Eating the proper amount is hard. Eating when you have low time, money, mental energy, or education on cooking is even harder.
This book assumes nothing. Do you know how to turn on your stove? You are properly prepared to use this cookbook.
Just want to share it with more folks!
I can make a pasta meal under $6 that’s generally made to last. The only determining factors is what additives you can add to it. My poor man’s meal consist of the pasta (those $1 ones at wal-mart), tomato sauce (my choice has always been Tomato/Basil/Onion kinds) now the fun part is the additives themselves.
I’ve gotten imitation crab legs ($1 for the snack kind), croutons, chopped turkey franks .etc anything. You can just add damn near anything to the pasta that’ll get you through a bit. I’ve only recently been adding frozen chopped spinach to the dishes, boil them up, dump them in.
All for a reasonable price. I don’t usually pay anymore than $8 for a complete meal.
I’ll share my recipe since it isn’t in the book.
Block of Smoked Tofu
Preparation: cut open the packaging with a knife, put on a plate, and eat with your hands.
Smoked tofu tastes good enough to eat it by itself, and it’s a great source of protein and fat.
I would steal this if I wasn’t allergic to soy XD
I tried tofu once. I didn’t super love it, but I’ll give it another shot
Try baking it next time
I’m in a motel with only a microwave and mini fridge at the moment (and for the foreseeable future) so unfortunately I can’t bake. Is grilled tofu a thing? They have some grills outside
I’ve never been so bold. Maybe if you wrap it in foil with some sauce and veggies.
Yeah, I was thinking it would probably need to be wrapped
I also eat raw smoked tofu blocks sometimes, but try cutting it into strips and sautéing them if you really want to give it a shot. You can eat that with whatever you like your fries with. I tend to go for a sriracha mayo.
Before you cut it up, drain any water from it, and wrap it in a clean dish towel, then press it under a cutting board or something flat for like 20 seconds on each side. If you get extra firm smoked tofu, that should be all you really need to do, but you can also toss it in seasoned flour (or a seasoned 1:1 mixture of flour and corn starch) first
Yeah, tofu by itself can be very boring, but it really shines with the right spices or marinade. The simplest way to make tofu that still tastes great is to cut it up, put the pieces in a container with a tablespoon of soy sauce and some Sriracha (amount depending on your chili tolerance), and shake the container. Then you can use it in many ways, for example by placing it on something that is releasing a lot of steam, like rice that is almost done cooking.
There are so many different types of tofu and different ways to prepare them that all taste vastly different. That stuff is basically a blank canvas.
It was in ramen and got soggy
I find it’s key to squeeze out the water with tofu so it can absorb the flavors you’ve adding. I place it between two plates with some weight on top (a pound or so is plenty) for like 10 minutes, then squish the plates together a bit over the sink to drain and that’s usually plenty. Fish sauce makes a nice flavoring if you’re into that.
PBnJ. 3 ingredients.No cooking. Get lost with any cook book.
Incoming: peanut allergy
Nutella?
Do I look like I’m made of money?
I hate Walmart but honestly they make the best cheaper off-,brand I’ve found.
Skip the PB.
Frozen pierogi boiled then fried with a little butter & eaten with sour cream is a classic
For any sweet pierogi, sprinkle some sugar on top of the sour cream or mix it up properly if you want to be fancy. So damn good.
just pointing out that the russian supermarkets have these for like $2-$3 per pound, basically ravioli. you can dump a serving into a pot of boiling water and then you’re done in a couple of minutes. can top with pasta sauce or even ranch dressing. feeds a while family for the cost of a single fast food meal.
Accepting that’s is ok to sometimes eat a frozen meal has been absolutely instrumental in helping me reduce eating out.
I got caught in the trap of perfect, trying to make tasty, healthy, low-cost meals, and then giving up when I couldn’t just do that every day with no experience.
Yeah I like mixing it personally!
Like I have fresh sour dough bread I made this morning. I then like to use said bread to spoon in store bought curries, pasta sauces, peanut butter, and jelly. Or sometimes I’ll use it as bread for a frozen fish patty to make a sandwich. I also have a big things of rice and beans I made that I will sometimes just plop into a tortilla and call a meal.
If you’re looking for a fun Youtube channel to folliw, check out Sorted Food. They do a lot of silly food challenge videos, but a lot of them have some really good lessons for the average know-nothing cook.
When I went back to college with a toddler and a baby on the way. I started feeling really bad about how I was feeding my kid. I’d do stuff like chicken nuggets with some frozen veggies on the side for example. I told someone about this and they were like “no you’re feeding your kid really well. They’re getting most of their food groups in every meal and getting consistent meals”
Frozen veggies are said to be just as nutritious or sometimes even better than fresh, because they are flash frozen right after harvest and don’t have time to deteriorate. They’re almost certainly better than canned veggies anyway.
Bertolli chicken parm and some garlic Texas toast is almost downright fancy, but it’s 100% dump, heat, eat.
I don’t even boil it. Just put it in a frying pan with some butter, put a lid on it, and cook it at a low temp for 20 minutes.
That’s the depression cure doctors don’t want you to know about.
I really love Mexican food so sometimes my dinner is pulling a tortilla out of the bag and eating it.
If you pass this recipe on please give me credit.
I do the same. Put some butter and Tabasco on it
Maybe brown some ground meat and scoop some on, with some chopped veggies and shredded cheese
This is now a taco. But any taco is a good taco. Carry on
That’s a 2 am staple. Especially when you roll in uo and pretend there’s actually stuff inside.
I would give credit, but your username being CarbonatedPastaSauce gives different expectations to any recipe with your name attached
Microwave it for two seconds first. 😙🤌🏻
Listen buddy, let’s be realistic, I’m no professional chef.
Lul this reminds me, we used to just chuck a few in a plastic bag and warm them up in the micro for like 15 seconds. No idea why, we had a stove and a comal to warm them up.
Then sprinkle in some sugar like you’re ‘salt bae’ o make it a gourmet dessert.
But I haaate waiting those 2 extra seconds 🤪
Thanks for sharing! I feel like I know some folks who need this in case of emergency. Will be passing it along to several friends…
First glance of the thumbnail had me thinking this was a D&D sourcebook.
For a D&D cooking show, check out Delicious in Dungeon!
Replace the vase of flowers with a tub of Vaseline or moisturizer.
I love the concept of this book but was pretty disappointed by the actual recipes tbh.
The title is quite literal. It’s not “some simple tasty recipes”, it’s depression-level-bare-minimum-effort-food ;)
You might not be the target audience. I’m not currently the target audience either.
My wife and I are really into cooking. We have a whole bookshelf of cookbooks, a metrowire rack full of “kitchen stuff” and we use it daily.
There was definitely a time when this book would have been perfect. This book seems to cover a lot of stuff that’s obvious to me now but wasn’t always.
If you’re food plan is a bulk package of Ramen, any help on how to make it not the same as every other day is culinary gold.
Same here. Last time this was shared I found a single recipe kind of interesting, but not enough for me to actually memorize what it was.
Thinking back, it was probably the Mac and Cheese one, and I had already wanted to try to make it anyway (it’s not a very common dish in my country, or at least my circle)
Before I had access to the internet; These were basically my, ‘Don’t die, eat something easy’ list of relatively quick foods back in the darkest, deepest depression days (turns out my brain chemistry reacts horribly to antidepressants and antipsychotics). I was just an anxious dude that didn’t know it due to being heavily medicated.
deleted by creator
Instant Noodles Carbonara
Cook instant noodles in a pan. Chuck an egg in and mash it about a bit.
When the water is nearly all gone, chuck in a load of cheese (I use strong cheddar and grated mozzarella) and a couple of chopped up Peperamis. Mix it all about until the cheese starts burning.
Eat that shit.
Best one: pasta in a rice cooker. Game changer
Wat. How?? I need this hack
Tell me more!
Me too!
Guys it’s literally in the completely free to download book linked in this post, called exactly what it’s called here.
Okay so what can’t be cooked in a rice cooker? I do oatmeal in it too.
I don’t recommend making ice Cream in a Rice Cooker.
Challenge accepted!
Rice cookers the microwave of the 21th century
Missed opportunity to send them a link to this post.
When I discovered this cookbook, I printed it out on regular printer paper and spent an hour or two hardcover binding it with a bookcloth spine and fancy foreign cover papers with gold foil and flocking. It looks so nice!
Then I immediately had to use it because I can manage professionally binding a shitty printout of the Sad Bastard Cookbook, but I cannot adequately feed myself. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This cookbook is great!
Quite possibly the most glowing review/recommendation for the book. Clearly a motivated and talented individual, but they STILL need help cooking!
To add my own bachelor chow to this
Meat of some kind these frozen vegetables And KD
What’s KD, precious?
Mac & Cheese, the polite weirdos to our north call it Kraft Dinner.
Either Kraft Dinner (Mac and cheese) or Kentucky Deluxe. Either way is sad.
what about craft dinner is sad? like I know it’s not top notch but i can’t say I ever felt like it was a bad thing
Found the not Canadian
That doesn’t sound too hard. Most people are not Canadian.
I don’t get this one, surely you can just buy pasta sauce instead and it’s exactly the same steps but better 🤔
Pasta and ketchup is a common meal in Paris according to the one French Netflix show I watched where they ate it and never commented about how absurd it is.
Maybe French ketchup is different than American ketchup?
Almost certainly
It’s almost certainly Heinz, and in no permutation you cannot find everywhere else in the world.
Probably doesn’t contain corn syrup.
Ahh this is not a “go buy” something recipe.
This is a “If you are thinking of not eating because you feel like you have nothing to eat, eat this instead”
This is for people who might not have pasta sauce in their pantry, but most people will have ketchup in the fridge.
Or packets from a fast food restaurant
i once had a long article in a pre-internet punk 'zine about the different meals you can make with free food like condiments… salt pepper water ketchup mustard relish honey etc. it also taught how to use toothpaste as hair gel.
it was eye opening.
It doesn’t happen to still exist does it? Sounds like a very interesting read
i don’t have it. it was at Moby Disc record store in the 1990s, maybe someone collects 'zines.
I’m gonna try to search for it later today. Any details you can add would help a ton
paperback, like half a 8.5 x 11. cover was blue and included a drawing of a payphone. the zine also included punk album reviews.
i see archive.org/details/zines has a ton of sinilar
100%, some of these recipes are “scavenge for food with things in the back of your fridge/pantry”
I actually prefer to eat spaghetti this way instead of the sauce
Would be a great reaction meme if you took out cooking and centered the remaining text
I’ve been trying to learn more about GIMP, so here you go.
Oh wait, was I supposed to leave it slanted?
Dear diary, today the internet delivered. Cheers to your GIMP learning journey!
Works either way, nice work.
Ay, DIY gimp skills make a homemade meme truly tasty
Grandma’s wartime recipe is this, but instead of ketchup you add canned concentrated tomato and equal amounts of water (just full the can once with water again, helps to get the last bit out) and that’s it. We call it red spaghetti, I make it for my kids from time to time, but this variation:
Grandma also added meatballs. Bake the small meatballs in a saucepan and when they’re done, do the tomato thing in that pan, stir well, then add to spaghetti. Can’t lose the grease, amirite…
I don’t like ketchup like that. Fries, sure. Burger? A little. This? This is fucking gross. I also knew someone that put it on their pizza. On the inverse, I can eat yellow mustard straight
