But as long as it gets men to cook it’s not all bad.
It’s because we’re fucking BROKE, IOM MCCORKLE! WE’RE FUCKING POOR AND THIS IS ALL WE CAN AFFORD!!!
I’m not a Zoomer, but I sometimes do that when my wife isn’t hungry. Throw browned ground beef in the instant pot with for example, some black beans, kimchi, and Korean BBQ sauce. One minute on high and Bob’s your uncle.
First of all, cut the ground beef with ground pork, and save a ton of money. 50/50, or maybe 2/3 Beef, and 1/3 Pork. They’re a good combo.
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Chili: Add beans (kidney, black, red, a combo), add a 50 cent spice packet from the dollar store, and a can of diced tomatoes. Add some water, and let it simmer.
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Spaghetti Sauce: Add a jar of sauce from the store. Simmer for a while. Add other spices to taste. Or not.
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Goulash: Add pasta (not spaghetti), and diced tomatoes, and some spices. Add a little liquid. Maybe sprinkle mozzarella cheese over the top. Bake it COVERED in the oven for a while. Take the top off near the end to let the cheese get brown, and the liquid to steam off.
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Meatloaf: Take your raw beef/pork mixture, and mix it by hand with a bunch of herbs like chives, parsley, Italian herbs, garlic, salt pepper. Mix in Bread crumbs, or even torn up chunks of stale bread. Form it into one big loaf in a loaf pan, or get small individual sized loaf pans. You can even use muffin pans. Bake them at 350°F until they’re done.
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Use it to make burrito bowls, like at Chipotle. You know what you like, and you know how to make it, you’ve seen them do it a million times. You just have to learn to make rice.
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Tacos: You know how to make tacos.
6 super easy, super cheap recipes to make ground beef way better. Experiment with them, add veggies, different spices, wine, Worcestershire sauce, BBQ sauce, etc. What’s in the fridge?
You can even substitute ground turkey or ground chicken, or non-meat options. Make your buddies buy the ingredients, and you’ll cook it, and cycle through these and a few variations and experiments. You get free food, and they get good food. Make them clean up, too.
And if you meet a good woman, she’ll be super impressed that you can actually cook.
This is the Way.
Ground pork is good for $4.49 in my area. 80/20 is $6.79. a 50/50 mix would cost costs by 16.5%. But for me the real benefit would be the added depth of flavor from the pork.
You bring a lot of good variations on this.
80/20 is about $6.99 where I am, and I can pick up a 1 pound roll of ground pork at Aldi for around $3, so the difference is even more significant where I am.
John pork is my go-to a lot of things and that the price is almost doubled has really hurt.
For tacos specifically, you can stretch it even further by mixing in a can of refried beans once the meat is cooked through
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This whole conversation is dumb
our society is dumb.
it loves cheap gender-based attacks and blaming individual choices for failures of our society at large.
instead of taking about stagnating wages and impossible education/healthcare costs, we just mock young people for being poor. and since young men are poorer than young women, subverting traditional breadwinner gender roles, they get mocked even harder.
on the radio yesterday NPR was mocking people for not going out and spending $50 on two drinks. telling gen z that pre-gaming, nips, etc were all ‘cheating’ at life, and they should just ‘grow up’ and fork over their money they don’t have to overpriced bars and restaurants because they are ‘killing the restaurant industry’.
it’s absurd. personally I am doing quite well, I’m in a top 15% income bracket, but all around me society and my peers are constantly acting like anyone who isn’t making a top 5% income is a failure of a human being, because if you aren’t filthily rich you are clearly lazy and pathetic! I’ve even had people straight up tell me I shouldn’t have been born because my parents were not rich and couldn’t pay for my college and give me a downpayment on a house…
and i’m in my 40s. i can’t imagine how awful it is to be like 25 and in a mountain of debt and being told by society/friends/family you’re a pathetic loser for trying to climb your way out of it by eating cheap food.
Well said, I share a similar view.
One of the good ones.
Yep, exactly what I called it too. My wife still says I’m making bachelor chow whenever I do some low effort ground meat with finely chopped veggies and some seasonings.
Exactly what came to mind. It’s funny how this show ended up being about 50% dated 2000s pop culture references and 50% extremely accurate social parody
Bachelor Chow…now with flavor!
Gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to an amazing new product.
I remember this shit being delicious when I was a kid, but a couple of years ago I bought a box on a whim to try it out and it was almost inedible.
It’s just noodles and spices lol
And so much salt.
MSG is the key to ultimate flavor.
Mock me all you want Hamburger Helper slaps.
Yeah, I’m eating stuffed bell peppers because I’m from the future: 1970.
No thanks
Who can afford ground beef?
I recently started to mix in granulated soy protein into ground beef whenever I’m making burger patties. It’s way cheaper and granulated soy has a lots of vitamins. Makes it a better “alternative”
Honestly. SO wanted a dish with it. Picked up 2lbs it was $17
Yeah no thanks
Ground b
eefillionaire. It’s surprisingly affordable, but for the best quality cuts, you have to work for it.Why is the “we don’t know what to do with these leftovers, so we shoved 'em in a grinder”-meat so expensive?
I use ground turkey instead. Its under 2 dollars a pound if you buy it frozen. Doesn’t do all the things ground beef does but you can still make spaghetti without going into debt.
Hit up your local restaurant supply if you can. $4.20/lb here currently in a 10lb tube and I usually hit a sale for under $4.00/lb for 80/20. A lot of those places don’t require a membership, you just need the freezer space.
Beefmaxxers
Never heard of boy kibble.
Cooking is good for all genders.
All genders can be boys, I’m not gonna stop them
makingwork@lemmy.ca What about Bachelor Chow?
I remember this, yes!
So it’s real.
Less red meat. Take care of your cornhole.
If it’s seasoned, turkey meat can make a good substitute. But not for burgers and the like.
But turkey meat is gross.
I’ll eat beans and rice all day though lol
I imagine myself breaking out the cast iron getting it hot with some EVO. Throwing some tofu chopped into cubes and seasoning in a bowl, mixing it up, browning it on the cast iron. Then maybe throwing a can of beans 9n the cast iron because I like to make a mess.
Usually I’ll follow this up with something fattier to reseason the skillet cuz tofu is so lean and EVO only does so much for the cast iron, in my experience.
Then wrapping it up in the lettuce leaf. Maybe Parmesan cheese or feta for mine.
EVO has a low smoke point that makes it less optimal for cooking. It’s an excellent drizzle or dipping oil. Cooling, not so much.
This is something that is repeated a lot, but it is simply not true. No, you shouldn’t use it for high heat cooking. However you can definitely sweat onions and do other low-mid temp cooking. If your oil doesn’t smoke when it hits the pan, then you’re fine. I cook with EVO every day.
Regular olive oil is good for cooking. EVOO goes bitter and should be used for finishing. Not saying you can’t, just saying it’s wasteful and worse-tasting than the alternative.
Agree to disagree. I cook with EVOO all the time, and it does not taste bitter to me (and I regular cook with avocado oil, so I have a comparison point). It’s not “wasteful” if you buy a Costco sized bottle of their cheaper stuff. Yeah, don’t use your artisinal EVOO to fry something up. Kirkland brand EVOO is perfectly fine for frying and finishing, dressings, etc.
What would you recommend for this recipe using tofu?
I use avocado oil for tofu because I like the crispy, crunchy feel. Avo can go high heat without any bitterness.
Avocado oil? Thats my go to when frying stuff.
Use EVO for seasoning. For cooking I use sunflower oil (cheaper and has almost no taste)
We make a turkey meatloaf (and by we I mean my wife, this one is hers) that is fantastic, we haven’t looked back. And we eat ground beef and red meat still, maybe once a week or every two, but the moistness of ground turkey just works so well in a meatloaf, because it doesn’t dry it.
I’m a gen z man and I don’t know what the heck is this thing
It’s just rice with ground meat, which is nothing new. That’s cheap and easy to make in bulk and it freezes well. So someone decided to call it ‘boy kibble’ and it’s become a viral thing as large numbers of men realize they are in fact capable of operating a stove to create something tasty without burning their house down. .
As if cooking was so difficult… if you can follow a recipe.
There’s two sides to that.
On one hand, you’re right- someone who is motivated to learn can easily pick up cooking.
On the other hand, it’s not just ‘follow a recipe’. There’s a lot of sub skills that someone who CAN cook can easily take for granted.
Let’s say your recipe calls for one chopped onion. So the prospective cook goes to the grocery store… but there’s lots of onions. There’s white and yellow and sweet and there’s little ones and big ones. Which one to get?
And then you have to chop it. Do you peel it first? How much to peel? Discard the ends or center or use them? What’s the best way to chop it? How big of pieces do you want to end up with?None of these are DIFFICULT things to find or learn. But ‘follow a recipe’ isn’t just a one step operation for a newbie cook, there’s a lot of other stuff that has to be learned along the way.
In that regard we do our kids (pretty much all of them) a disservice- our schools teach kids that learning is a boring and unpleasant activity that involves hard mental work with little practical reward and thus should be avoided when possible. And we grade their efforts- failures are punished as disgraces, not treated as opportunities to learn. So I don’t entirely blame the dude who grows up out of that and doesn’t feel super motivated to dive into something new.
I also blame schools for not teaching basic cooking and financial literacy to kids. I was given a semester or two of ‘home economics’, the only things I learned in that class were 1. the difference between a spatula and a pancake turner, and 2. that we’d be yelled at if we didn’t dry the sink basin (even though it was about to get wet again). That curriculum needs a serious rethink.
Those step can be learn the usual way: trial and error.
I’ve been cooking for years (at home) and I still learn new thing and scree the meal sometimes. But there is the fun part of cooking: the uncertainty of not knowing if this time will be great, meh or a horror.
trial and error
Staying motivated here requires a positive mindset. It requires the person to say ‘it’s okay if this one isn’t good, I will learn from it and the next one will be better, and I will keep improving until I am good’.
That mindset is often not present. For someone without that positive mindset, the process is grueling- each step, each burned or bad dish becomes an F on their report card that kills their GPA, not a fun experience that needs more experimentation.
There’s so much more to it than motivation. If you mess up a meal, that’s money down the drain, and most people (especially those who really should be cooking more often) lack the money to take this kind of risk too often. And when you mess up, how do you know what you did wrong? Was it because I chose the wrong onion? Did I cook it for too long? Not long enough? Did I measure something wrong? Did one of my ingredients go bad? Is it because I bought low quality ingredients? Is there a problem with the minerals dissolved in my tap water? There are way too many possibilities to realistically go through them all by trial and error.
If I were to teach someone how to cook, we’d start with something very basic with very few ingredients, then explore variations where you change one variable at a time to understand how it affects the end results. It wouldn’t be through recipes.
And odds are that not knowing how to cook has increased the depth of ones poverty and risk aversion by the time they need to figure out that cooking is mandatory. The longer one waits to cook the more money it has cost them.
the gun part of cooking: the uncertainty of not knowing if this time will be great, meh or a horror.
You have a strange idea of fun. I’m personally into the part where I get better at it each time.
Type 3 fun is the best fun.
It’s only strange if you don’t like trying new things.
I like trying new things. I find it very strange.
it is. people are too stupid to read instructions.
they also do stupid stuff like think they can ‘make it go faster’ if they turn up the oven to 500 when it calls for 350, and wonder why their whole house is now filled with smoke.
they also irrational cling to bad habits because it was what their mom did or something.
Or they think why preheat the oven and then everything is sad.
Hence “if you can follow a recipe”.
If you replace the mince with beans its regular poor person food.
Okay but hear me out:
What if you did mince… and beans! Possibly even assorted frozen vegetables. We’re getting closer to good food!
Ground beef has long been considered poor people food in the US. It’s gotten too expensive to still feel that niche, but that is the niche it used to fill.
I was just thinking “I need to stock more stuff for variations on rice and beans to stretch since dollars.” But now I know that it’s because I’m poor.
Oh, I’m all about the rice and beans.
Rice and beans are the best. I’m pretty sure I can live off them exclusively if it weren’t so filling and I didn’t have to feed people who required variation.
Mince is cheaper than beans where I live (Germany).
Dry beans or cooked?
What are we living on the Belt?
Red kibble is the best.
I believe the terminology used is “in” the belt
Yeah, I think I mixed it up with Long Island.
That’s not kibble.
Here’s some real Human Kibble™.
I was looking to see if anyone would post this. This one made me seriously naseous when I watched it.
The pelletizing process generates a lot of heat which can harm nutrition retention. A high quality pelletizer is cooled with liquid nitrogen to prevent that from being an issue.
I guess the one Nile Red used in the linked video wasn’t high quality. But I mean, the pellets it made looked crumbly as hell, too.
The visible gears tell me that it’s meant for grains, not powders. They moistened the powder but didn’t use any kind of binder. It’s quality enough for a lot of jobs like chicken or rabbit feed. But if you tried to use it on hops you’d destroy so many volatiles that they could only be used for bittering American style generic beers like Budweiser.
It isn’t claiming to be. It’s saying these dishes are what you can make instead of “boy kibble.”
We had that as children. Called it “Krümelmett” meaning crumbly Mince. With Indian spices. That was a great comfort food.
It’s called Keema Matar, but without peas.
