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

[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.