pls share affordable low budget healthy recipe

mao2708

i am a university student and i want to try to eat healthy but money always seems in the way. I eat lots of instant noodles and have to eat rice a lot so i feel full and i cannot afford variety of fruits/veggies and proteins. please share any low budget healthy meal! thank you !

ms_true

Lentils and beans - filling, cheap, and nutritious way to get your protein. Whatever fresh fruit in veg that are in season or on sale. I usually try to stop myself at two each types of staple fruit and veg, and then one extra of each. Freeze any fruit that is about to go over. I keep most veggies long past their sell by date and throw them in soup.

Buy a new bottle of spice every now and again if you aren't stocked up already. I use oregano, basil, cumin, garam masala, tumeric, paprika, and bay leaves the most often.

Our butcher is very kind and he gives us beef marrow bones for free. I use them to make bone broth soup, which can be further concentrated until it is basically stock cube jelly that you can freeze in an ice cube tray and use to add an amazing amount of flavour and nutrition to soups and stews. Add it at the very end so you don't lose any vitamins. I'm going to make french onion soup with it...yummy and cheap!

Some amazing recipes here:

New Covent Garden Soup Recipes

Asharee011

I totally understand where you're coming from! I just graduated college and I'm still on a tight budget. Follow sales, they are a life saver. I like to buy frozen broccoli and cook it with chicken. Or brown rice with chicken, a little soy sauce and whatever vegetables I have. Chicken is fairly reasonable. Don't forget that you can freeze a lot of meals so the food won't spoil. I'm sorry if this doesn't help but there are also a lot of low budget healthy recipes on Pinterest.

Queenmunchy

crazyravr wrote: »

http://www.budgetbytes.com/

All you need.

Yep! Frozen vegetable blends, canned fish, soups (you can freeze them in portions), beans, lentils, rice, potatoes.

Jnascott

My go to is always eggs. Today's lunch was 2 egg omelet with low sodium deli ham, spinach and pepper jack cheese. I put some salsa on it too.

Jnascott

I also like talapia they sell them in the freezer section individually packed at 4 oz. There is about 10 packets for $6.00 I will get a bag of broccoli and some quinoa (use chicken broth it's better than adding water). This will last you a few meals for under $20 for all of it.

AddieOverhaul

I agree with all of the above. I also suggest buying a bottle of sriracha if you like a bit of a kick. It really adds a lot of flavor to food that might otherwise be kind of boring (like rice).

OldHobo

mao2708 wrote: »

i am a university student and i want to try to eat healthy but money always seems in the way. I eat lots of instant noodles and have to eat rice a lot so i feel full and i cannot afford variety of fruits/veggies and proteins. please share any low budget healthy meal! thank you !

You are apparently used to cooking rice. That's great. Even better if it's just plain old bags of rice and not boxes of precooked stuff with "flavorings" included. Some folks have mentioned beans. Dried beans are a terrific, inexpensive nutrition source and they combine with rice in good sciencey ways. It's no coincidence that rice and beans combine in every cooking culture on earth.

Once you are cooking one kind of rice, it's pretty easy to learn another. There are differences but take them one at a time. You've got a lifetime after all, and basmati rice isn't like a cell phone they're going to stop making next year. If you've got basmati, brown long grain and a short or med. grain white rice in your repertoire, there's a lot of stuff you can do with them. Same with beans. They're all different, but they all cook the same way. The main difference is how long they take. Presoak long method, short method or not at all. Doesn't matter, they're just done when they're done not when the timer goes off.

You can live off just rice and beans. You can live healthier if you add vegetables. Here's a secret. Peppers are vegetables that are often part of the rice & beans dish and jalapenos are pretty cheap, 89 cents a pound up the street from me. Most grocery cashiers only recognise bell peppers, in three colors, and jalapenos. So if you bring them a big bag of poblanos or fresnos they almost always ring them up as jalapenos even though they cost 3 times as much.

About protein. Part of that sciencey stuff is that although both rice and beans have protein but, neither are complete. But they combine to form complete protein so you don't need as much animal protein as you would without either or both so you don't need as much cash at the checkout counter either. I can't understand how all those cooks in every corner of the globe figured this all out thousands of years ago.

Spices on a budget warrant a discussion by itself but I'm tired of typing.

Cooking on a tight budget gives you opportunities to learn skills that you just might not learn after the constraints are loosened. You can do better than instant noodles. Don't get discouraged.

Oh, one more tip from an old guy to a young gal. Don't get hung up on recipes. Nobody has all the ingredients. Read them as inspiration if you want but adapt them to what's in your cupboard at the moment, What's on sale. What's in season. What's in your wallet. And what you like.

GreenTeaPotato

Potatoes. Cheap and super nutritious starchy vegetable. So many ways to cook them. Easy to store. Eat them with your beans and rice.

jtangcs

crazyravr wrote: »

http://www.budgetbytes.com/

All you need.

This website is great! I agree with everyone - look for sales. Although I'm not on as addict of a budget, I still prefer to buy sale products (and sometimes in bulk like Costco). Then I'll pre-marinate and freeze the food.

phxteach

Depending on your location, there may be community gardens you could tap into or look at starting a patio garden for fresh veggies. Also, if there is a dollar store, often they have produce and canned products that can be nutritious, even organic. You just have to pass right on by the junk food. I follow a coupon blog and she put together a list of things that were available to make a week's worth of reasonably nutritious meals from the dollar store for an inexpensive amount. Oatmeal is fairly inexpensive and can be bought in bulk at a Sprouts, Whole Foods for less than $1 a pound.

phxteach

For spices, you can buy just the amount you need for a recipe in many stores - Winco ?, Sprouts, Whole Foods (more $) or check the health food section of larger chain stores such as Kroger/Fry's. Also, I forgot to say that there are some amazing organizations like Market On the Move which you can get 60 pounds of produce for $10. I do not know if it is in all locations, but you cannot beat this for value. The organization buys surplus food from growers who would have to just till it back underground and distributes it through local organizations which are often church based.

flowerbob

Hi there,

You don't say where you are, but eating the fruits and veggies that are in season is a lot cheaper here in the UK. You might also find that some things are cheaper frozen, if you have access to some freezer space.

I have cooked several of these:
http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/collection/cheap-and-healthy
and they are usually very good, and I also love recipes by Jack Monroe. Her chickpea and chorizo burgers are lovely, and you can leave out the chorizo to make them super-cheap.
http://agirlcalledjack.com/

Good luck!