Favourite cheap meals?
Favourite cheap meals?
I've got a fair few, but I'm starting to get bored of them because most of them have a base of garlic, onion, and canned tomatoes.
That said, I just had chipotle shakshuka. It was pretty solid.
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The combination of beans and rice is pretty much a peasant food staple around the world and I'd recommend getting into that because you can make some really good variations on this, especially if you have a few spices on hand, and I'd recommend cooking a batch and freezing the bean portions so you have ready meals on hand to reach for when you're tempted to order takeout:
Mexican black beans and rice makes for a great base for burrito bowls, just add some cilantro, diced tomato, pickled onions (or raw), sour cream, avocado, roasted poblano peppers, carrot, corn, lettuce etc.
India has a huge array of curried beans/lentils and I'm partial to Mughal cuisine so here's one of my favourite websites for this style of cooking:
https://www.spiceupthecurry.com/category/dals-beans/
Channa masala, palak chole, dal tarka, rajma masala, and dal makhani are some of the absolute favourites. Although it can be expensive buying the spices, if you buy them in a larger quantity from an indian grocer it will be more economical in the long run and once you have your array of spices you'll be set for a long time.
Chinese food is really adaptable and if you can get fresh green beans or frozen soy beans and you're comfortable with a wok, you can make lots of dishes. Just adapt the sauce to what you're making. Some of my Chinese favourites are Yu Xiang-style stir frys and green beans in XO sauce (you can get vegan XO sauce if you hunt for it.)
Here's a recipe for Yu Xiang eggplant that can be adapted to green beans or soy beans (extra points if you throw some tofu in):
https://www.seriouseats.com/sichuan-braised-eggplant-vegan-experience-food-lab-recipe
(Kenji has a video of how to prepare this on YouTube as well.)
Note that with stir frys, you can add in other vegetables too - pretty much whatever you have on hand.
I'd also recommend buying dried TVP mince. You can cut your ground beef with it 50/50 and you won't even notice or, if you want to go all the way with it, here's how to prepare TVP so that it is very close to actual ground beef. There's additional info about adjusting this to be vegan but you can rehydrate your TVP in beef broth if you aren't vegan/vegetarian.
mm yeah I'm already a beanlord and I love a daal but those all look great I had no structure to mine it was just meal + bean/pea of some kind
Remember that when you're making a dal you can always fry some chunks of eggplant or zucchini (or other things like squash or potato) and add them in so you're getting extra veggies. Or if you're tired, even a few handfuls of frozen peas at the end of cooking a plain dal goes really well too.
based and legumepilled
Actually making that image reminded me of one of my favourite desserts which happens to be beans and rice lol.
This is something that is probably more to your taste if you appreciate Asian style sweet bean desserts so you might not love it but there's this Vietnamese dish called Che Dau Trang which is black eyed peas and sticky rice with coconut milk.
Here's one recipe for it but if you're making it on the cheap just use padan essence. I tend to add sugar to the beans and rice and skip the coconut sauce step, opting to pour unsweetened coconut cream over the rice instead because it's simpler and just as good.
Viets eat this hot which is nice in winter but tbh I really enjoy the dish at least as much when it's cold, straight out of the fridge.
Mmm yeah I've tried that before at a restaurant and.. so-so, so-so. Maybe it tastes better homemade. I've got an oafish pallette so other puddings take the cake for me.