What do you eat if you don’t have enough money?

20 comments

1. Armer Ritter (poor knight) is a slice of bread soaked in an egg-mixture (sometimes just a beaten egg, sometimes mixed with a bit of milk) and then fried in the pan on both sides. A couple of tomato slices on top are optional. Pretty good and filling, plus it takes no effort to make.

   Personally if I don’t want to go shopping and make myself something cheap, it’s usually pasta with tomato sauce or tuna pasta or Reibekuchen (similar to Rösti/Hashbrowns).

2. Cooked potatoes with butter and salt is about the cheapest meal I can think of. Fills you up real good too.

3. The staple here is pasta.

   With a basic tomato sauce,its not very expensive… most people can afford a tin of tomatoes.

   A more traditional local variant would be ‘aglio,olio e peperoncino’… pasta with just garlic,a little oil and a little chili.

   This was served with breadcrumbs toasted and sprinkled on top,by those who couldn’t afford to grate cheese on to it

4. I remember having situations like that as a student. This was my daily routine:

   – Buttered toast for breakfast (I remember buying eggs as well, but that must have been on the expensive side?)

   – Bread and whatever the cheapest cheese per kilo was available for lunch, if I was feeling extravagant I’d add some lettuce to it

   – Rice and either lentils or canned spinach for dinner. Might have alternated that with some kind of very basic pasta dish as well

   Rice and lentils goes particularly far, you buy large bags of lentils at Indian supermarkets and you get a very healthy and calorific meal out of it.

5. I think a baked potato with a sprinkle of salt is the cheapest meal you can make. It would be an enjoyable meal with some leftover condiments from the fridge.

   Pasta and oats cost about 50ct at their cheapest each per pound. But plain porridge or pasta is not really a meal.

6. Pasta and ketchup.
   Maybe cheap supermarket bread with ham.

7. Porridge, toast and butter, toast and jam, beans on toast, eggs on toast, sardines on toast, tomatoes on toast, mushrooms on toast, cheese on toast (a bit more expensive). Toast in all its forms and varieties.

   Baked potatoes with butter, with beans, with cheese, with tuna, with coleslaw etc, but electricity is so expensive these days, a meal that goes in the oven for 1+ hours isn’t as cheap as it used to be!

   Soup made of whatever vegetables I have in the fridge, maybe with some rice in it.

8. Pasta, sour cream and vegeta (spice mix) or some bread and ajvar

9. Weed and potato soup. Essentially potatoes boiled until they’re falling apart with some salt and dandelion greens, nettles, hogweed shoots, buckthorn, clover, etc.

10. Nothing beats home cooked meals. They are always cheaper and more nutritious than any fast food or processed food. Some ideas

    – Pasta with fresh tomato sauce. You can make a ton of tomato sauce using cheap fresh ingredients from Aldi or Lidl, or the middle eastern supermarket around the corner. It’s nutritious, you’ll be a to feed yourself and others for less than €1 per person, or freeze the rest of the sauce. All you need to do is buy the cheapest pasta, canned tomatoes, carrots, celery and onions. Chop up the veggies, fry them for 5 min, add the tomato and let the sauce cook for half an hour.

    – buy a bag of potatoes, cut them in wedges, add some oil, flavor with salt and pepper, put them in the oven 30 min at 200C. Costs less than €1 per person

    – bake your own bread. All purpose flour costs less than €1 and allows you to bake two loafs.

11. Lentils. Dried lentils are super cheap, tasty and very hight in proteine (13g in 100g). I could practically live out of those. Little salt and thats it! If you feel a bit adventurous and have some savings: throw in some onion, potato and a can of tunafish. Boil until it becomes brown goo. If you truly wanna make it royale, add some olive oil. My favourite food before and after payday.

12. IIRC the most common recommendation in such situation is canned pea soup. 3-4 cans a day should be enough. Add some raw onion and mustard if you want to splurge.

13. Pasta and Pesto, cheap and you can buy enough to feed several people for less than £1.50

14. France here and as a student I ate pasta everyday during several months.

    I still do that but with some pesto, parmesan, Gorgonzola, fresh tomatoes etc..

    Or rice !

    Edit : don’t know though the impact of being half Italian on this result ( my mom is ).

15. Definitely pasta, usually with tomato paste and/or yoghurt. Bread on the side. Lots and lots of bread with whatever else you are eating.

16. Pasta, rice and potatoes, the holy trinity of cheap but filling food.

    Just put a bit of salted butter into any of the three for taste and you have a meal.

17. a 5x 400g bag of elbow macaronis 0,39€/pcs with a soup cube 0.69€ (for 12pcs) and 5x [a bag of frozen root vegetables](https://apetit.fi/tuotteet/apetit-kotimainen-keittojuures-200-g-1/) 0,35€/pcs.

    Throw all of those in the pot and you have all that you ever need to survive for a week for just 4,50€ and in a pinch you can drink just water and soup cubes but that’s getting pretty fucking dire at which point you

    a) consider your life choices or

    b) look for the opening times of a nearest food bank

    c) realise that you’re a mister money bags and have 3€ from all the bottles that you collected yesterday to buy minced meat to turn that macaroni bag in to some real gourmet meal and option

    d) or sunk even further, buy a lousy burger from MD for 1€, fart and be hungry again.

18. In Romania here are some foods:

    French fries (oil, potatoes, salt and if you have cheese or ketchup)
    Eye of egg
    Some salad with eggs, potatoes, some cheese, pickles and onions
    Potato soup
    And on the sweeter side, some combination of cocoa, the yellow part of the egg, and sugar I think.
    Bread and margarine

    These are some cheap and actually good foods.

    Sorry for the gramatical mistakes.

19. Not traditional at all but aside from bread and all kinds of cheap spreads, I used to eat those minced soy flakes as a student. They look like [this](https://www.eatwholefoods.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/soya-mince.jpg) and can be used instead of minced meat. Beef is expensive and this is cheap, 50g of protein per 100g (less when you add water and sauce because they swell), doesn’t really taste like meat but doesn’t taste bad.

20. Boiled eggs on bread with Kalles Kaviar, pasta and tomato sauce or noodles