Recipe: quick pasta with tomato

[ladyjanelly]

A few days ago, a friend of mine (hi  eldercat! )  was talking to me about this show where two adults and their eight kids eat on $150/week and how boggled he was at that.  And I was like "Seriously?"  And went into low-cost meal planning, throwing ideas out to feed a family of 10 in a pretty nutritious and cheap way.

Now see, the thing is, durimg the time I was 19-28, I was continually broke (getting rid of my ex, and his salary, actually made it all better, but that's another story).  During part of that time we were living on a mattress in a friend's dining room, and other deeply annoying places.  

Anyways, I've eaten so much cheap-ass food that my tolerance is really low.  I will never again be able to eat any of the following more than once or twice a year:

Box macaroni and cheese
Ramen
Cool-aid (generic)
Cheap-ass kielbasa
Those cheap rice or pasta mixes that come in a bag
Bologna
Jarred pasta sauce (except the kind you get at Central Market that runs like $5/jar, god I'm a snob)

So I started thinking of ways to make cheap food that doesnt look or taste cheap.

Quick pasta with tomato

1 box pasta shells
2 cans diced tomato
1 tsp chopped garlic in oil
6 lg white mushrooms, sliced
1 tsp olive oil
Mrs. Dash tomato, basil, garlic seasoning
McCormics traditonal italian seasoning

Cook the pasta according to box instructions, drain

In sauce pan, heat oil, add garlic and mushrooms, cook until garlic is all gold and stuff
Add spices (about 1/2 tsp of each)
Add tomato.  
Cook until boiling.

Add pasta and eat.

It's all fresh-tasting, despite being from a can.  Big flavor, little money.  $3.50 for a side-dish for six-eight (assuming the oil and spices are already in your cabinet).  Add cooked chicken breast chunks to make it a main dish.

Actually, Kendra and I each ate it for dinner, and I put away enough for two more dinners for me or her.  So yeah.  Pretty cheap.

Oh, buying your own fresh mushrooms in bulk instead of pre-packed, pre-sliced is about half the price and eliminates getting the styrofoam box that the recycle place near us doesn't take.

And I don't use the canned tomato that comes with the garlic and basil and whatever because 1) wow. Expensive and 2) Um, I didn't ask them to put freakin' corn syrup in my tomato mix.  Fuckers.

Comments

[embroiderama]

Mmm, yeah. And you could add a can of white beans to the other stuff in the sauce pan and have more of a main dish, too.

(BTW, I got your angel story, but today was--as you say--deeply annoying, and now I want to curl up in bed and read comfort food RPS AUs, so I haven't read it yet. :\)

[ladyjanelly.livejournal.com]

WooHoo. I never remember white beans. Yay for cheap-ass protein.

I eat a lot of black beans and rice with a spoon of salsa and a dash of lime juice. It's like--every third meal or so. Also, lots of bran flakes with soy milk.

Not that I"m vegetarian at all, I just got out of the meat habit when I was having that stomach issue.


It's all good. Angel story is...old. I swore I read it like a year ago and didn't see what was so wrong with it, but i just reread the first chapter or so and cringed the other night. :)

Yeah, The Starving Days

[cattraine.livejournal.com]

People don't believe me when I tell them that if necessary I can live off twenty dollars worth of food for a month. I remember at one point qualifying for about seventy-five bucks of food aid a month and having dollars left over every month, because even though I was now eating great I bloody knew how to budget every dime and exactly where and when to shop. I still keep a bale of ramen as emergency rations,LOL.

Re: Yeah, The Starving Days

[ladyjanelly.livejournal.com]

And honestly, assuming things were good enough to have some staples in the spice cabinet, it can really be tasty too.

Ugh. Ramen. I think I'd rather eat egg noodles with salt.

[moogielion.livejournal.com]

When I lived with Rachel in Austin we never threw anything out, so I have a few tips for using stale things:

Stale tortilla chips: Break them up a little and put them in a casserole pan with chicken and verde sauce, then bake. They reconstitute into tortillas with the juices from the chicken and verde.

Stale Cheerios: Crush and use instead or in addition to breadcrumbs for meatballs. I think we did 1/2 and 1/2 and it was yummy.

[ladyjanelly.livejournal.com]

Thos are awesome uses for yucky stuff. I almost think the chips might have crushed and gone into meatballs too maybe.

[spinfrog.livejournal.com]

it's true! pasta is cheap and filling, and there are so many different shapes of it, and assuming that your family isn't watching their carbs and doesn't hate 99% of all vegetables, it would be easy to come up with a new, pretty, nutritious and creative way to serve it every day :)

[spinfrog.livejournal.com]

Also: omg, beans! Another really cheap way to eat (just soak the black ones for extra long to be easy on your digestive track)...or lentil curry! Yey! Or replace pasta with rice! Why did my family have to be so damn picky, man :/

[ladyjanelly.livejournal.com]

Heh. My beans always sprout when I pre-soak them overnight.

Maybe I'll try black beans in the slow-cooker. It warms the kitchen/computer room nice too. 50cents a can for the pre-cooked ones at walmart isn't too bad though.

I'm on the low end of calorie consumption (I eat about 1400/day if I like food that day) so carbs aren't a problem. Kendra is broke and living with us so she'll eat what I eat. My husband is doing Atkins again and is costing like twice what Kendra and I eat together in a week (not counting my chick-fil-a breakfasts every day).

[spinfrog.livejournal.com]

Oh man, Atkins is froggin' expensive!

I usually do the fast soak method - boil for 5 min (10 for black), let stand for an hour (2-4 hrs for black), then drain, rinse, cook on really low temp for about 7-9 hrs (I usually leave them on the stove over night :)

[ladyjanelly.livejournal.com]

It is. And I don't like it. But Sam feels like he'll lose weight on it and I try to be supportive. I have a hard time filling a menu with meat and the few veggies he can eat.

Thanks for the cooking advice. I'll have to try it out.

[janissa11.livejournal.com]

Yes yes yes! And you can add tuna in oil (drain it off, of course) to give it some heft. Lots of black pepper. Mmmmmm. Or black olives and anchovies. Mmmmmmmmm. Well, okay, that makes it a puttanesca, but anyway. Good stuff! And cheap!

[ladyjanelly.livejournal.com]

Are anchovies cheap? The tuna maybe I could do.

Dude. Tuna and blk olives in it would rock.

[elmathelas.livejournal.com]

Macaroni and tomatos is a popular food in this household. We usually just have it as 2 ingredients. Whole-wheat pasta + diced tomatoes from can. Heat, serve with parmesan on top. Considering that most Americans get more protein than they need in a day and that the whole 1970s imperitive of combining proteins to make sure you get all the right amino acids in one meal (like, milk + whole grain, rice + beans, natural combinations, usually) was proven wrong-- your body is smart and won't throw out good protein just because it's imcomplete, it'll wait for the complementary protein to come along-- I don't worry about adding meat or beans, thoguh sometimes we serve with a side of vegetarian sausage. I'm about 90% vegetarian.

Part of eating very cheaply also has to do with accepting that the food will not be The Best, all the time, but it will be Great according to world standards. Store-brand frozen broccoli, in the paper-wrapped package, is around 70-90 cents. The Birds Eye broccoli is easily twice to three times as much. Is it better? Yeah. But do I really care five minutes after I've eaten it? Not really. I don't eat the store brand and then go "awww, damn, I wish I had splurged on Bird's Eye." Awesomely, many nutritional studies indicate that frozen is almost as nutritional as fresh.

Also, a great money saver for me is to never ever ever ever ever buy juice in any form, or butter or margarine. Juice has almost no nutritional value and is expensive. Water is free. And butter and margarine you can always live without unless you're baking. I rarely buy dry cereal, since it's not cost effective compared to bulk oatmeal or even just regular food for breakfast. Eggs are nice and cheap and also nutritious, and retain their cost efficiency even if you throw away most of the yolks.

BLAH BLAH BLAH. I admit that now I'm a nurse I don't stick to the same stringint rules as I had as a student, especially regarding fruits (I bought strawberries AND cherries last week, oh my god, so expensive but so worth it) but the principles are still there.

[ladyjanelly.livejournal.com]

My food-diary program thing says that I've eaten an average of 1250 calories/day, at 49 grams protien, 201 carbs and 31g fat.

I eat a chicken and egg burrito for breakfast every morning, and the rest of my protien is from soy milk or black beans.

I'm a big fan of store brands. Sometimes there's more water in them tough, and the price difference isn't enough to cover it.

We buy V8--I used it as a "add 40 calories to the day" back when i wasn't eating enough, and got used to it.

We use OJ for taking L-Glutamine powder. otherwise juice is pretty useless.

Being a nurse, I was wondering if you'd seen a link between tomato/citrus consumption and herpes/shingles outbreaks? I'd been eating a lot of tomato and now I have shingles on my ear. Just if you know offhand. My doctor put me on some very effective anti-viral pills.

[motorwill.livejournal.com]

Fan-tastic.
You know what's also good, those bags of 15 (or is it 13) Bean Soup. Really damn cheap, and doesn't leave me feeling full-but-greasy/queasy.

[ladyjanelly.livejournal.com]

Oooh. I'll have to try one. I've seen them but never got around to trying it out.

[lekkerstuk.livejournal.com]

Pasta is always the right answer! Something I almost always add to pasta is basil, but I buy the frozen kind (like mini ice cubes, each cube is a Tablespoon of fresh basil). It lasts a long time and I've made pesto with it that tastes just as good as fresh basil. It's only $1.29 for the whole tray, too.

And I vote for walnuts for my favorite, cheapest protein. I put the things in damn near everything.

[ladyjanelly.livejournal.com]

Mmmm, basil. I've never seen the cubes. I'll have to look for those. I loves basil. The polution's so bad here that growing fresh herbs is gross. You have to harvest the green-baby leaves or they're all dirty from the air and I don't trust just washing them off.

Walnuts. I'll have to get some. The hubby's doing Atkins and I'm looking for more to feed him.

[lekkerstuk.livejournal.com]

I get my basil cubes and my walnuts from Trader Joes, my favorite store. I hear they are slowly spreading east in case one pops up in your neighborhood.

I don't know much about Atkins, but I think most nuts are okay. Walnuts are really "meaty" and add a lot of bulk and body to salads and sauces.

I hope you are having better luck eating since you found out about your ulcers.

[ladyjanelly.livejournal.com]

I'll look at Central Market next time I'm there picking up ground bison. :)

I'm just having a hard time giving Sam the variety he likes when he's eating ATkins. I think it's a stupid diet, actually.

I'm eating more. I'm at like 1300-1500/day, and my energy level's back up, only sleeping 8-9 hrs a night like a normal person. I kinda think they overestimate the calories a person burns. I am maintaining my weight on that intake and a fair amount of exercize. I'm eating kind of mild, and laying off the sodas when I can.

Thanks for asking. :)

[lomer.livejournal.com]

I make something very similar for cheap dinners. Add some ground beef and it becomes even more delicious.

Eating cheap isn't always fun, but it's pretty do-able.

[ladyjanelly.livejournal.com]

Ugh. Ground beef is on my "no more" list. I'm such a snob--we eat ground bison or chicken breast for meat. I'd rather not meat at all than go ground beef.

It's not that we have to eat cheap, it's just fun to play with the high-quality, high-taste possibilities.

[lomer.livejournal.com]

I can live off of ground beef, pre-packaged food, cheap chicken, and a shelf full of herbs.

Tomorrow I think I'm going to make cheap and easy pork chops. It's basically porkchops with a ketchup/woosherster sauce coating with cut onion and rice. It sounds disgusting but it's delicious!

[ladyjanelly.livejournal.com]

I had bad ground-beef days. I just bought and used crazy amts of the cheapest stuff Icould find for a long time and now I'm so over it.

I'll check out the price of pork chops next time I'm in the store. That sounds really good. Maybe in the slow cooker.

[lomer.livejournal.com]

I'll try and write down the exact reciepe for you when I make it. It'd have to be a "remember as I do it" reciepe since my family apparently isn't a fan of writing things down. *g*

And when ground-beef is bad, it's REALLY bad. So I can understand it losing it's appeal.

Oh another great cheap reciepe is chicken and couscous! Bake a cheap chicken breast with some lime on top for flavor. Get a box of couscous, and chop up any left over veggies from the fridge. Add it to the couscous as the chicken cooks. When the chicken and the couscous is done, chop up the chicken, put it in the couscous, add some raisins and you have culinary gold! It's so delicious, and it only takes about 30 minutes to cook. (Because of the chicken, though if you're vegetarian, skip the chicken and it takes about 15 minutes instead!) Dammit, now I'm hungry!

[eldercat.livejournal.com]

I just visited their site and this actually made it onto their FAQ page. apparently it was just bad editing that made it SEEM like it was $150 a week.

"How do we spend only $150 per week on groceries for a family of ten? We spend that much ONLY at one store. In other words, due to editing, it seems that we only spend that much period...not entirely true! I shop at discount stores locally (great source of organic foods extremely well priced) as well as at Sam's club every other month or so. We also do not buy our meat at the grocery store. We buy it in bulk at organic wholesale places. I really can't say what it avererages per month total."

[ladyjanelly.livejournal.com]

But--but--I could do it. I could feed 10, really.

And dude. They've got 10 people to feed. How can they not budget for that? Unless the husband's skimming from his work and they don't want to get in trouble with the boss and the IRS.