for another few days of meals. It's not that hard to do.

[Fathom Zero]

He smacks of someone that two or three years ago moved out from his parents' and has been eating Burger King and microwavable bowls ever since.

[kahljorn]

premade chicken is actually a pretty good deal usually. Usually they come with about 2 pounds of chicken for anywhere from 5-6 bucks, which is 2.50 to 3 dollars a pound.

Sometimes you can get chicken breast for 2 dollars a pound, but then you have to cut it up and shit.. i dont really know shit about that lunch meat chicken though.

[Fathom Zero]

My thing is that I can cut a chicken any way I want it. I can't turn sliced chicken stuffs into chicken parm, though. Also, I sincerely doubt that it's cheaper. At best, Walmart's got these pretty good whole roasted chickens, (without the innards, which most prolly prefer, anyway), and they're $5 where I live. But if you go in there at the magic time of day where they're trying to get rid of them, you can get them half off. When I was a freshman, I routinely lugged four or five chickens back to my dorm and threw it over rice, eating for more than a week. You can get a bag of specific parts for around same amount/poundage, too.

[kahljorn]

you can buy premade battered chicken breasts and turn that into chicken parmesian pretty easily

[Fathom Zero]

Premade BATTERED?

:barf

[kahljorn]

yep tastes good.

[Chojin]

chicken breasts really aren't that expensive. honestly no healthy foods are expensive except for the 10% that say "HEALTHY ORGANIC LEAN ETC" all over the packaging, aren't even all that good for you, and are 900x the price. coincidentally those are the same products that everyone assumes are the only healthy foods in the store so it's an easy thing to believe.

a box of 10 individually wrapped chicken breasts is usually about $10, and it's cheaper than that if you just get a package of them. a whole rotisserie chicken goes for about $5 at sam's club and is good for 3-4 big meals.

spaghetti isn't especially good for you but noodles and sauce are stupid cheap

one of my favorite things to make is chicken breast+spaghetti sauce+shredded cheese+bacon in the oven, then put it on some light bread w/ light sour cream

[Babs]

Actually chojin, I just got back from kroger and chicken breasts (packaged with 10) is $6 right now. Probably due to everyone going apeshit over ham right now.

[elx]

how is fruit expensive
serious question - do you never buy fruit or something? it's fine and decently priced when it's both on sale and in season (particularly bananas/apples) but keeping a variety of fruits in your daily diet year-round is so expensive :( fruit has high water content and is low in physical substance, like trashy-ho said, it'd take like $10 to fill you up for a day. it'd be cheaper and more delicious to fill up on real food.

anyway I mostly just eat vegetables, pasta, bagels, oatmeal, etc. less yummy than fruit but this is all way cheaper and actually feels meal-worthy, whereas five bananas is like baby food. I spend less than $30 a month on food, and fruit still takes up the most expensive portion of that. tl;dr- that question is retarded, fresh fruit isn't cheap

[elx]

also, what? grocery stores sell whole chickens? that's so gross :( are there whole cows in the back too?

[Fathom Zero]

I'm gonna let that one sink in for a bit.

[Mad Melvin]

Fresh crispy lettuce, sliced tomatoes and mozzarella in a bowl and put some olive oil, black pepper and balsamic vinegar on top. Tasty. You can also add some strips of air-dried ham on it to make it more meaty.

I don't know if this is healthy, but it sure is tasty as shit (and quite cheap): Buy some beef. Cut it to proper size pieces and throw them in a pan. Fry them up and throw them in a tray (is tray the proper word? The shit you put in an oven). Add chopped garlic and onions in the tray with the meat. Also bacon. I like to add mushrooms as well, but it's a matter of taste, really. Add a meat stock cube (again, not sure if this is a real phrase. The brown colored seasoning cube that makes the food taste meaty and good), salt, black pepper, basil, rosemary and most importantly, red wine. Get the cheapest wine you can find. 0,6 liters should be fine for the food. Drink the rest. Put some tinfoil on top of the tray and put it in the oven for five hours at 120 degrees celsius (convert this to whatever fahrenheit nonsense you are using). Serve with rise or potatoes.

You can also put some carrots or some shit like that there and it would be just as tasty.

[Colonel Flagg]

also, what? grocery stores sell whole chickens? that's so gross :( are there whole cows in the back too?

Yes, even branded Perdue. They're prepped for stuffing or roasting, though, not hanging like dried up carcasses you see in Chinatown. No more gross than buying a whole fresh turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.

I haven't seen a whole cow for sale, though. :o

[Colonel Flagg]

I'm gonna let that one sink in for a bit.

Yeah, probably should have done. :(

[Fathom Zero]

:lol

[kahljorn]

serious question - do you never buy fruit or something?Yea i mean i used to go grocery shopping all the time and never spent more than ten bucks a week on fruits and veggies. They were usually the cheapest things.

Maybe I'm just not an idiot when it comes to buying stuff or something.

I've seen abnanas for 20 cents each or fifty cents a pound ;/ how much is five of those

[MailCall]

I do a lot of crock pot cooking, because I am both poor and lazy. But you can make some pretty healthy combinations using meat, vegetables and potatoes that way.

[ThrashO]

abnanas are an exception price wise, but more than one a day and you wont be able to shit (srsly)

my favorite fruits ever are plums and kiwi's though, and they both get expensive, BUT I could live off of them.

also, whole cooked chickens are kind of gross imo :/

I'd rather have pre-cooked and then prepare them however I like. Plus i've always been kind of weirded out by raw chicken. I lived with a guy who had a bowl of flour, was tossing raw chicken in it, then put the flour back in the flour jar :x honestly since then, aside from steak, I enjoy pre-cooked meats.

PS. those of you excited by cheap whole cooked chickens, go to any grocer past 8:00 and you'll see them under a warmer with a $4-off coupon attached to them probly. mmmmmm.

[kahljorn]

apples and oranges are really cheap too.

pineapples can be pretty reasonable sometimes. I find them for two dollars each pretty often and thats like a whole meal or more. tomatoes can be a steal. squash is cheap. sometimes i get cantalope for cheap as hell. foodmaxx frequently has avocados for 25 cents each. I dunno i guess I'm just not a fool.

oh yea and sometimes people have these things in their yard.. oh yea fruit trees.
learn to forage bitches.

[Pentegarn]

I lived with a guy who had a bowl of flour, was tossing raw chicken in it, then put the flour back in the flour jar :x

What?

Was he hoping to make salmonella cookies later?

[executioneer]

oh yea and sometimes people have these things in their yard.. oh yea fruit trees.
learn to forage bitches.

CRIIIIIIIIIIME

[kahljorn]

IF THE BRANCHES ARE HANGING OVER A FENCE IT IS PUBLIC PROPERTY

[Zhukov]

Hats off to Kahl for ruling on the subject of free fruit.

[kahljorn]

:lol

ive never actually done that i just know some hippies who did :( they also went around in the forests and found blackberries or some shit. But they wouldn't tell us where cause they didnt want us to know their leet berry stash.
also one time they ate some poison ivy or some shit somehow.

although in the neighborhood i lived in a lot of people had fruit trees and they would put signs up that say, "Free fruit, take the shit" cause they didn't want it to waste/be all over their lawn.

[ThrashO]

:lol

ive never actually done that i just know some hippies who did :( they also went around in the forests and found blackberries or some shit. But they wouldn't tell us where cause they didnt want us to know their leet berry stash.
also one time they ate some poison ivy or some shit somehow.

although in the neighborhood i lived in a lot of people had fruit trees and they would put signs up that say, "Free fruit, take the shit" cause they didn't want it to waste/be all over their lawn.

That sounds awesome, only thing that ever grew around my house growing up was shitty crab apple trees >:

[executioneer]

sorry i just get touchy about fruit crime because my folks have an orchard :x

[kahljorn]

:O

i also live in california though where you can find fruit stands that sell that shit by the crate for hella cheap

[ThrashO]

man i wish i lived somewhere cool :\

[Esuohlim]

I can't pilfer fruit :( I live in the midwest where the only thing that really grows is apples and I've never EVER in my life picked an apple from someone's backyard that wasn't rotten and awful

[kahljorn]

i got it made bitches

[ThrashO]

my grandparents in Florida had coconut tree's around their neighborhood when I was a kid, when I finally cracked one open it was rotten as hell.

I found this out by stabbing it and drinking the sour milk :x

all of the ones that I found were like that

[Aaarg]

the summer before last the house next to ours was vacant and up on the hill there was a bunch of wild strawberry and my girlfriend and i (and our dog) would just wander around eating little strawberries and it was awesome but then this last summer some people had moved in and we didn't want them to ask us what we were doing

also there were some blackberry bushes but the birds always beat me to them.

another time when i worked at a cave there was a couple of blueberry bushes off the side of the road and i'd go out and keep an eye on them waiting for them to ripen and then one day i went out and they were fucking empty.

also if you go on the blue ridge parkway in the summer you'll often find cars on the side of the road and then catch some old people with buckets :( jerks

fuck i love berries i want berries yum yum berry yum

[10,000 Volt Ghost]

another time when i worked at a cave there was a couple of blueberry bushes off the side of the road and i'd go out and keep an eye on them waiting for them to ripen and then one day i went out and they were fucking empty.



They were probably stolen by Barney Rubble.

[Chojin]

PS. those of you excited by cheap whole cooked chickens, go to any grocer past 8:00 and you'll see them under a warmer with a $4-off coupon attached to them probly. mmmmmm.

oh yeah, there's a market near here too that has all meat half off after 8 pm

it's really really really easy to cook pretty much anything in a foreman grill or outdoor grill. chicken is also easy to cook in a pot of boiling water. it tastes best in the oven imo and that isn't terribly difficult either.

[ThrashO]

my favorite is when they have a rack of discount fruit up at 2 am and it's pretty much just a bag of brown slop

I love cooking chicken on a charcoal grill, plus when you're poor it's a good way to relax. The place I've been living at for the past two years though doesn't allow any grills, but there are public ones set up that you can use if you really like diseases

:puke

[Kitsa]

If you have a citrus distributor like this (http://www.hscitrus.com/B%20WEBSITE%202011/BB%20DIRECT%20SALES%202011.htm), it is so very worth it. You just to to the prescheduled site (usually an abandoned parking lot), fork over the cash, and they give you a huge crate of citrus. I get great navel oranges from this place.

[kahljorn]

what i used to do is go to vons and wait tillthe cross rib roasts went on sale for about 5 bucks or so. pick one of those up, STEAM IT with a small amount of water at the bottom. you can brown some onions in the pan before you add the water. Anyway, you end up with shredded beef after a couple of hours.

you can use the shredded beef as a roast and make some potatoes and shit. you can use the broth for gravy. Then the next night you can flavor it a bit and use it in tacos/burritos/enchiladas. you can also fry it up and use it for breakfast.
shits good and lasts for a few days

[Chojin]

If you have a citrus distributor like this (http://www.hscitrus.com/B%20WEBSITE%202011/BB%20DIRECT%20SALES%202011.htm), it is so very worth it. You just to to the prescheduled site (usually an abandoned parking lot), fork over the cash, and they give you a huge crate of citrus. I get great navel oranges from this place.

man that website is pro as heck

[Kitsa]

barebones mean BIG SAVINGS

[Evil Robot II]

LOL a chicken in manhattan cost about $30

[Zhukov]

A chicken from the supermarket costs $9.98 here. I know this because they advertise everywhere "Why pay $10 for a chicken?!".


Massive savings all round.

[Kitsa]

I've gotten rotisserie chickens for ~$6 and uncooked roaster chickens for ~$4 here. Life is cheap :(

[Evil Robot II]

Halal food from a street vendor. Crab juice or mountain dew.

[Kitsa]

Also, not on the level of extreme couponers but my last trip I saved $88 on groceries. Just be normal about it...no fifty carts, no dumpster diving for coupons, just get stuff you use or need. There are coupon clipping services where you buy $1 off coupons for like 8 cents ea and then you don't even have to get a newspaper.

I promise it won't make you grow lady parts.

[MattJack]

I use to make something called the Ramen Surprise.

Here is what you do:

Keep your ramen in the fridge (makes you feel like it is real food). When you are hungry go to your fridge, close your eyes, and randomly pick a package of ramen (random flavor). Set it on the counter and then close your eyes again. Select two to three other items (anything goes). Go ahead and boil it all up, put it in a bowl, and allow it to cool at the kitchen table. While it cools go ahead and grab a shotgun, sit at the table, position your toe on the trigger, and put the barrel under your chin.

[Aaarg]

surprise!!!