Dodging Appetite Fatigue, Part 1
WARNING: this article is long. Really long. I didn’t want to two-part it, and then that failed, so we are doing parts but this first part will still be pepper series long. I tried to include as many pictures as possible to make it easier to scroll to the section relevant to your needs.
This article is also going to take a slightly different track than usual, because I want to address the questions I’ve gotten specifically about people being tired of eating the same things day in, day out. When “I’m tired of it” starts to transform into, “I just can’t eat that anymore,” that’s appetite fatigue. The psychology on this very real problem I’ll leave to the experts since they’ll explain it properly, while I’m simply addressing the practical aspects of it here. I never feel like people spend enough time looking at the psychology of poverty foods, and in particular appetite fatigue, so I’m doin’ it here.
I’m doing it a little more weirdly than you’re used to (didn’t know that was possible, right?), because I want the following video to be the base of how I frame most of this discussion. Whatever the “it” you’re tired of eating is, if that’s your situation, the techniques for rectifying it are always basically the same. I chose this video specifically because I am an 18th-century Ireland guy (The Midnight Court is my jam, and I will happily chat with anyone about that poem until they’re tired of talking with me), potatoes really are easiest for me to analyse. I also chose this video because I absolutely love this YouTube channel, and think y’all will, too.
So, we’re going to analyse the video, and we’ll do it with some Irish history thrown in. This should help those of you who are experiencing or at risk of appetite fatigue learn how to do what we’ve done in the last two weeks’ refresher on beans with whatever the staple food in question you’re struggling with is. In this post, we’re looking at 50# of potatoes as the base staple for a family of 6, so we want to analyse how this worked, whether there are improvements that can made, and some of the information that I personally would have liked to have seen included in the video. I looooooove film analysis, so I’m #sorrynotsorry that y’all are the victims of that love today and next Monday. I’m not gonna do the kind of film analysis I used to with my students, so y’all don’t worry about this being too intensive or technical.
Some history
Once the potato was established in Ireland as a staple crop, daily rations of potatoes for common folk averaged 5-9 pounds per day per person. That isn’t even how much proper laborers got, which was upwards of 14 pounds per day of taters (dairy floats a pint to a quart to complement the potatoes). This is rather a lot, but one must keep in mind that this was largely the ration for people with physically taxing jobs, and ditto less food diversity than we typically enjoy today. For more common people, meat, if it was part of the diet at all, was not a big portion and did tend to be cheaper cuts and offal. Depending on where in Ireland you lived, fish might be a bigger part of your diet, and you often would see greens and such in kitchen gardens and also wild foraged. Ditto some fruits. But by and large, for the populations most at risk of appetite fatigue, we’re largely talking potatoes and dairy (plus cabbages!) by the 19th-century. In the 18th, there was still a higher reliance on oats than existed in the 19th (oats hadn’t been given up in the 19th, but rather became back burner to potatoes), as Europeans in sum were much more hesitant about integrating potatoes into their diets until the late 18th-century.
Potato Famines
Potato consumption first needed to be popularized by the aristocracy and other upper crust folk, with all manner of weird tricks and schemes that went on in order to get the general population to consume them. Potatoes otherwise were favored for livestock and as a survival food if nothing “good” was available. There’s some float here, depending on the region, but the main point is that diversity was decreased from what we might expect or experience today, and especially for the poorest people, such that the humble potato was where it’s at by the onset of the 19th-century. This is part of why the 18th-century famine (1740-41) was less noteworthy despite having killed so many more people (potentially upwards of 20% of the total population died in this famine): in the Great Famine (1845-49), we’re talking about the collapse of monoculture, whereas in the 1740-41 famine, a range of crops and similar failed, making this more like a normal famine than a potato-potato famine. By the time the Great Famine hit, about half of the Irish population was 100% dependent on the potato, and there was still a high level of reliance on potatoes in the rest of the population.
Since many people in our world are currently seeing reductions in the availability of healthful, affordable foods, made more severe by the rampant food cost increases that’ve been going on due to supply chain issues created by the pandemic, we want to look at how to manage it all with fewer adverse psychological effects.
The Magic of Potatoes
What’s cool about potatoes is that when coupled w/ dairy, they’re a nutritionally complete meal. What’s also cool about potatoes is that you get a longer growing season (depending on where you’re growing them), and that means you can grow enough to eat as you need them during the growing season and to store for the future during harvest season. Plus, as y’all know, they just store well if you do it right. For reference, the only vital nutrients potatoes don’t contain are vitamins A and D, plus calcium. That’s it. And that’s also why potatoes + dairy work just fine as the base of a diet, so long as you find some ways to mix it up to accommodate the psychology of eating.
The Inca had a freeze-drying method for potatoes that allowed them to keep up to a decade, called chuñu, although I believe contemporary processes are now more commonly used in the relevant nations to make chuñu. This bit of info is mainly a side-note, because I really doubt any of you are going to do this to your potatoes at home during the winter.
A bit more history
Right. Pre-potato, the Irish diet was largely comprised of barley, oats, some wheat (regionally and economically dependent), parsnips, peas, beans, dairy, fish or meat depending on where you lived and your income, more dairy (really, a lot of dairy), and some other vegetables and fruits as situations permitted. A lot of the reliance on grain was brought along with English colonization, so meat and dairy consumption was substantially more ubiquitous before cereal dependency came to Ireland. If you look at their climate, it really does make a lot of sense that they didn’t lean toward cereal culture until it was put upon them to do so. Ireland has a fairly damp climate, so shepherding culture is more situationally appropriate than crops that are prone to blight and other such humidity-related pathologies.
Y’all just cannot even imagine right now how hard it is for me to not tell you everything else about Irish potato famines. And other things about Ireland, such as fantastic poetry. Needs must, so I’m moving on.
If He’s Got Enough Rosemary
I know, I know. We aren’t even to the video we’re analysing yet. Probably doesn’t surprise any of y’all that this is our situation, but I do hope you’ve watched the potato video above by now. I am, however, never going to ignore the opportunity to throw some Firefly around, so today we get a gem from the much beloved Shepherd Book: spices.
Spices really are the lifeblood of diverse flavors without diverse main ingredients. If your financial situation is extreme and you can find the space in your budget to add a dollar store or Aldi spice per grocery shopping trip, it will help you a lot. Like, a lot. That said, it’s also okay to not be able to afford more spices; there are other ways to mix things up! But if you can slowly build your food pantry, your base staple corn, potato, bean, grain, and/or bread diet can be enriched with more diversity through the spices you acquire.
Off-Book (haha) Spice
I use fats this way a lot, too, where I will use a different fat to change the flavor of the exact same thing I made the day before, or to help me repurpose leftovers.
Recently, Child Tester wanted refried beans for breakfast. I served her a plate of those that I’d fried with leftover sausage grease (“spice”) and used cumin as the second spice for them (other than salt and pepper) because I was too lazy that early in the morning to get more spices out to grind. She still wanted beans for lunch, so I made her a burrito with the same beans and a bit of shredded cheese. I used the cheese as a spice, not a bunch of cheese: we’re talking a tablespoon or so for the entire burrito.
The next morning, I gave her the whole beans that didn’t get made into refried, because she still wanted beans but not refried. I used just salt and pepper to season these, and added a boiled egg and some fruit to round out the meal. When she asked me for beans again for lunch, I offered hummus, as I had those chickpeas already made into that as well. All that’s really changing here is the type of bean, how I spiced them, and whether or not anything else is served with them. It’s still just beans, though, yeah?
Strangely, I used to hate beans. A lot. If there were beans in a meal, I ate around them. Well, except refried beans. That was the only bean preparation I’d touch, and even then not often. My friend Chandra helped me work through that with an impressive and delightful dose of mockery and a somehow heavier sprinkling of encouragement to work through that aversion. Now I love beans and eat them a lot.
Tip: save fats leftover from cooking other things; they will all have different flavors based on what the fat was exposed to while cooking the other meal, and accordingly function as a free spice and fat. Even if there’s just leftover vegetable oil in the pan, saving it reduces food waste (saving money!) and transforms that oil into a spice for later use.
So when we’re talking about spice, we’re really just talking about small changes that can affect the overarching flavor, and sometimes texture, of the dish. Not just actual spices. Sometimes this really is herbs and spices, but you can use sprinkles of other foods and/or different fats to give different flavors. Same with condiments and sauces. If you have a bit of ketchup or mustard that might taste good with your other ingredients, use it as a spice! Lemon juice bottle? Spice! Soy sauce packets leftover from whenever? Spice! Lot of options. Because of the ways in which spice transforms meals, spices also change how we feel about what we’re eating even if we’re still eating the same things day in and day out.
I also love chiles as a spice. 1 jalapeño costs usually 10 cents or less, but you can split it between a couple of meals to add some deliciousness and a bit of extra nutrition. When I’m looking for a super cheap way to dramatically alter the flavor profile of a dish, chiles tend to be a go-to for me.
If you’re thinking of the Spice Melange right now, wrong spice. Do not use this:
Back to the Video
As a quick head’s up: most Americans buy the same roughly 100 items every single time they go to the grocery store. This means everyone pretty much is eating the same stuff they always do, and simply feel better about it than when the available options have been narrowed without their consent. Again, this part is all psychology.
Since we need to know for purposes of discussion, here’s what Christine bought in this grocery haul:
50# potatoes
5 dozen eggs
2 packs with 16 slices each of American cheese
2 cans of chili with beans
1 can of hot dog chili sauce
1 quart sour cream
1 4-pack margarine
1 pack of corn tortillas (looks like the 80-pack)
2 cans cream of chicken soup
2 cans evaporated milk
2 packets taco seasoning
4# pinto beans
2# white rice
1 chub of chorizo (10 ounce)
1 8-pack Knorr chicken boullion cubes (these make 2C of broth per cube, not 1 like the smaller cubes)
Y’all didn’t smile and think that sounded fun when you saw the food she bought with her $34, did you? Most people seem to not carry this particular brand of insanity within them, but I gasped with delight when I saw what she’d bought. Child Tester gasped with horror and did not understand why I found this challenge to be so fun; she was particularly concerned about the absence of fruit. She definitely didn’t believe me that fruit wasn’t necessary on account of the potatoes.
CT didn’t exist back when I used to routinely do $10/week grocery challenges, and the challenges I tend to run these days are gentler because I do them as part of a larger group rather than a thing I simply subject myself and my family to. Pre-family, I made these challenges “more fun” by making the cot of eating out part of the $10 I could spend each week on food! No real point in a challenge of this type if you can hit up restaurants when you’re not feeling your grocery budget, amirite? I also had a rule that people couldn’t buy me food (restaurant meals or groceries), because too easy to cheat that way. I definitely would’ve cheated, and many people offered to help me cheat so I could engage in more social activities.
Christine’s methods are pretty much the same as the ones I favor, though you do see some bits of cheese and whatnot in this video that weren’t meant to be there. BUT, she doesn’t try to hide that fact and I like her more because for it. What she spent amounts to $5.67 in groceries per person for the week. This means each serving of food cost 81 cents. Christine does this routinely in her non-potato challenges as well, and tends to not go over a dollar per serving even in the most expensive meals she makes.
My general food philosophy creates a situation where even a $10 home-cooked meal for my family of 3 feels outrageously expensive unless there are a ton of leftovers. This doesn’t change for me when we have guests for dinner, and the giant feasts I often like to make when we’re entertaining almost never go over $1/serving. I miss entertaining. This method of meal prep is wholly integrated into my life, and so much so that when Child Tester asked me to read this post to her while I was editing, she was very surprised to learn that most Americans don’t eat this way.
Food Insecurity and Social Isolation
What was awful for me about my challenges was that they were extremely socially isolating. I lived alone during the times I did them and was in undergrad, so I very much wished to have an active social life but struggled to find ways to do it within the confines of my extreme challenges. A massive part of social interactions involves food, so when you can’t be part of it (due to horrible circumstances or your own crazy choices), there can be hardship there. I had tea dates sometimes with my friend Catherine, and sometimes fed others in my home, but largely I spent more time isolated due to the finances of the challenges I set for myself. Poverty is almost always isolating.
When food insecurity isn’t happening because you felt like doing challenges, there’s an element of shame that can be involved in what’s going on in one’s food life. It is embarrassing to not have food security. If y’all go look at Buy Nothing groups, you’ll see shame in every single post asking for food, even though rules always state that you do not need to explain why you want or need whatever it is you’re asking for. There are always explanations in those food ISO (in search of) posts, because in general we tend to view food security as a basic thing everyone can do for themselves If They Just Try Hard Enough. This just isn’t so in many cases, so please try not to feel like it’s a personal failure if this is your situation. There are a lot of reasons why food insecurity happens on both the individual and societal levels, and the oft cited “poor choices” typically isn’t part of it.
Shame is normal, but it’s not what we’re about. We’re about making yums from less.
Since food insecurity really is isolating, reach out to people you know and see if they can help or know someone else who can. Allowing your network to be there for you may help you diversify the foods you have access to. In the cases where reaching out doesn’t get more food into bellies, it still tends to come with a lot of compassion from those you know.
If you aren’t food insecure but know someone who is, reach out and let them know you made or bought way too much of whatever and wonder if they’d help you out in dealing with it. Everyone merits a helping hand when in need, and everyone also has the right to dignity, so if you’re helping someone, please make sure that you do it in a way that doesn’t increase the shame they’re already feeling.
My personal ideology tends to lean heavily toward more collectivist/community-based set of views than individualistic, so I strongly favor community members pitching in for others when possible. This can be a real boon especially for those who’re waiting in food bank and pantry lines for their mystery boxes of full bellies. Everyone can make a difference if they take the time to see where there’s need within their own circle.
Yes, everyone can make a difference. If you are helping someone(s) out, it may be good to go through your spices and include bags of some them. This is my standard practice when I’m helping someone with their food situation, because I know spices usually get ignored.
Just so we all remember, this screen shot of the video shows everything Christine bought except the 50# of potatoes. I may use another video of hers in a later post, because she’s got one that closely replicates the average food box. The food bank local to her offers these amazing boxes that are really not representative of what most people receive, so I don’t want to use her food bank replication video for a food bank skills article. This is kind of a food bank skills article already, so we’ll see how that all goes later.
You’ve probably noticed that nearly everything in this part of the grocery haul is high fat. Fat matters. It matters a lot from a nutrition standpoint, even when we aren’t looking at how high fat foods can keep you full longer or that the mouth feel of high fat food is intrinsically more satisfying. We all know the numbers, because we’ve all grown up with nutritional labels. I personally was a huge fan of the Fruity Pebbles nutrition labels when I was growing up, as I read them almost daily while eating my dry cereal. I don’t like milk, and didn’t as a kid either, so I always eat cereal as a dry food.
But just in case you didn’t grow up around moms used had calorie counting books and you don’t read labels now, carbs and protein net you 4 calories per gram. Fat gives you 9. This means that your body gets a lot more energy from fat than the other two, and it takes longer to burn it off. Alcohol, in case anyone wondered, is 7 calories per gram (with no nutrition!). Probably not relevant in this situation, but figured I’d toss that in here in case anyone needs to know what the booze is doing. I think if I were considering alcohol from a nutrition standpoint, it’d be all beer and no spirits for me.
Also: fat = flavor. Accordingly, how you use fat can change how the same foods taste to you, and that matters. It matters all the time, but it matters more if you are at risk of or experiencing appetite fatigue. That’s why we spent so much time looking at fats as spice above.
This challenge may look tough, but there’s really a lot that can be done with what she bought! Whatever culture or subculture (both, even!) you come from may yield different potato ideas (or beans, or rice, or pasta, or whatever the base staple you’re dealing with is) than the video does, so exploring the foods you grew up with and the foods of other cultures can often yield preparation methods that you aren’t used to. Different is good, y’all. In case anyone forgot this, local libraries tend to have a lot of cookbooks, and availing yourself of this free resource will help you diversify your food life. There are single-food cookbooks on just about anything you can imagine, even walnuts (FYI: excellent book!), so you should be able to locate a cookbook that aligns with your own situation.
Should I do separate articles for rice and pasta? Y’all let me know in the comments if so.
Such a pretty bottle of oil! jonathan ocampo/Getty
Staples
Christine says in the intro that some kind of fat, salt, and pepper are what she assumes everyone has for the purposes of this challenge. She typically also includes flour, and that does come up in the video while she’s making potato pancakes, despite it not being mentioned in the intro. I probably would forget to mention that in my intro, too, because I really do just assume everyone’s got at least a bit of some type of flour. If you do not have flour, though, I’m gonna tell you how to make some in the next section below.
Beth Macdonald/Getty
Making Flour
Making your own is not always particularly fun or easy, and especially if you don’t have a grain mill (I don’t, nor do I have space for one, though I really want one!) but if you do need some flour to thicken sauces, make some pancakes, or whatever, there are ways to do it.
If you really do have all these potatoes and not a different base staple, you can make potato starch! I never peel my potatoes first like the link says, but I do of course wash them. I almost never peel my potatoes because a stunning amount of nutrition is lost when they go in the bin instead of being eaten. Doesn’t mean you can’t peel yours if that’s what you prefer, though.
The potato parts themselves I use for hash browns, latkes, or even to make mashed from (including colcannon!). Rice? We’ve got you covered. Oats? Ditto. Buckwheat? Sure thing, though I doubt most people have whole buckwheat laying about. Beans yes also. You can do it with canned beans, but it’s labor intensive: you have to first puree your cooked beans, then dehydrate them, and then pulverize them into flour.
It should be noted here that in the bulk foods aisle where you just get however much you need of whatever they sell that way (really hard for me to ignore the candy parts of those aisles), you may be able to get your flours more cheaply than you’d be able to buy them pre-bagged otherwise, and certainly without the labor of making flours yourself. If the bulk flour is still too costly, it may well be worth the labor to make some of your own as needed.
Tom Hermands/Getty
A note on the spice packets: because Christine is starting the challenge with only salt and pepper, this is the most efficient use of her food budget. If your meal plan is taco-centric/similar and you don’t already have the several spices you need to make it, taco seasoning packets are cheaper in the short term and you should snag some while you’re at the store. Ditto the other kinds of packets that would fit in with your meal plan more affordably than multiple jars of spices.
My friend Amanda once told me that spice packets are important for people with storage problems, because no space for as many jars of spices as one might otherwise like to own. That had never occurred to me until she said it, but storage space is always an issue no matter how big your home is.
If you can find $1 per trip to the store(s) to buy a condiment, spice, or similar to diversify your flavor combination options, this will save you money long-term. If you can’t (or don’t have enough spice diversity for other reasons), buy the packets! They are worth it!
Don’t forget the bulk aisles here, too. The prices they show on the jars tend to be pretty OMG, but since you’re never buying more than a little bit, you often can get spices for pennies instead of dollars. I used to always buy cardamom and other similar spices this way, because I could spend 35 cents on a good amount that’d last me a while instead of a $7 jar that’d last maybe twice as long as the bags I was buying through the bulk aisle. Now I buy my cardamom in ethnic shops where the prices are more in line with my own budget. This is true of most spices I like to keep on hand, so if your area has any kind of ethnic market, go check out their spice aisles and see if they may be helpful to you.
Ingredients! Christian Bowen/Getty
Ingredients!
Eggs: Yes. If you are on a serious budget and can eat eggs, eggs really are the best bang for your buck. Lots of great protein and fat, tiny per unit cost. It would be impossible for you to get as many meals from a nutritionally equivalent amount of meat as you can from eggs for the same cost. I love that eggs nearly always play a prominent role in Christine’s extreme budget challenge videos.
Meat: “I couldn’t afford it this time.” Facts. If you are on a tight budget, you can’t afford meat. Certainly not in any kind of quantities that would allow you to consume meat-centric meals, but possibly not at all. In America, there is a tendency to favor Meat as the Star meals over meals with smaller, integrated quantities of meats, so a lot of people forget that budget eating generally favors vegetarian and vegan meals, even if meat fits in the budget at all.
Chorizo: if you eat pork, you really can’t get a cheaper meat that offers more flavor than these tiny chubs do. When Ross cooks chorizo, he always uses the whole package (I buy the same brand shown in the video despite preferring the more dry cured varieties of chorizo), but when I cook it I tend to use about a quarter of of the chub. He is usually using it to make queso fundido con chorizo, whereas I am using it as a spice in most instances. It’s so rich in flavor and so fatty that there’s rarely a need for a lot of this sausage in a given recipe. Christine uses half a chub at a time, and that is the same ratio I use because her family is 6 people whereas mine is 3.
Save your chorizo fat, too. Ditto if you have bacon, sausage, breakfast sausage, or other fatty cuts of whatever meat. Jars of various fats are all over my kitchen and in my fridge because I really do regularly use them as a base spice. When I have a particularly fatty cut of meat, I usually trim off the big pieces of fat before I cook the meat and toss the fat in a bag in the freezer to cook with later.
Shelley Pauls/Getty
Beans: the refried beans thing… LOVE IT. These are a default food in my house, as you saw above, because we all will eat them, all will enjoy them, and it’s very easy to make a lot of different kinds of meals with them. Ditto whole beans, but omg refried yes. Spices again matter here, because they change the flavor of the beans, no matter how the beans are prepared.
I’ve never cooked my beans the way Christine did before frying them, but I’ll have to check it out! They’re probably extra level yes, and I don’t know why I’ve never used Knorr in my beans when I always have it on hand. All that bouillon is an inexpensive, massive flavor enhancer (spice!), and it will change how your beans taste. I tend to be more heavily reliant on fat selection than spices since I almost always spice my beans (if meant to be refried beans) with cumin, coriander, thyme or oregano, and lots and lots of salt and pepper. I’m boring that way. The method Christine lists is much more exciting!
Erik Dungan/Getty
Tortillas: in my experience, tortillas are the least expensive breads on the market. They’re versatile, delicious, and can be used to make a lot of the same-same meals feel very different emotionally. Being tired of tacos might mean you eat burritos or quesadillas instead, or you might just slather margarine or butter on them and nom out. I sometimes will eat plain rolled up flour tortillas as a snack, though that often leads to a full plain tortilla meal because tortillas are delicious.
You know what? That’s a lie. I don’t sometimes do this. Plain tortillas are one of my favorite snacks. It may be a common sight in my home to witness me wander off with a bag of tortillas and return to put a much thinner bag away when I’m done snacking. I have to be careful not to ruin my appetite for actual meals this way, since I’m always telling Child Tester not to ruin her meals with too many snacks. Of course, you want to model the behavior you want to see whenever possible, so I do my best not to eat every tortilla in the house in one sitting. It’s hard, though.
Maybe you have corn tortillas, since way more bang for the buck on that front, and you might also like to make nachos since you can cut and fry (or bake!) your tortillas into chips. Lot of flexibility here to be sure. Or perhaps not cutting before frying or baking so you can enjoy the unsung glory that is tostadas. Since we’re talking about tortillas, those of you who don’t know should be aware that tacos guisados are tacos filled with stew. I make these to use up leftover stews and it’s always a beautiful experience where no one has a single complaint about what happened for dinner. If you look at the wide array of how tacos guisados happen in Mexico, you really can use any stew you’ve made, whether you made the stew for that or you’re just trying to deal with some leftovers. A lot of the time, my tacos guisados are really Middle Eastern fillings inside beautiful corn tortillas.
As a head’s up, you can very easily make your own corn tortillas (flour too, though that requires a different flour and more ingredients in sum). Wal-Mart sells their own brand of masa flour for $1.98/4.4# bag (other brands go up to $2.88 for that weight), and that bag will make a lot more for the money than you will spend if they’ve been made for you. The cheapest bag of 80 corn tortillas I saw on their site was $2.68, so if you have it in you to make your own tortillas, you really can save some money. Corn tortillas only need masa, water, and salt, and you do not need a press to make them. It’s easier with a press, but you can use other household objects or even do it by hand. Hand shaping is the traditional preparation method, though much less common than it used to be.
Also, let us not forget enchiladas. You could make trays of cheese and potato, bean and cheese, bean and potato, bean, potato, and cheese enchiladas, and lots more. Those cans of chili and chili sauce would make an excellent sauce/topping for enchiladas, too! If you don’t have it in you to cook your tortillas in oil or the sauce before making enchiladas, you can opt instead for New Mexican style enchiladas, which stack the tortillas in layers with filling in between, instead of rolling the filling inside each tortilla individually. Some people call this “enchilada casserole,” but it’s actually the OG enchilada. Ross always thinks I’m making that up, but I am not. It’s later in colonial Mexican history that the rolled enchiladas turn up and become ubiquitous. So if you don’t want to do modern enchiladas, do them the older way for less work and same deliciousness!
Stijn te Strake/Getty
Dairy
Margarine: I’m not a fan of this, because it strips a lot of the dairy out of the dairy. This is a fine choice, however, when butter isn’t affordable. It really does still have some milk in it (I checked), so it’s still a helper in terms of making potatoes nutritionally complete. Imperial is often one of the more costly brands, so if you’re in the margarine realm, buy what’s cheapest. Name brand shopping and frugality are usually at odds, so don’t waste those precious pennies on a label.
Evaporated milk: I’m a firm yes on this. I mostly use it for quiche, but I’m not gonna pretend I haven’t rehydrated it before to use for other things, or just used it for other things. Dairy is dairy, and dairy can be important for rounding out certain nutritive requirements.
Cream of chicken soup: this is an eminently practical choice here. While it is easy to make your own cream of whatever soup base, it also might not be in the budget to do so, let alone something you’ve got time for. These little cans, especially when not name brand, are a relatively inexpensive way to integrate more dairy (and sometimes meat like chicken) into your diet when it might otherwise be cost-prohibitive to do so.
American cheese: cheese is cheese. Most American cheese is actually cheese, even though it doesn’t feel that way to a lot of people (me included). I acknowledge that this is my least favorite cheese, but I have happily chowed down on it rather than lead a cheese-free life during the times I couldn’t afford the cheeses I liked more. American cheese has the extra bonus of not requiring that you go through a bunch of extra steps to make, say, macaroni and cheese, because it is designed to be melty. It’s also good for the enchiladas, tacos, quesadillas, and so forth that we discussed above. The meltiness of this affordable cheese often negates the need for flour and other expensive ingredients when making sauces.
Sour cream: dairy yay! For potatoes especially this is important, but it matters with other base staples as well. In my experience, sour cream is also the cheapest of the semi-solid dairy options, because yogurt is wicked expensive at the store and not everyone makes their own. Those of you who love creamy sauces on your pasta, salads, bean salads, and so forth will find that sour cream tends to be the most affordable option when making those meals.
Yes, this chili looks kind of gross. That’s because Ross pulled it out of the fridge for lunch and I grabbed it when he was done so I could show you a picture of chili since Getty didn’t have one. They probably had one in the paid section, but I don’t like to buy the “premium” pictures even though Sabrina doesn’t mind. My frugal heart balks a lot at that.
I made this chili the night before and didn’t bother to heat it before snapping a pic. This chili was really weird. A month or two ago, I got a free pound of vegan “meat” from the grocery store. I’m not sure why it seemed important to HEB that I take $8 of free stuff from them, but I saw no reason to say no to trying this product out free-of-charge. There was an epic battle over this once the “meat” came home, with Ross and CT begging me to throw it away and make them “proper” vegan meals if I just want to make something vegan. As you know, I hate food waste, so since I wasn’t going to throw it away and no one I know wanted it, I had to figure out how to hide it in a meal. I mixed it with 1.5# of regular ground beef. I buy the 70/30 meat, because I want to save the fat as a spice and for cooking in general, so there’re some savings in buying the fattier beef beyond its lower cost so long as you maximize what the higher fat beef is offering.
No one noticed, so I view that as a positive in terms of the fake meat quality even though I legitimately cannot ever see myself spending as much money on fake meat as it costs. They ended up finding out the night before this went live that I fed them the fake meat, because I felt guilty for tricking them. They were shocked and appalled that they ate it and didn’t know, and especially Child Tester, but agreed it must be a fairly high quality product because they had no idea it was in a meal and normally do notice any off-book weirdness I serve for dinner. The downside of the fake meat was that this chili really didn’t age properly in the fridge. It was the only variable other than having made it in the Instant Pot (I’m told this isn’t usually an issue with IP chili), so I assume fake meat just doesn’t age well in stews and whatnot. The chili was way too spicy for CT even though I added potatoes in hopes that using up my leftover, roasted chiles wouldn’t be too spicy for her, but Ross and I enjoyed the chili nonetheless. Those roasted chiles are delicious, both by themselves and in the chili!
Yes, I also put beans in that chili. I strongly appreciate the reality that beans in chili make chili go a lot further. Again, my frugal heart makes a lot of decisions for me about how I make different foods, but I suppose that’s useful to y’all and so is a good thing in the end.
Canned chili and hot dog sauce: yes. If you want chili and you are struggling financially, buying a bunch of meat isn’t the ideal situation even if the chili can be stretched. Meat is expensive, so don’t do it. These cans are a short-term solution that work well with some meal planning, and Christine’s right that the chili sauce for hot dogs will stretch it out without anyone noticing, too. Not noticing matters, and especially if you’ve got kids. If you’re buying canned chili, I personally recommend buying the all meat version. The cans generally cost close to the same amount ($1.12 for a can with beans, $1.20 with no beans in the Wal-Mart brand she purchased), and you hopefully already have beans you can cook in your crock pot, stove, or Instant Pot to stretch the canned chili out. Get the meat only kind and add your own beans. You’ll get more nutritive value out of it for an extra 8 cents, plus another quarter max if you go with dried beans instead of canned to add to your cans of chili. Other options for chili instead of potatoes include Fritos (that’s a nod to the Texans I live with), rice, pasta, bread, and corn bread. You can put it on any of those foods, and various regions of the nation have traditions that use something other than baked potatoes or cornbread.
That is my sole gripe with Christine’s purchases in this video. All the other choices are super solid, in my view, and especially within the context of feeding a large family (her family is twice the size of mine). But meat-only canned chili is a better value than chili with beans. Her frugal heart and deep understanding of food make it actual work for me to find flaws in her purchases, so this is all I have on that front.
Meal Planning
You don’t have to meal plan, but you should meal plan at least a little bit. When your food is limited, a plan makes it feel less so, and it also gives you a sense of control and empowerment over what’s happening to and with your meals. Making a plan doesn’t have to be an expansive, stressful thing, and can be as simple as jotting down a few ideas on what you’d like to consider making with your food. I personally find cool menu boards to be stressful because I strongly dislike the rigidity of a set schedule, so I tend to jot down ideas on the back of a receipt or other random scrap of paper that I stick on the fridge. On the days I just don’t know what to do for a meal, those jotted notes give me some direction.
Whether you’re a loose planner like me, who prefers to have a list of options to pick from or you’re a real, proper planner, having some ideas at the ready can make the whole process of eating on a budget a bit more streamlined and a lot less stressful. This is especially nice if you’re working long hours, because you can prep the staple you’ll be using ahead of time. This can save you a tremendous amount of spoons if your life is just too high stress to deal with meal prep daily.
Advance Prep
In the video, Christine cooks a bunch of potatoes ahead of time in her Instant Pot so she can more quickly assemble some of her potato dishes later. She also preps beans. This works well for most staples, too. If you know it’s a bean week, go on ahead and make the whole week’s worth of beans at one time on one of your days off. If you don’t have days off, crock pot is your friend here. Just don’t make kidney beans in the crockpot. That’s not safe.
Potatoes can be baked ahead of time in the oven, cooked in your pressure cooker, boiled, or whatever it is you needed them to be. I find that when I’ve got extra prepped potatoes (typically baked), I wind up microwaving them to warm for a fast lunch; chopping them up for a quick potato salad with oil or melted lard, salt, pepper, and herbs; or mashing them. I love mashed potatoes to a ridiculous degree, which most of y’all already knew. There are more expansive versions of potato salad than I lean toward, like the link above, but sometimes I really just cut the potatoes up, add olive oil, salt, pepper, and call it a day. I like that option because it doesn’t feel heavy without condiments like mayonnaise in them (a food I already dislike for mostly textural reasons), and I often use dried herbs because a lot of the time I just don’t have fresh ones on hand. It’s whatever. Make it your own, with the flavors you like. Also keep in mind knishes, latkes (these get made the same way, whether it’s straight potatoes or with other veg added), and other options like boxty and aloo matar can vary how the potato-y-ness (not a real word, I know) feel to you emotionally.
To be clear: your feelings matter. Being broke doesn’t mean the emotional impact of what you ate doesn’t matter. It matters. Let’s recognize that your needs have import and stop pretending that it isn’t the case unless you make a certain amount of money.
Pasta can be cooked 3-7 days ahead of time, so if you’ve got that ready and some sauces ready (no shame in the jarred sauces game), meals are a snap! Don’t forget, also, that leftover pasta with sauce can be fried for a next level treat meal! I usually cook extra pasta specifically so I can fry it for lunch later. My very favorite version of this is plain pasta fried with tons of lemon pepper and vegetable oil, but most of the time I’m frying pasta that’s already been mixed with sauce. I felt a particular level of increased affection for my Irish-Italian friend Kathleen when I found out this is one of her favorite childhood comfort foods, too!
Lots of other options by varying the sauce and/or spices, and of course there’s also pasta salad. I could live off pasta salad, but family does not share this love. They like pasta salad enough to know it’s a race to get some if I’ve made it, but they won’t fuss about it if I finished all of the giant tub of salad by the time they’ve tried to get in on it. There seems to be a lot of amusement that a tiny human (me, in this case), can eat nearly a gallon of pasta salad in a single day. And casseroles, of course, can’t be forgotten! Pasta is perfect for casseroles basically always, and really does make up the foundation of a lot of casseroles.
Rice and other grains can do the same, and rice should be cooked ahead of time if you are planning pudding, fried rice, and lots of other meals. Oats, if those are your staple, can usually also be prepared ahead of time. You can even make a little extra oatmeal for cake and bread! I personally love oatmeal cakes for easy breakfasts, because CT can grab herself a slice and feel like she’s eating dessert for breakfast and I can feel like my mornings are easier while still giving her something healthful to eat.
No matter the staple food, do as much preparation as you can on a day off of work so your meal prep is easier during the week. Every moment you’re not spending in the kitchen dealing with daily meals is time you have to relax and focus on you and your family!
To be continued…
This seems like a good stopping point, since we’ve got our basic information on staples-based eating taken care of. Ditto thoughts on the ingredients purchased for the video! Next week, we’ll continue along by analysing the choices Christine made in her meal plan and recipes, with suggestions for methods to strip down the cost and/or increase the number of portions each recipe serves, as well as discussion on some of the best tips she offered!
Stay tuned! We’ll continue this next Monday!
