like I said... not as convenient. If you had to choose either a pot or a pan which would it be? I would rather have a pan(cast iron). You can't cook fried eggs in a pot very easy unless you are deep frying it.
Buy a spun carbon steel wok. Cheap, authentic, last a lifetime, never need to be cleaned quickly with anything but water. Rice wine, rice wine vinegar, 50/50 soy sauce, and rice are very cheap in bulk from asian super markets, last a long time and are the base for tons of meals. Always buy a whole chicken, not off the bone packet stuff. Costs a tiny bit more and you can get 3-4 meals for 2 people out of a whole chicken. Eat well, keep the place reasonably tidy & well aired. Whenever you are not drinking alcohol, drink water (more money for boozes).
Okay, serious mode for food. If there's one thing I know, it's how to eat a balanced diet, regardless of my shitty diet. Vegetables are your best friend, especially grains. Bags of flour are cheap per pound, get wheat or unbleached white. Rice and potatoes are very energy dense and have a high caloric value for their volume. Like wise, if you make potatoes and rice the basis of most of your meals, you'll get fat. If you're already fat, you'll get fatter, unless you actually use that energy. But the real secret to a balanced diet on a budget? Quinoa. It has a complete protein profile, but I'm not certain how hard it would be to get because it's a North American crop. You can live off absolutely nothing but this for a good several months before your body needs micronutrients. Whole grains are easier on the digestive system and not as fattening. Beans aren't as energy dense as a lot of other staples, so if you're trying to cut back use beans for a base of meals. Soups and stews can be very flavourful and low in calories because they're mostly water, but they can fill you up just right. Some of the high cellulose vegetables actually take more energy to digest then they give but fill you up all the same, like celery and whole corn kernels. If you don't chew your corn, it won't get digested but will still fill you up. I'm not certain if you have access to a warehouse club where you live, but they're really cost efficient. For example, here in the States there's one called Costco. 55$ a year for membership, and they sell everything in bulk, like milk is sold in two packs of 2 gallons each. If you're on your own, then it might not be effective when it comes to perishables, but with a roommate or two it could save a lot of money. Especially when it comes to nonperishable food. Moist grains and root vegetables will keep forever in a freezer. Dry grains and legumes like rice and beans almost never go bad, just make sure they stay away from mice and insects, cool dry place and all that jazz. Eggs and cheese are cheap compared to other high-protein animal products, so if you need protein fast then they're your best bet, but they're both high in fat and egg yolks in particular are high in cholesterol. Egg whites however are nothing but healthiness. Sooner or later, you're going to want meat. Whole chickens are the cheapest meat you can get. Pork rumps and shanks are the cheapest cuts of pig. If you're a real man, you'll want real meat. And that means cow. Chuck is (relatively) cheap, but is about as tough as it gets. Cook it in the crock pot for a few hours and it'll be fork tender. If you want steaks, you get rump. Grill it up and use a rub, even a generic store bought rub will add a lot of flavor. Make sure to cut off most of the fat, especially the strip along the side, and then score it every half inch or inch, just make sure you don't cut any meat off or cut into the meat. If you cook bacon in a skillet, save some of the fat in a tin can in the fridge, it'll take months to go bad. Put a small lump on the meat while cooking, spread it around and it'll add extra flavor, then once you flip it it'll just burn off or caramelize. If you don't have a grill, then do it all the same but make sure to get as much of the fat as you can off, pat it dry if you have to because it doesn't take much of it to add a lot of flavor, but that shit ain't healthy. Honestly, when it comes to food, there's far more I know than I can stick in a post. I suppose this covers a good amount of it, but if there's any specific questions ask away. Also, all of the costs are from my perspective living in the Northwest US, so the prices might be entirely different, but everything else should be just right.
Good cheese is not in any way cheap, it is expensive as fuck. But the last time I was in the US, there was nothing even worthy of the name cheese, just yellow rubber. We British take our cheesemaking very seriously, and the cost reflects that. Rump Steak is interesting. As everyone knows, the chart for tenderness and minimal fat content goes: Fillet > Sirloin > Rump > T-bone Flavour goes in reverse. But if you can find a good place to get your steak from, I've had Rumps so tender that I'd have mistaken them for a Fillet, and a good one at that, with not an ounce of fat on it. It's really a case of trying the different butchers and supermarkets around you, because you will find a good one that can give you really good cuts of meat, especially if you become a regular. Same especially goes for bacon. A good pack of bacon from a proper butcher will blow anything a supermarket can give you out of the water. You might pay a premium but you could honestly eat half as much and still get more actual bacon out of it in one serving.
protip: find the cheapest food that doesn't require any preparation, only requirement is that you can eat it months on end. Burger King menu for 2 euros, this is how I roll. No organs have failed recently. Ignore balanced diet bullcrap, vegan hippy propaganda. protip2: get off the computer and find friends, preferably those that can cook. Try to make them pay for drinks more than you do. protip3: find a girlfriend who can cook, split the rent with her. Manly level: Man. Make her do the dishes while sticking it in her pooper. protip4: get the best stereo you can afford, the louder you play music, the more your neighbours will respect you. protip5: stock up on beer, alcohol abuse master race. protip5: Don't bother cleaning the room, just wait until your mom visits, she'll be unable to withstand her inferior female instincts to clean your room. If you fail at 4 out of 5, you're either not a student or beta as phuck.
here's my tip for surviving on a dental floss budget, cook 1-2 WEEKS of food at a time. you wanna make burgers? you make at least 12 burgers and you freeze the extras, you want pasta? you make meat/sauce for 12 servings of pasta cuz reheating pasta is silly just boil some fresh noodles. this way when you suddenly get too poor, or sick, or lazy and don't want to cook you will grab cooked thing from the freezer. also this will keep you from getting lazy and not cooking because even your favorite food everyday will force you to actually cook something different sooner or later. also when it comes to protein not all sources cost the same, im not sure if this is international but here in u.s. of a. chicken drumsticks cost 1/2 as much as the wings. my fiancé and I always joke about chickens with no wings strutting around the farm, we are dark people don't be like us. also there is this thing called bullion it is the marrow and fat of animals in cubes, this contains actual calories unlike the preservative dust in ramen packets, drop one of these cubes and an egg into your ramen (on the stove!) and it truly does approach being a true meal.
Yeah I must admit, sitting down for 6 hours and making yourself like 10 meals to freeze will make sure you save money and eat well for a while.
Marksies do £5 flat rate rump steaks that are awesome. Sometimes a little tough but tasty as hell and you get lots of it. I sometimes wake up covered in blood and smelling of garlic and I figure I just blanked out while eating one because it was so good.
For me it's about the fat. I don't mind it if it's a bit tough, but if there's fat in it (which I just cannot eat, and end up spitting out) I can't deal with it.
err um if you mean chunks of jelly like fat left over after cooking I can agree but, everything most people eat has chunks of fat that you don't notice or mind that much. I mean like... bacon... 50-70% fat(at least here in America). Canadian bacon is just crap... I can't stand calling it that... its more like sweet, fried, thin, meat wafer, that's what it should be called.
You're supposed to cut cut the strip of fat off the side on most steaks, and if you're buying steaks with strips of fat in the middle then you're buying from a bad butcher. Unless you're buying top sirloin or one of the specialized Japanese steaks, but that's another story. Canadian bacon and what you consider bacon are two different cuts of meat. Bacon is essentially any salt cured cut of pork. If you want less fat in the bacon, just get a different cut. Ever eat pork belly? They put it in East-Asian soups sometimes. It's a thick layer of fat then a layer of meat about half the thickness, normally in a total of 4 layers. That's what most American bacon comes from. It's *really* amazing in soups if you break it into tiny bits and let it soak in, but eating fried or grilled pork belly is almost vomit inducing.
I don't mean the strip of fat, I mean small, very difficult to chew chunks within the steak. It's mainly the sirloin you find it in, although sometimes you can get it in a fillet.
Do you mean gristle/cartilage? Chewing on that ruins any meat. Empty, get a frigde/freezer combination that runs efficiently. No idea though if you have to worry about electricity prizes where you are. Get a RealDoll™ if you have the money and are living in the outback. That way your sheep stay healthy.
:/ Pretty sure you shouldn't get that in steak except for in one place which is consistent on every steak cut of that type. Kinda wondering if those were tapeworm eggs or something.
