I’ve recently been fixated on the idea of struggle meals, probably because I’ve been struggling both financially and mentally. I’ll share a couple of mine:

-Egg on hash brown patty: as simple as it sounds, bake a frozen hash brown patty, cook a sunny side up egg and put it on top. I like to season the egg with salt/msg, pepper, and garlic powder, then add a few drops of Tabasco sauce. Bonus points if you have avocado to spread on the hash brown first

-Flaming Hot Cheetos taco: toast a corn tortilla on both sides on a pan, then add sour cream and shredded cheese and flaming hot Cheetos as the “meat”, add any other taco toppings you like/have (shredded cabbage/lettuce, hot sauce, etc)

Would love to hear everyone else’s struggle meals when you just don’t have the means mentally/financially to put much effort into cooking

  • communism@lemmy.ml
    1·
    2 days ago

    For effort: not exactly low effort but you can front-load all the effort by spending a couple hours cooking loads of food (I use a 5L Dutch oven for making pasta sauces, curries, soups, stews, etc). Freeze individual portions. Now you can just take out a portion and thaw it when you want to eat. All the aforementioned foods thaw on the stovetop on low heat so you don’t need the foresight to thaw overnight either. I do like to spend a couple hours making the curry/soup/etc to a good quality, but once you’ve invested that time, you’ve got a good-quality curry/soup/stew/sauce to go with zero effort. Takes time to thaw but you can just stick it into a saucepan on low heat and walk away, do something else, come back and enjoy. If it’s on low heat then you don’t need to worry about leaving it too long unless you’re gone for hours then it might have evaporated too much liquid.

    For financial (and somewhat effort) struggle: rice cooker and use lots of rice to bulk out a meal. You can stretch out protein sources, veggies, sauces, curries, etc just by having a high rice ratio on your plate. Even paired with slightly more expensive proteins, bulking out with rice means you can stretch e.g. a duck over many meals to amortise the higher cost. Also rice and beans is a classic poverty food and you can pimp it up a lot with spices and hot sauce—again, the cost of spices and hot sauce gets amortised over many meals so is not that expensive per meal. I buy the big bags of spices as they are cheaper per kg than the little bottles you get at the supermarket.