I am a student who will start grad school in the US this fall. I was looking for dishes I can cook up on a shoestring budget with ingredients I can get at ordinary American supermarkets near my school, and I thought American home cuisine would be the easiest to cook with cheap ingredients that I can get. So, what kinds of dishes do you eat most of the time?
Edit: My dorm will have a stove and a microwave, along with a freezer, but no oven.
42 comments
This will vary from person to person, home cultural foods (usually from the country your parents may be from) and subculture around food.
Here are some common American home meals though: https://www.tasteofhome.com/collection/classic-comfort-food-dinners/
It depends on the household. In ours, we do lots of veggies, homemade pasta, and homemade bread. Not all households have the time or interest to do so, though.
There are infinite answers to this question.
The real question is, do you have a full kitchen available? Tools and pots and pans? Slow cooker? Most importantly…time? Will you have time to cook?
If not, what resources *do* you have? Then its a fun game.
We probably make something close to what you like now and you’ll probably come up with some new favorites.
I just ate some buttered toast and over easy eggs.
Just cook whatever you can afford, there isn’t really any specialty American staple like you’re thinking.
Just make whatever you eat now
>I was looking for dishes I can cook up on a shoestring budget
Ramen is the time-honored traditional meal of an American college student on a budget.
Man, the running gag in the US is that broke college students eat instant ramen. I graduated from undergrad approximately 10 years ago, but it was true then and what I hear from my soon-to-be college student nephew, it’s still the same.
I’d say most Americans budget meals are comprised of a lean protein, veggie and a starch. So chicken, broccoli, and rice would be a simple meal. I used to eat that every day back when I was really into weigh lifting. It’s cheap, easy to make and you can make a weeks worth at one time and just toss it in the fridge for later.
What a typical American eats and what a typical student eats can be quite different. Students are shuttling themselves around building to building. Grad students are particularly rarely at home unless they’re sleeping. It can lead to a lot of less than healthy eating. Deli sandwiches, microwave ramen, donuts, pizza, stuff like that.
[Breaking Bad even makes a story about the dollar ramen Walter and Elliot consumed when they were in grad school](https://youtu.be/HPDGhTf4gPU?t=35).
For a quick snack in the morning I poach me a couple eggs in the microwave real quick before heading out the door. I’m not a huge breakfast eater so this small morning snack gets me going for a while
It varies wildly. Check out some of the top threads in /r/eatcheapandhealthy if you need some ideas.
I’m sure whatever is available in your country is available here too. No need to change
If your concern is just being able to find ingredients, if you’re going to school in a major city, odds are you’ll be able to find things close enough to what you’re used to at home. We’re a country of immigrants so any major immigrant hub (like most major cities) will have markets that cater to various cultures.
But if you’re just looking for “what’s cheap to make?”
Pasta
Rice
Soups
Those are generally the kinds of things you’ll get the most bang for your buck out of
Sandwiches, mostly. Bread and fillers. Lunch meat with cheese, tuna, peanut butter with jelly/jam.
Growing up it was rice, beans, bread, potatoes, and cheap meats.
You’ll find our supermarkets have an insane amount of selection (it’s actually too much and leads to a lot of food waste). You’ll likely be able to cook whatever you want. If you’re in the western US, and you want to stick to a specific cuisine, then pick up a cookbook for Mexican food.
Student? Eat ramen. Also, keep some bread, peanut butter, and jelly in stock.
Because America is such a melting pot, you can have just about any *style* of cuisine that you want – so long as you are willing to put in the time and money to get it.
So like, If you want to save money, a $10 bag of rice can literally last you an entire year.
So . . . do you want to eat nothing but steamed rice? Cause that’s going to be pretty cheap.
Want to jazz it up with some vegetables? A big bell pepper where I live costs $2 each. Same price for cucumbers. A can of sweet corn is about $1.50 each. Same for black beans.
So If I wanted to make like a Mexican fried rice with peppers, onions, corn, beans, avocados, lime, sour cream, and carne asada for meat . . . ***none of those things are really expensive on their own*** – but when taken together can turn a really cheap meal into something $$$. Even if you’re paying $1.50 per component, a meal with a whole bunch of different components is going to rapidly eat up your savings of making food at home as opposed to just going out.
It’s also going to inflate the amount of time you spend on it too. Rice by itself can be a set-and-forget, one-pot meal. What I just described is probably going to need more prep time. More cleanup time. More pots n pans and cutting boards will get messy.
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**TLDR:** American home cooking is whatever you want it to be. You choose how much time and effort and money you want to pour into it.
Super loaded question…it can be almost anything you want it to be. Your go-to cheap things to cook will be rice, potatoes, pasta, and chicken. Buying cheap ramen noodles, and “spicing” them up with whatever you want to add is a fun way to have fun while eating cheap too. Rice and Ramen would probably be my go-to, as they are very cheap bases, and you can add as little or as much as you want based on how much more you’re willing to spend.
Eat what you want. We have a lot of food options here.
Pan saute vegetables into macaroni and cheese
Sliced vegetables and an egg into Japanese ramen
Oven made nachos with chopped vegetables, address cheese after vegetables cook.
For breakfast I usually have eggs and oatmeal, which are both inexpensive and easy to make. When I was broke I often ate canned chicken which is pre-cooked and less expensive than raw chicken, and it lasts longer. Season it with the spices you like and cook it in a pan until it’s hot. Instant mashed potatoes and frozen or canned vegetables make good side dishes. Pasta with a jar of sauce is also an easy, affordable meal.
The natural answer for a shoestring budget is ramen. But in all seriousness, I eat healthy and cheap for less than 20 dollars a week. I buy whole grain pasta, no salt added tomato sauce, light tuna, mozzarella cheese, olive oil, and pinto beans. You might see words like whole grain and no salt added, and things like olive oil and think, woah, Frenes, this stuff is premium, but actually when you break it down it’s less than 20 dollars a week once you account for the olive oil and bags of cheese being stretched out over weeks or even months. Same goes for the beans, just buy a big bag of raw pinto beans for less than 10 dollars and it will last months. Supplement all of this with vegetables of your choice like spinach and carrots and you have a mostly healthy diet and plenty of fiber. I like to mix in whole grain spinach tortillas to make bean and cheese burritos with a drizzle of olive oil on top, but finding those cheap is hard unless you buy in bulk sadly.
Everything.
Find whichever supermarket has the ingredients you like at the best price and cook what you want! The cheapest foods in the US often are the least nutritious (ramen, processed breads and cheeses and meats, snack foods), so I recommend buying the fresh produce and meats that are on sale that week and building your meals out from that.
An aside:
Something I have noticed living in a few other countries is that what people in the US eat at home is much more varied than you find in some other places. I don’t mean actual ingredients/food products, but kind of meal structure. When I lived in Brazil almost everybody’s breakfast was structured around coffee with milk, some kind of bread or baked good, some of kind of fruit or juice, maybe some cheese or meat. Lunch was usually beans and rice and some kind of protein and salad. Dinner seemed the most varied.
Once again, in the Eastern European countries (mostly Balkans) I know breakfast revolved around coffee, bread and things to put on the bread, with perhaps some other baked good if you had breakfast out or on a special occasion. Lunch almost always started with a soup (usually vegetable based) and always had a pile of bread available.
In the US it really can be anything in my experience. There are certain foods you typically eat for breakfast (cereal, smoothies, baked goods, toast, eggs and bacon) or lunch (soup, salad, sandwich), dinner (protein, veggie, starch, but often all mixed together in a casserole or stew or pasta dish), but the structure varies wildly. There isn’t one thing that one can nearly always expect at a specific meal, as was the case in those other countries.
I wonder which other countries/cuisines are similar or different in this way.
Typical American cooking varies widely, but as for “cheap and easy on a budget”:
Lots of American supermarkets sell very cheap roasted chickens, what we call “rotisserie”. You can use the meat for wraps and sandwiches, and then boil the bones for soup. Soup takes a while, but it’s very cheap and mostly hands-off: just add seasoning and whatever veggies are on sale.
Rice and beans is a classic, especially among poorer Mexican immigrants. There are a variety of ways to season it, it’s cheap as can be, and a good source of protein.
Spaghetti with tomato sauce is a winner, and add some ground beef if you can find it on sale.
Eggs can be bought ridiculously cheap, and cooked dozens of different ways. Scrambled, fried, hard-boiled, soft boiled, poached. In the same line of reasoning, potatoes are fantastic. Boil em, mash em, stick em in a stew.
On the less healthy side of things, lots of college students live on ramen noodles and easy Mac, since they’re so cheap and so easy.
There’s no universal standard. The US is multicultural, so we make and eat whatever, and it’s usually influenced by our home culture. (I grew up eating Japanese food)
Our supermarkets reflect this and will generally have most ingredients and spices you need, and then you can supplement by going to a cultural market. We tend to have Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Mexican, Russian, etc groceries somewhere in town as well.
We eat everything from pretty much all over. There’s no specific things all Americans usually eat. Our own house menu for the week usually includes Korean, Middle Eastern, Indian, Mexican – pretty much if it looks good, we will cook it. If you’re on an extreme budget, there are tons of videos and websites dedicated to feeding yourself inexpensively and in a healthy way. Staples you’d probably want to have: eggs, oats, beans of various kinds, rice, tofu or some sort of meat, bread, peanut butter, pasta, canned tomatoes, bananas. Add fresh veg and some other fruit. Learn which grocery stores are most economical, make a menu plan, grocery list, and stick to it. Doing batch cooking once or twice a week can also save you time and money, assuming you’re ok with eating the same things for several meals in a row.
When I was in college and only had a microwave my go-tos were microwave Mac n cheese, rice and beans, and whatever other microwaveable meals I could get my hands on for cheap. Usually rice-a-roni
When I got to a dorm with kitchen apartments I started cooking more, but it was typically some sort of pasta or baked chicken. Also more frozen meals
As an adult, I try to cook one *meal* meal once or twice a week. Rice gets you very far in life in many contexts
What will you have access to? Will you have a stove, and an oven? Do you have refrigeration? A freezer? What kinds of equipment do you have, pots and pans and knives and the like? How much time are you willing to spend cooking? Where in the country will you be?
These will all have major impacts on what kind of food you can make.
Food.
On a budget ,sardines are excellent, so are eggs .
College students eat whatever is cheap. I know I lived on frozen pizza, instant noodles (ramen), and other dishes that I could get cheap and pop in the microwave. I had a full kitchen though.
I’m of Mexican descent. My boyfriend is of Vietnamese descent. We grew up in California eating multiethnic cuisine. Today I’m making something Mexican for dinner, for lunch I’m having sort of a leftover Portuguese rice (sizable Portuguese population in my metro area), we also got pork belly so I can cook a Vietnamese braised pork belly dish that we love and have several times a month.
Most days I have tuna or egg salad with Club crackers for working hours. Grilled cheese (with an egg or tuna) is a great dinner. Under $5 a meal.
Spaghetti
[Budget Bytes](https://www.budgetbytes.com/) is a great resource for relatively cheap and delicious recipes.
I don’t think you have to confine yourself to American cuisine by any means – in fact, most supermarkets in more populated areas (and I’d imagine you’ll be somewhere that is at least a college town) have a wide variety of ingredients.
My go to in college were Italian pasta noodles. A few bucks will get you a big bag of dried pasta and a few more gets you a giant jar of passable pasta sauce. Super easy to make on the stove. Buy some powdered garlic and Italian spices to dress it up and eat with a $2 loaf of fresh baked bread. It’s filling and is a damn college feast and reheats well to boot.
I’ll add that if you’re going to live in a true college town, it will be full of places that have scientifically engineered their menu to have a hundred menu items that will deliver the maximum amount of carbs possible for $8. Pizza, Asian food, Greek, etc… Many are places you can get 2 meals out of, so you’ll have a lot of options. Eating healthy for a college student is far more challenging than eating cheaply and being full.
r/eatcheapandhealthy is a better source.
Some options that are both easy and inexpensive (not cheapest possible):
* Spaghetti with jarred sauce and frozen meatballs
* Tacos (everyone has their own ideas of good fillings, just Google and experiment)
* Mac and cheese with additions. I like it with canned tuna and tomato because that was my dad’s easy lunch for the kids.
* sandwiches.
* Rostisserie chicken from the grocery with sides. There are entire cookbooks devoted to these.
* Eggs for dinner.
* Homemade pizza – you can either make the dough from scratch or buy it bagged. Or make the pizza on tortillas, bread, bagels, or English muffins.
* Baked/microwaved potato with canned chili
Chances are that many of the ingredients for foods that you’re used to will be readily available in the US, or at least close substitutes. Potato and grains are nearly universal.
Also, one of the best suggestions for finding inexpensive produce in the US is to shop at ethnic grocery stores. They tend to have less pretty produce that’s otherwise the same quality as mainstream grocery stores.
Here is a Wiki list of regional American dishes. Many of them are staples in the regions that they are from, and in the homes of transplants away from those regions as best as they can manage it.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regional_dishes_of_the_United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regional_dishes_of_the_United_States)
A lot of these have origins in cheap food, or Native food, or dishes from abroad. Some have origins in make-do food from the Depression, or to make meats (which were sometimes scarce and expensive) go further.
Here is a much more extensive list:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_regional_and_fusion_cuisines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_regional_and_fusion_cuisines)
Have fun! It’s a fascinating topic.
Food of some type.
Depends. Ive got COVID so gatorade and water lol. When kids are here. Monday tuesday and sunday varies Thursday was italian night and saturday usually finger food night like tacos sandwiches and such. But having a variety to buy from sometimes makes it hard. Oh Friday pizza night.
So food availability will change depending on where you are in the US. Near me you could get whatever food you were used to back home. I live in a city more populous than a number of states, and it does have a well regarded university in it. So students there can eat whatever they’re already used to making.
If you’re in a college town based out of a smaller city, your selection might be more limited.
My suggestion is to check out this website which generally seems to make use of ingredients you can find anywhere with an eye on budgeting:
https://www.budgetbytes.com/
I cooked a lot of recipes from it when my husband and I had to lower our expenses for a few months between jobs.
Common easy and cheap food to make:
Tacos, burritos, quesadillas – Easiest way to do this is cook the meat w/ salsa, and you have taco meat. Then you just top a tortilla with cheese, rice, beans, sour cream, vegetables whatever you like on your tacos.
Pasta – Buy a jar of Pasta sauce, and a box of dried noodles. Lots of different pairings. You can add meat, cheese or vegetables to your liking.
Sandwiches – sliced bread, deli meat, sliced cheese, lettuce, tomato, mustard, mayo.
Cereal – Milk, and cereal it’s really convenient and depending on the cereal you buy a lot healthier than other convenience food.
Fried Rice – Basically I take whatever I have (usually some meat, and a pack of frozen vegies) and fry it up w/ some cooked rice, and add some type of sauce that seems to go with it.
Swedish meatballs – frozen Swedish meatballs, egg noodles, and a can of mushroom soup.