GoonSquad
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16 Aug 2012, 8:33 am
16 Aug 2012, 8:50 am
OliveOilMom
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16 Aug 2012, 11:29 am
When you have very little money to feed your family on, you tend to plan meals a certain way, or at least I do. I decide on the meat first. Because I'll be buying cheaper meats I have a limited selection of how I can cook them. Hamburger meat comes in three types here. Ground beef, chuck and round. Beef is the cheapest but it's got the most fat in it. If you don't have much to spend then you will probably use hamburger helper with that meat, or possibly spaghetti or meatloaf. Hamburger helper is $1.87 a box and not all of it requires milk, some only calls for water. It's high in carbs.
After the meat is decided on, if you aren't making a "helper" dinner then you need a side dish. Potatoes are usually good for that or rice. If you make potatoes though you need gravy. And if you're making gravy you might as well make biscuits. So, for supper you could spend $6 on a package of cube steak and batter and fry it, then make mashed potatoes, gravy from the steak drippings, and biscuits. That doesn't cost that much and it's satisfying.
For most of the poorer folks around here, supper is the main meal of the day. A lot of people don't eat breakfast and if you work then sometimes you can't afford to buy lunch so you wait until supper to eat. Supper needs to at least feel like a full meal. You need different textures and types of food to make you at least feel like you are full. The things that are cheap are fattening. A bag of green beans and a bag of potatoes cost about the same, but you can stretch the potatoes farther and they are much more filling than the beans are.
Hot dogs are .98 cents and buns are 1.10 so all you need is chilie (.57 cents) and an onion (.85 cents) and you got chillie dogs. Eight of them for under five bucks. A bag of frozen fries is $1.23, so add that in and you have supper for your family. It's not healthy but it is cheap.
Try giving yourself $10 a day to spend on food for not only yourself but your whole family and lets see what healthy choices you can make.
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16 Aug 2012, 4:04 pm
16 Aug 2012, 4:52 pm
16 Aug 2012, 5:03 pm
GoonSquad
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16 Aug 2012, 5:29 pm
16 Aug 2012, 5:34 pm
16 Aug 2012, 5:38 pm
I live in a metro area of nearly 500,000 and public transportation here is a joke. Even if you could catch a bus to the supermarket, you aren’t going to be able to manage 1 or 2 week’s worth of groceries on a bus (especially not while wrangling kids…). Hence, you will be forced to buy groceries every few days. That represents a huge amount of time for working poor with no car.
As far as your food recommendations go, poor folks eat plenty of eggs when they can get them… not so much salad (which requires other condiments to make palatable). And 5 cans of tuna a week? Really? A man of 200lbs would be in danger of mercury poisoning if the consumed more than 3 cans a week for a long period.
Skipjack tuna contains very low levels of mercury. My cat's food is almost exclusively made of tuna and even though cats are more sensitive to mercury poisoning than humans, she has never had any problems and at age 13, she's very healthy.
I've never had any problems carrying groceries for the week on the train. The only European country with worse mass transit systems than Norway is Turkey.
Are you feeding a family, and trying to deal with children while carrying your food?
I do. We are off to the farmers markets today on the bus because I don't drive for enviromental reasons.
16 Aug 2012, 5:39 pm
GoonSquad
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16 Aug 2012, 7:01 pm
After the meat is decided on, if you aren't making a "helper" dinner then you need a side dish. Potatoes are usually good for that or rice. If you make potatoes though you need gravy. And if you're making gravy you might as well make biscuits. So, for supper you could spend $6 on a package of cube steak and batter and fry it, then make mashed potatoes, gravy from the steak drippings, and biscuits. That doesn't cost that much and it's satisfying.
For most of the poorer folks around here, supper is the main meal of the day. A lot of people don't eat breakfast and if you work then sometimes you can't afford to buy lunch so you wait until supper to eat. Supper needs to at least feel like a full meal. You need different textures and types of food to make you at least feel like you are full. The things that are cheap are fattening. A bag of green beans and a bag of potatoes cost about the same, but you can stretch the potatoes farther and they are much more filling than the beans are.
Hot dogs are .98 cents and buns are 1.10 so all you need is chilie (.57 cents) and an onion (.85 cents) and you got chillie dogs. Eight of them for under five bucks. A bag of frozen fries is $1.23, so add that in and you have supper for your family. It's not healthy but it is cheap.
Try giving yourself $10 a day to spend on food for not only yourself but your whole family and lets see what healthy choices you can make.
Those meals sound so discusting. I shudder to think of eating it.
I was going to comment on how good a meal of chicken fried steak, gravy, biscuits, and mashed potatoes sounded... Not good for ya, but REALLY good to ya!
Different strokes, I guess.
@Kurgan,
I don't know where you get your info, but people around here are not throwing away food (at least not poor people). Hunger is an increasingly common problem as many Americans fall out of the middle class.
OliveOilMom
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16 Aug 2012, 10:53 pm
After the meat is decided on, if you aren't making a "helper" dinner then you need a side dish. Potatoes are usually good for that or rice. If you make potatoes though you need gravy. And if you're making gravy you might as well make biscuits. So, for supper you could spend $6 on a package of cube steak and batter and fry it, then make mashed potatoes, gravy from the steak drippings, and biscuits. That doesn't cost that much and it's satisfying.
For most of the poorer folks around here, supper is the main meal of the day. A lot of people don't eat breakfast and if you work then sometimes you can't afford to buy lunch so you wait until supper to eat. Supper needs to at least feel like a full meal. You need different textures and types of food to make you at least feel like you are full. The things that are cheap are fattening. A bag of green beans and a bag of potatoes cost about the same, but you can stretch the potatoes farther and they are much more filling than the beans are.
Hot dogs are .98 cents and buns are 1.10 so all you need is chilie (.57 cents) and an onion (.85 cents) and you got chillie dogs. Eight of them for under five bucks. A bag of frozen fries is $1.23, so add that in and you have supper for your family. It's not healthy but it is cheap.
Try giving yourself $10 a day to spend on food for not only yourself but your whole family and lets see what healthy choices you can make.
Those meals sound so discusting. I shudder to think of eating it.
I was going to comment on how good a meal of chicken fried steak, gravy, biscuits, and mashed potatoes sounded... Not good for ya, but REALLY good to ya!
Different strokes, I guess.
@Kurgan,
I don't know where you get your info, but people around here are not throwing away food (at least not poor people). Hunger is an increasingly common problem as many Americans fall out of the middle class.
Country fried steak is good, but I don't like Hamburger helper. I like one type of it, that taco type with the topping. Thats all. Now honestly country fried steak, potatoes, biscuits and gravy is a pretty cheap meal to cook. So is fried chicken instead of the steak. I do pork chops the same way usually. Battered and fried. That makes them seem more substantial. Now, to people not from here that might seem nasty tasting, but to us it's not.
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OliveOilMom
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16 Aug 2012, 10:57 pm
After the meat is decided on, if you aren't making a "helper" dinner then you need a side dish. Potatoes are usually good for that or rice. If you make potatoes though you need gravy. And if you're making gravy you might as well make biscuits. So, for supper you could spend $6 on a package of cube steak and batter and fry it, then make mashed potatoes, gravy from the steak drippings, and biscuits. That doesn't cost that much and it's satisfying.
For most of the poorer folks around here, supper is the main meal of the day. A lot of people don't eat breakfast and if you work then sometimes you can't afford to buy lunch so you wait until supper to eat. Supper needs to at least feel like a full meal. You need different textures and types of food to make you at least feel like you are full. The things that are cheap are fattening. A bag of green beans and a bag of potatoes cost about the same, but you can stretch the potatoes farther and they are much more filling than the beans are.
Hot dogs are .98 cents and buns are 1.10 so all you need is chilie (.57 cents) and an onion (.85 cents) and you got chillie dogs. Eight of them for under five bucks. A bag of frozen fries is $1.23, so add that in and you have supper for your family. It's not healthy but it is cheap.
Try giving yourself $10 a day to spend on food for not only yourself but your whole family and lets see what healthy choices you can make.
Those meals sound so discusting. I shudder to think of eating it.
To each their own. People tend to eat what they are taught is good. My husband had to learn how to eat when he moved down here because his mother STEAMED all her vegetables. He didn't know how they were supposed to be cooked (all day). He didn't know that food was supposed to have actual flavor too. His mother actually once said to me in an accusing sort of way "You just eat what tastes good, not whats good for you don't you!" I said "If it don't taste good why the hell would I eat it?"
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auntblabby
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16 Aug 2012, 10:58 pm
16 Aug 2012, 11:31 pm
OliveOilMom
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17 Aug 2012, 12:24 am
Ooooh now I hate steamed vegetables. I cook them for about 6 hours in a pot of water with fatback, an onion and a potato. What each of us likes to eat, I assume, is based on what we grew up with. Is that how your Mom cooked them, steamed?
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I'm giving it another shot. We will see.
My forum is still there and everyone is welcome to come join as well. There is a private women only subforum there if anyone is interested. Also, there is no CAPTCHA.
The link to the forum is http://www.rightplanet.proboards.com
