What's a "Poor Person" Food That You Still Eat?

a reply to: JAGStorm

just eat it you big wuss!
EAT IT !!!!!!!!!!!

originally posted by: Rikku
a reply to: JAGStorm

just eat it you big wuss!
EAT IT !!!!!!!!!!!

No............ anything but the old man fake Spam!!!
Yes I'm a wuss!

Chicken hearts

You basically can use them like thigh meat. All that's different is the texture.

Carbonera, or basically the cheap version which is eggs, bacon, parm cheese and spaghetti.

Clammy noodles - can of baby clams, cheapo white cooking wine, butter, garlic into a sauce put on spaghetti.

Fish taco salad - catfish nuggets cut up, breaded, fried, served on greens with some avocado and crumbly cheese. Add sauce as you desire

I make pea soup out of the ham bone when we buy a half a ham at less than a buck a pound. I do not like the expensive hams and I also don't care for the spiral cut hams cheap or not.

I make bone broth out of marrow bones from the half cow we buy, then make really good minestrome soup or french onion soup out of it. We make lots of soups, we buy whole chickens when on sale, usually under a buck a pound and I debone the breast and thighs and wing tips and toss all the scraps into a pot with some onions, celery, garlic, spices, and cabbage and make broth to make soup or just to make other dishes that need chicken broth.

I make most of our bread and buns and hard rolls, six rolls or buns and a one pound bread made with mostly organic grains costs about a buck and a quarter. I could cut costs by going non-organic, but it would only drop the price of those to about eighty seven cents, not worth the downgrade which results in extra glyphosate residue in the grains caused by preharvest treatment of the grains.

We can afford to buy all of those ingredients in good quality equivalent to the quality we make, but it would cost a real lot more to do it. Organic grassfed bone broth is expensive. So are organic breads, and those organic breads taste like crap compared to the bread I make. We do buy some store made bread from one store which they make from frozen dough, one of their frozen bread dough brands they buy is very good tasting, not much of the bitterness from the herbicides and pesticides in that bread. A bitterness that even sugar cannot hide.

Both the wife and I like to cook real food at home instead of going to the restaurants and being disappointed. They have a real good restaurant here that sources it's beef from the farmer we get our cow from, it is good, I have tasted some leftovers my daughter had. But it costs about sixty bucks per person to eat there and that does not include the alcohol, in fact it does not even cover the cost of the coffee, just the meal and water. Plus the tip on top of that. Why would we pay a hundred forty bucks for a dinner for the two of us that is about the same we can make at home for about twenty five bucks...and ours includes a pot of coffee, one pot of coffee at home costs about thirty cents worth of Hills Bros grounds.

We eat like kings and stock up on stuff that we regularly eat when they are on sale...we have enough money to pay full price, but what challenge is there to that. I like when pork chops are on sale for under a buck, and ten pounds of Gerber leg quarters are under five bucks. We have a vacuum packer, and lots of bags for it we bought on sale, less than seventeen cents a bag after eleven percent off.

I like to consider myself thrifty, we do not waste hardly anything food wise...but the food the wife and I make is so good, we tend to eat too much. We make lots of freezer jam and give it away to the kids, some friends, and relatives who want some. That is not cheap, just like our beef, when you give over half of it away to others.

That reminds me, maybe this weekend we will take a turkey out of the freezer, soak it in salt brine, then cook it in the smoker. Again, we give half of it to the kids and grandkids.

I just put all new brake lines, brake hoses, and new calipers and brake pads on the car I gave to the granddaughter, it cost about a hundred thirty bucks to give a car away, we put all new lines in the back about five years ago along with new brakes. Just turned the drums on the brake lathe I gave to my brother when I sold my shop building, it saves a lot to do your own rotors.

We also like ramen once in a while and also eat macaroni and cheese from a box...the cheap stuff at fifty cents. It keeps us humble and even though that mac and cheese cleans us out, it reminds the wife and I of how it was when we were young and broke all the time because we spent all our money going to the bars on the weekends.

originally posted by: JAGStorm

originally posted by: Rikku
a reply to: JAGStorm

just eat it you big wuss!
EAT IT !!!!!!!!!!!

No............ anything but the old man fake Spam!!!
Yes I'm a wuss!

When you slice spam really thin and fry it in a frying pan with butter till it is a little crispy, it is real good on a sandwich. My wife dislikes spam except she loves it that way. After frying it crisp like that add it into a grilled cheese sandwich. It is actually better than fried Ham. Our blind cat who only eats bacon and virginia smoked Kretschmar deli ham likes thinly slicedfried spam too.

Escargot. In wine and butter with garlic.

More than a century ago, a French immigrant imported some classic brown snails from "The Old Country". A few escaped and now my state is, literally, crawling with them..."free range".

Just grow some "snail-bait" plants (be sure to go Organic!) in your garden, and you'll have a near endless supply of tasty mollusks ready to hand.

Do remember to purge your crawlees for a few days in cornmeal before cooking them.

And the shells are reusable!

When I was growing up we didn't have much money, so Mom used to make this dish she called American Chop Suey. It was basically hamburger, macaroni noodles and a can of tomatoes with garlic and other spices. It was okay, and it filled you up, but I always remember it smelling better than it really was. She also made hamburger gravy a lot, served over mashed (boxed) taters. I liked that. Lots of black pepper, and man, I'd eat that stuff up!

I remember once Dad proclaiming we would never eat Oleo again, only butter, he didn't care how much it cost. That was a great day! Real butter or death. Mom would guard that butter with a baseball bat! Get into that butter and she'd bust your knees.

Lamb was always cheap where I grew up in Wyoming. They called it 'wether lamb' which meant it was really mutton more than lamb. That was always a treat. Turkey was always cheap too, and they used to have these loaf things which were part white meat and part dark. Loved that stuff with some gravy on it.

Mom traveled a lot back then (she was a big tournament bridge player), and when she was away Dad would make "beans". They were pretty much whatever beans he found laying around, with whatever stuff he could find to put in them. I always called it "Whatchagot Beans". Still love beans.

In college, my middle name was 'Ramen'. I could probably list 1,000 different ways to prepare ramen noodles. All my buddies loved some of those concoctions. Probably one of my strangest, and it was really good too, was cooked ramen noodles, drained and then simmered in Buckhorn beer, slices of government cheese melted in and some cheap tequila with lots of black pepper. Hey, you went with what you had!

There's a great YT channel out there called something like 'depression cooking'. This lady has all sorts of really good recipes.

originally posted by: JAGStorm

originally posted by: Atsbhct
a reply to: JAGStorm

Name brand Spam is crazy expensive here. I've never actually eaten it. There's a rip off brand called... and this is very original... Kam. 😂 My grandmother liked making sandwiches with it.

I have a very gross off brand Spam story.

I am a super smeller, seriously like a bloodhound.
I purchased off brand one time and almost vomited upon opening it.
Smelled 100% like an old man. I still to this day wonder if someone fell in, or lost a hand/arm/leg in processing.
I'm convinced there was human in there.

🤮 God, I feel bad for you. The world is rarely a great smelling place.

Soylent Spam.

a reply to: ketsuko

Ooohh. That's fancy cheap food. Sounds good!

My grandfather loves chicken hearts and gizzards. The texture is a little weird for me, but he'd fry them in a little butter and eat like a kind.

Beef heart or liver is where it's at for me, offal wise.

a reply to: rickymouse

I love pea soup. It's one of those old fashioned staples here. But I only like it if it has fresh peas in it too. I put them in at the end and blend them up a little with the immersion blender.

Sounds like you guys are living the life.

I can't change my own rotors yet, but when it comes to mechanics, I've been burned so many times taking my car anywhere myself. Now I only take it to one kid who tinkers in his back yard. We pay him about $40 an hour plus parts and that's CHEAP where I am. But for a 17 year old, that's a ton of money. I'll be sad when he ages out of it. 😂

This handicapped guy has a YouTube channel where he deals with cheap foods. It is called ' The Wolfe Pit '.
He makes corny jokes, but he taste tests frozen dinners, makes cheapo meals from bottom dollar food products.

a reply to: Atsbhct

Question: Does 'poor person' count as a poor person food?

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

If you gotta eat, you gotta eat good.

a reply to: AccessDenied

We had that last night due to the thread but we didnt have hormel and this brand Staggs? Stuggs? lemme see Stagg. It was too sweet. Should have compared sugar content to the other brands but we bought it for our 'emergency' pantry.
Now when we restock I will make sure its less sweet. Even after putting in thai chilis. Wasnt terrible just not as good as the other one....

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

I love the depression cooking grandmother!

What is "government cheese"?

a reply to: Atsbhct

🤮 God, I feel bad for you. The world is rarely a great smelling place.

Soylent Spam.

I knew when both of my parents were going to pass because I could smell their body chemistry had changed.
I could smell Parkinson's on my dad too.

I don't talk about it much because it freaks people out, but I know what deodorant people are wearing, soaps they used, shampoos, etc.
But you are right most smells/scents are not nice!!

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Turkey was always cheap too, and they used to have these loaf things which were part white meat and part dark. Loved that stuff with some gravy on it.

Was it in a little aluminum loaf pan and all pressed in there?!!! I remember that and I loved it!!

a reply to: Atsbhct

A poutine and a steamie, all dress, dats-it-dats-all !!!

a reply to: Nothin

Omg yes. I'm having such a hard time putting you to a province though. When I think steamies, I think of the ol' Quebec dep.

But that talk is all newfie!

originally posted by: chris_stibrany
a reply to: AccessDenied

We had that last night due to the thread but we didnt have hormel and this brand Staggs? Stuggs? lemme see Stagg. It was too sweet. Should have compared sugar content to the other brands but we bought it for our 'emergency' pantry.
Now when we restock I will make sure its less sweet. Even after putting in thai chilis. Wasnt terrible just not as good as the other one....

Hormel is not a brand I can buy here. Stagg is the most popular one. But I honestly either use my homemade chili, or I buy it from Wendy's restaurant and use that.