

Ask HN: electric kettle, hacker recipies. - dimitar

I'm trying to save some money on food.<p>I've just boiled eggs with my electric kettle (my only appliance).<p>Has anyone tried making ramen with an electric kettle?<p>I'm trying to drop my food expences to under 100 euro a month.
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wittjeff
Tips for minimizing the food budget: \- Cut your meat intake in half or lower.
It's expensive, and you'll feel better. Avoid red meat in general, as it is
most expensive. Eggs are the cheapest protein. Tuna is probably second. \-
Generally speaking you should consider rice, potatoes, oats, and beans the
base of your diet. They're all cheap if you buy them unprocessed. \- Get in
the habit of diluting everything that is processed by half. So if you get a
package of cheesy rice mix for 1 euro, add a cup of plain rice to it. Likewise
with Tuna Helper, etc. I don't know why they put so much spice mix in those
things. Also you can do this with canned soups -- add a can of beans or
veggies, and you have two cans of soup for a lower price. \- I would encourage
you to cut out sweetened soda all together, as I believe it has almost no
nutritional value and is probably the leading cause of obesity, but if you can
get the large containers (they sell 3L bottles over here) on sale they are
probably the cheapest source of calories. \- Make your own coffee and tea. Get
a thermos if you don't have one. \- Consider milk a luxury. It is relatively
expensive for what you get out of it.

Cutting out all of these things that are above-average cost, you may wonder
what damage it will do to your health. I'm a firm believer that optimal
nutritional health comes from 1) greatly lowering the excess bad stuff and 2)
eat green things. Really, anything loaded with chlorophyll is probably good
for you, and will fill in the gaps in your nutrients. I'd bet you could live
on rice and spinach alone indefinitely.

When I was in college I a single-burner hot plate and a 1-qt non-stick sauce
pan for just about everything.

So basically the cost-minimizing technique is to eat as most of the Chinese
do.

We have a few discount stores over here (I'm thinking of one in PA, but I know
of another in MT) that sell dented cans, out-dated (but perfectly good) boxed
food, etc. for roughly half of regular retain price. It's the same thing you'd
get at a regular grocer, but the packages aren't right. If you have one near
you it could save you more than any other diet-changing strategy.

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petercooper
This is pretty much how the instructions on the packets of ramen noodles I've
bought explain how to cook them. Put the noodles in a bowl, boil the kettle,
pour the boiling water into the bowl.. it's totally doable.

If you can spring the 40-50€ for a cheap microwave, though, you'd expand your
opportunities a lot. It's was a bit of a 70s/80s fad to do this but you can
pretty much cook "anything" in a microwave (if you're willing to put up with
the quality).

