recipes for cheap and healthy cooking?

[Davidius]

I don't live in campus anymore and therefore no longer use a campus meal plan (I was getting tired of the food in the Dining Hall anyway!). I'm now on a budget and am trying to eat healthily, avoiding white flour and sugar as well as fried foods as much as possible. Does anyone know of an online database which has recipes that are both healthy and cheap to put together?

 

[ChristopherPaul]

My wife could help you with specific sites.

Healthy and low cost: Beans, Lintels, rice (brown), and oats.

 

[Scott Bushey]

Salads. Tofu. Tuna. Salads.

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

David -- Check out this thread.

 

[ChristopherPaul]

Try white rice...millions of poor asians cannot be wrong!

White Basmati rice is a staple in my house, but it basically has no nutritional value (negative or positive). Brown, although not as yummy, has better health benefits.

Get yourself a $20 rice cooker and a large bag of Basmati and you will be full without putting your wallet on a diet.

 

[Davidius]

White Basmati rice is a staple in my house, but it basically has no nutritional value (negative or positive). Brown, although not as yummy, has better health benefits.

Get yourself a $20 rice cooker and a large bag of Basmati and you will be full without putting your wallet on a diet.

I'm definitely on the rice plan already, except I've just been buying bags of whole grain rice and cooking a lot of it at the beginning of the week and eating it with vegetables and sometimes hardboiled eggs for protein. It just gets old after a while, so I'm trying to find ways to spice things up while remaining healthy. I could do white rice as well, but I'm really looking to get the best deal for my dollar as far as nutrition is concerned, that is, to be full and not develop vitamin deficiency.

 

[Davidius]

David -- Check out this thread.

Thanks for pointing me to that thread. Looks like there is a lot of info there.

 

[Chris]

I don't live in campus anymore and therefore no longer use a campus meal plan (I was getting tired of the food in the Dining Hall anyway!). I'm now on a budget and am trying to eat healthily, avoiding white flour and sugar as well as fried foods as much as possible. Does anyone know of an online database which has recipes that are both healthy and cheap to put together?

A trip to Asia gave me a great appreciation for Ramen-type noodles. Use your imagination - you can do lots of good stuff with them.


Do you eat venison? I ate a truckload of venison in college. It's good, it's good for you, and it's cheap.

 

[Davidius]

A trip to Asia gave me a great appreciation for Ramen-type noodles. Use your imagination - you can do lots of good stuff with them.


Do you eat venison? I ate a truckload of venison in college. It's good, it's good for you, and it's cheap.

I may have had venison once or twice at some point but I don't remember it very well. Is it something I can just look for at Food Lion? In what form would you normally buy it?

 

[Chris]

I may have had venison once or twice at some point but I don't remember it very well. Is it something I can just look for at Food Lion? In what form would you normally buy it?

You don't really 'buy' venison.

You buy a rifle, a hunting license, and you go out and 'collect' it.


fresh venison

 

[ChristopherPaul]

A trip to Asia gave me a great appreciation for Ramen-type noodles. Use your imagination - you can do lots of good stuff with them.

I agree Ramen is good, but David qualified his request with "healthy". Which Ramen is not.

 

[Chris]

I agree Ramen is good, but David qualified his request with "healthy". Which Ramen is not.

If you leave off the 'flavor packet' in exchange for maybe a bit of canned chicken, they're not too bad.

The 'flavor packet' will both kill you and preserve you at the same time, though.

 

[Scott Bushey]

If you leave off the 'flavor packet' in exchange for maybe a bit of canned chicken, they're not too bad.

The 'flavor packet' will both kill you and preserve you at the same time, though.

and the sodium content is insane!

 

[ChristopherPaul]

If you leave off the 'flavor packet' in exchange for maybe a bit of canned chicken, they're not too bad.

The 'flavor packet' will both kill you and preserve you at the same time, though.

Yes in that case I agree. The flavor packet is salt on steroids.

 

[Davidius]

You don't really 'buy' venison.

You buy a rifle, a hunting license, and you go out and 'collect' it.


fresh venison

Oh. I don't think that's really an option for me right now. I'd love to be able to go hunt for food but because of time constraints and the money to buy a gun and ammunition...plus being able to "clean" whatever I'd shoot...

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

Oh. I don't think that's really an option for me right now. I'd love to be able to go hunt for food but because of time constraints and the money to buy a gun and ammunition...plus being able to "clean" whatever I'd shoot...

My father (who lives in New York state) has a neighbor who hunts deer but likes to share the meat. Being an anthropologist, my father (who got his Ph.D. at UNC-CH, btw), likes to prepare the venison using only "stone age" Indian tools. We have benefited from getting refrigerated venison packs sent to us -- they last a really long time and they are delicious.

 

[Michael]

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

My father (who lives in New York state) has a neighbor who hunts deer but likes to share the meat. Being an anthropologist, my father (who got his Ph.D. at UNC-CH, btw), likes to prepare the venison using only "stone age" Indian tools. We have benefited from getting refrigerated venison packs sent to us -- they last a really long time and they are delicious.

I had a venison burger this week -- not cheap, but delicious.

 

[LadyFlynt]

menus4moms.com

 

[toddpedlar]

I'm definitely on the rice plan already, except I've just been buying bags of whole grain rice and cooking a lot of it at the beginning of the week and eating it with vegetables and sometimes hardboiled eggs for protein. It just gets old after a while, so I'm trying to find ways to spice things up while remaining healthy. I could do white rice as well, but I'm really looking to get the best deal for my dollar as far as nutrition is concerned, that is, to be full and not develop vitamin deficiency.

Make friends with an Indian (an India Indian I mean) and you'll have NO problem with variety and spice in your rice... (and you'll get to use Basmati, to boot!)

 

[toddpedlar]

Venison...pff...we don't have venison camp down here. We just have deer camp. We hunt deer. Venison's for yankees.

Mmmmm.... deeeeeeeeeer meeeeeeeeaaaaaat.


We have 80 pounds from a recent successful outing at the local locker being made into steaks, roasts, bratwurst, polish kielbasa, breakfast sausage, hamburger and jerky...

hmmmmmm... should be ready any day now.

 

[bookslover]

and the sodium content is insane!

Just like V-8 Juice. Tasty stuff, but there's enough sodium in one of those puppies (882 mg in a can) to give you a stroke...

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

My father (who lives in New York state) has a neighbor who hunts deer but likes to share the meat. Being an anthropologist, my father (who got his Ph.D. at UNC-CH, btw), likes to prepare the venison using only "stone age" Indian tools. We have benefited from getting refrigerated venison packs sent to us -- they last a really long time and they are delicious.

My father wrote an article about deer that appeared in the Buffalo News last year:

Bambi Strikes Back

By Robert Myers

Call it Bambi’s revenge. And call me unsentimental, but hitting three deer in two weeks makes me nervous when driving at night. I was lucky because the attacks, I mean collisions, were only nerve-wracking, not dangerous. Is it my imagination, or has the deer situation become worse since 9/11? Better yet, I think we should call the problem cervine terrorism.

Everyone I know has a deer story. I hear complaints about deer from people who live in suburbs, towns, and even some cities, but you must live in a rural area and drive deserted roads at night to understand the impact the large deer population is having on our quality of life. Yes, they eat our flowers and shrubs; they annoy and disrupt us. But most importantly, they keep us on edge and scare us, especially, during the peak months of the mating season.

Rightly so. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reports that over 150 people in cars died from violent encounters with deer in 2003 (the latest year for which statistics are available), a number which has increased steadily since the mid-1990s. On their side, some 1.5 million deer collide with our vehicles each year, causing more than a billion dollars worth of vehicle damage. The sad results of this slaughter cover our highways. There is something wrong here.

We have thought of them as silent victims for too long. We assumed our clashes with them were accidental, mindlessly random collisions between two objects in the wrong place at the wrong time. We have carefully monitored their numbers, benignly managed their population growth, and imposed rigid limits on how many could be taken in brief hunting seasons. We refuse to raise them for food or allow their meat to be sold on the open market, preferring instead to import tons of venison from distant deer farms, primarily in New Zealand.

Most insidious of all, we have sentimentalized them, teaching our children to address them with ouu’s and ahh’s, and projected the sympathetic emotions evoked by that most powerful anti-hunting cartoon, Bambi, on an entire species. Somehow we even confused Disney’s title name for a male deer and attached it to female deer, or to deer in general.

Now we need to reconsider our relationship with deer, and to see them as silent, plotting aggressors. Their numbers have reached or exceeded pre-Columbian magnitudes with no limit in sight. They are keeping watchful eyes on us, testing us with broadside and frontal assaults to see how we react or maneuver. They are neither mindless nor random in their movements. They will sacrifice themselves, male or female, old or young, in an instant. We would be better served, i.e. protected from their encounters, by comparing them to suicide bombers, with all the caution that entails. They are the four-legged terrorists of rural and suburban America.

There is no silver bullet for the problem. Reason and kindness don’t work. Peaceful co-existence has failed. Negotiation is pointless. Building higher, longer fences everywhere needed is impossibly expensive. Birth control measures and longer hunting seasons provoke one animal rights group or another. They feel invaded and want us to leave. Don’t they know we mean well and wish them no harm?

Recently, CNN and USA Today have reported vicious, non-vehicular deer attacks across the country. The most obvious terrorists in the U.S. these days are our deer, those deceptive, doe-eyed insurgents. Perhaps they are working for al Qaeda, in service to Osama. Call Homeland Security, please.

Robert Myers teaches at Alfred University, Alfred, NY.