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[LordBucket]

What's the cheapest, best recipes for dinner you can come up with?

tl;dr: healthy, tasty option that's very flexible on available ingredients, and that you can eat every day and not get tired of because a few simple changes can generate a very different result. Also, if you have space, read the paragraph about garden squash. For the price of one or two meals you can grow plants that will feed you for an entire growing season.

Cheapest and best might be mutually exclusive. But I'll throw fried rice out there. Make white rice normally, one to one, rice to water. Be sure you don't put in too much water. It's ok if it's a little hard. After it's cooked, spread it out onto  saucepan and let it sit without a lid until it dries. Some recipes recommend putting it in the fridge overnight, but I find that 10-20 minutes is usually sufficient. Next, fry it at medium heat in the pan with oil. (Olive oil is best, both for flavor and healthiness. If you use olive oil, be sure to get a "rich, fruity" olive oil, not a light one. You're cooking with it, not using it for salad dressing. Some people like it with peanut oil but I don't care for the flavor that adds. It's probably not the end of the world if you use cheap vegetable oil or regular butter, but the flavor will suffer. If you do that, try to use only what you need to coat and fry the rice or else the taste might overwhelm the final result.) Stir it a lot while it fries.

While frying, if you have it and you're going to use it, sprinkle in any combination of black or red pepper, or onion or garlic powders. It's best to use fresh if you have it, but you can get large 18 ounce containers of granulated spices for cheap, and they will last months. Experiment with combinations and you can add a lot of flavor. Important: do not use garlic salt. That will absolutely kill the final result. if you use garlic, get garlic powder. It is completely different. If you can only afford one or two spices, I recommend either black pepper or onion powder.

Next, add soy sauce. Generic kikkoman sauce works well. Experiment with how much sauce you put it. Personally I like enough to fully turn all the rice to a dark brown, but some people I cook for find that to be too much. At this point the rice is very flexible on how much you cook it. So long as you keep stirring it from time time and keep the heat low, it's difficult to overcook. Note that if your original white rice was excessively dry and hard, this extra cooking step will fix that and the soy sauce can be used to correct mistakes. But if the rice was too soft to begin with, this step will turn it to mush. Don't overcook your rice in that initial step. It gets cooked again here.

You now have the base rice. What you do with it next depends on what you have available. You can eat it like that. If you used olive oil, it will probably be palatable. Adding chopped white onion is a cheap simple thing you can do to enhance it and add texture. Experiment with how much you cook the onions. Some people prefer them soft, others prefer them still crunchy. Eggs will also add a lot, as well as contribute protein. Ideally, mix the eggs in a bowl with pepper and onion. How much you fry them will change the result of the meal. Most recipes will recommend incompletely frying them and adding them to rice while they're still a bit runny. Doing it that way causes the egg to slightly coat the rice. It's also possible to fry them completely. If you do that, it's important to use the spatula to chop the bits of egg into small pieces. Experiment with how and how much you cook the eggs. Like the spices, this can have a wide variety of results on the final meal. If you're going the cheap/easy route, you can also simply use a spatula to push the rice to clear an edge of its saucepan and crack the eggs directly in with them and fry them together. If you do this, you'll probably need to add a little oil to the pan, and be sure to not mix the eggs with the rice too early. The eggs have to be mostly cooked before mixing or else they'll completely vanish into the rice and coat it, resulting in a huge loss of color and texture. The protein will still be there, but it just won't taste as good. Also, if you do use eggs, regardless of how runny they are when you add them to the rice, be sure to add the eggs after you've fried the soy sauce into the rice rather than adding the eggs then soy sauce on top. Each will tend to cot the rice and you want the soy sauce coat underneath the egg, not the egg coat underneath the soy sauce.

If you want to go all the way, fry some chicken tenderloins in a separate pan. Regular frozen, bagged chicken works well. While it's cooking, chop up any combination you like of onion, broccoli, cauliflower, any kind of squash/zucchini, baby carrots, peas, or other vegetables of your choice. White onion is cheap and easy, and it's hard to go wrong with. If you have space for a garden, squashes are hardy plants that are easy to grow and produce large quantities of food with very little space and that come in several varieties. I once had a set of six zucchini plants that took up a 4x20 foot section of my yard that produced so much food that five of us couldn't eat it all. If you can set aside even enough space for one each green/yellow/orange squash, all you'll have to do it water them and with a little rice, onion, eggs and soy sauce and they could keep you fed for six months. Note that squash tends to have about the same amount of flavor regardless of size. The bigger it is, the more than flavor will be spread out. If you cut the squash from the plant when they're still small, about six to eight inches long, they'll taste much better than if you wait for them to get big. Doing so also doesn't have a huge affect on the overall production of the plant, as they will tend to produce new fruit only if there aren't already some taking up resources. Cut them every day or two and you'll have a steady supply. Don't be surprised if you miss one beneath the foliage and one day discover a two foot long zucchini as thick  your leg. When that happens, just cut them, maybe make bread from them, but they won't be very good for stir fry.

Once the chicken it's cooked, cut it into bite-sized chunks, and put it back onto the pan with your vegetables. Be sure the meat is cooked all the way through, and cook the mix until the vegetables are of the desired softness. Mixing soft with crunchy vegetables can add a lot of texture if you like that. Experiment with it. For example, I'm like soft bite-sized broccoli/cauliflower with centimeter-long bits of still-crunchy onion. Or you can cook it all thoroughly. Just be sure the chicken is cooked.

Finally, it's time to mix. Personally I prefer putting the rice/egg mix on the bottom of a bowl with vegetables on top. Some people prefer mixing them evenly together in a single pan.

Fake edit:

Eggs + Rice + Whatever random Veg you have lying around = Egg Fried Rice. Soy Sauce optional if you wanna be fancy.

Damn ninjas.

[gimlet]

Brown rice & beans is pretty hard to beat.  The easiest "bean" to cook without pre-soaking is lentils, it will cook in the same time as the brown rice (40 min to an hour, depending on the rice) so you can just throw it all in at the start.  I always try to put in onion and garlic, maybe jalapenos or hot peppers or sausage or red pepper flakes - there are hundreds of variations so browse recipes on the internet, I usually just cut up some tomato or something and throw em in, throw in some crunchy veg about 5 minutes before it's done - broccoli works a treat.  Even just topping it with salsa or spaghetti sauce or BBQ sauce can work.  Just keep trying combos and recipes til you find a few you like and rotate thru em, keep some hot sauce on hand to drench the losers so you can still eat em   You can even slant it towards "rice and beans chili", I've made some pretty tasty versions of that but it's a bit more work and ingredients.  But make a big pot of it, put some in the refrigerator and some in the freezer and you get many meals out of it.

"AN HOUR!" - yea, make enough for a few meals, refrig the rest, nuke it later.  And/or cook in a crockpot or steamer or rice maker, that makes it super easy.  To cook single meals I do it in one of those "food jar thermos" (basically a 16oz wide mouth thermos) - boil water in an electric kettle, throw the rice and lentils and spices in the thermos, maybe with a bullion cube or spoon of "soup base", pour in the boiling water, close the lid, go do something for an hour or so and BAM easiest meal in the world. (this way takes a LITTLE longer than simmering on the stove, but you also don't have to watch it - even if you forget it's fine hours later).  I throw in a handful of frozen veg 5 min before it's done so they get hot but not mushy - I have a big bag of "stir fry vegetables" in the freezer that makes a nice combo (broccoli, green beans, snap peas, carrots, red bell peppers, shiitake mushrooms, water chestnuts, baby corn and yellow onions - doesn't THAT sound like a fast, decent variety?).

My go-to herb is rosemary, I sprinkle more or less in just about everything I make.  Shop around til you find cheap jars of decently potent herbs - Penzeys stores are decent if you have one nearby and there's nothing better.  Black pepper, red hot pepper flakes, Worcestershire sauce, tarragon is great with eggs or green beans or tuna, etc - try out different combos and see what you like.  Keep trying promising looking recipes off the web, try to get enough different ones so you can rotate and not get sick of making it the same few ways.

[AustralianWinter]

What's the cheapest, best recipes for dinner you can come up with?

tl;dr: healthy, tasty option that's very flexible on available ingredients, and that you can eat every day and not get tired of because a few simple changes can generate a very different result. Also, if you have space, read the paragraph about garden squash. For the price of one or two meals you can grow plants that will feed you for an entire growing season.

Cheapest and best might be mutually exclusive. But I'll throw fried rice out there. Make white rice normally, one to one, rice to water. Be sure you don't put in too much water. It's ok if it's a little hard. After it's cooked, spread it out onto  saucepan and let it sit without a lid until it dries. Some recipes recommend putting it in the fridge overnight, but I find that 10-20 minutes is usually sufficient. Next, fry it at medium heat in the pan with oil. (Olive oil is best, both for flavor and healthiness. If you use olive oil, be sure to get a "rich, fruity" olive oil, not a light one. You're cooking with it, not using it for salad dressing. Some people like it with peanut oil but I don't care for the flavor that adds. It's probably not the end of the world if you use cheap vegetable oil or regular butter, but the flavor will suffer. If you do that, try to use only what you need to coat and fry the rice or else the taste might overwhelm the final result.) Stir it a lot while it fries.

While frying, if you have it and you're going to use it, sprinkle in any combination of black or red pepper, or onion or garlic powders. It's best to use fresh if you have it, but you can get large 18 ounce containers of granulated spices for cheap, and they will last months. Experiment with combinations and you can add a lot of flavor. Important: do not use garlic salt. That will absolutely kill the final result. if you use garlic, get garlic powder. It is completely different. If you can only afford one or two spices, I recommend either black pepper or onion powder.

Next, add soy sauce. Generic kikkoman sauce works well. Experiment with how much sauce you put it. Personally I like enough to fully turn all the rice to a dark brown, but some people I cook for find that to be too much. At this point the rice is very flexible on how much you cook it. So long as you keep stirring it from time time and keep the heat low, it's difficult to overcook. Note that if your original white rice was excessively dry and hard, this extra cooking step will fix that and the soy sauce can be used to correct mistakes. But if the rice was too soft to begin with, this step will turn it to mush. Don't overcook your rice in that initial step. It gets cooked again here.

You now have the base rice. What you do with it next depends on what you have available. You can eat it like that. If you used olive oil, it will probably be palatable. Adding chopped white onion is a cheap simple thing you can do to enhance it and add texture. Experiment with how much you cook the onions. Some people prefer them soft, others prefer them still crunchy. Eggs will also add a lot, as well as contribute protein. Ideally, mix the eggs in a bowl with pepper and onion. How much you fry them will change the result of the meal. Most recipes will recommend incompletely frying them and adding them to rice while they're still a bit runny. Doing it that way causes the egg to slightly coat the rice. It's also possible to fry them completely. If you do that, it's important to use the spatula to chop the bits of egg into small pieces. Experiment with how and how much you cook the eggs. Like the spices, this can have a wide variety of results on the final meal. If you're going the cheap/easy route, you can also simply use a spatula to push the rice to clear an edge of its saucepan and crack the eggs directly in with them and fry them together. If you do this, you'll probably need to add a little oil to the pan, and be sure to not mix the eggs with the rice too early. The eggs have to be mostly cooked before mixing or else they'll completely vanish into the rice and coat it, resulting in a huge loss of color and texture. The protein will still be there, but it just won't taste as good. Also, if you do use eggs, regardless of how runny they are when you add them to the rice, be sure to add the eggs after you've fried the soy sauce into the rice rather than adding the eggs then soy sauce on top. Each will tend to cot the rice and you want the soy sauce coat underneath the egg, not the egg coat underneath the soy sauce.

If you want to go all the way, fry some chicken tenderloins in a separate pan. Regular frozen, bagged chicken works well. While it's cooking, chop up any combination you like of onion, broccoli, cauliflower, any kind of squash/zucchini, baby carrots, peas, or other vegetables of your choice. White onion is cheap and easy, and it's hard to go wrong with. If you have space for a garden, squashes are hardy plants that are easy to grow and produce large quantities of food with very little space and that come in several varieties. I once had a set of six zucchini plants that took up a 4x20 foot section of my yard that produced so much food that five of us couldn't eat it all. If you can set aside even enough space for one each green/yellow/orange squash, all you'll have to do it water them and with a little rice, onion, eggs and soy sauce and they could keep you fed for six months. Note that squash tends to have about the same amount of flavor regardless of size. The bigger it is, the more than flavor will be spread out. If you cut the squash from the plant when they're still small, about six to eight inches long, they'll taste much better than if you wait for them to get big. Doing so also doesn't have a huge affect on the overall production of the plant, as they will tend to produce new fruit only if there aren't already some taking up resources. Cut them every day or two and you'll have a steady supply. Don't be surprised if you miss one beneath the foliage and one day discover a two foot long zucchini as thick  your leg. When that happens, just cut them, maybe make bread from them, but they won't be very good for stir fry.

Once the chicken it's cooked, cut it into bite-sized chunks, and put it back onto the pan with your vegetables. Be sure the meat is cooked all the way through, and cook the mix until the vegetables are of the desired softness. Mixing soft with crunchy vegetables can add a lot of texture if you like that. Experiment with it. For example, I'm like soft bite-sized broccoli/cauliflower with centimeter-long bits of still-crunchy onion. Or you can cook it all thoroughly. Just be sure the chicken is cooked.

Finally, it's time to mix. Personally I prefer putting the rice/egg mix on the bottom of a bowl with vegetables on top. Some people prefer mixing them evenly together in a single pan.

Fake edit:

I'll be trying this tonight. I have lots of rice, soy, onions and eggs. Along with some vegetables, and it should turn out fine.
Eggs + Rice + Whatever random Veg you have lying around = Egg Fried Rice. Soy Sauce optional if you wanna be fancy.

Damn ninjas.

[Yoink]

Good luck!
Also, that quote got kinda butchered... I hope the fried rice turns out better, heh.

[moocowmoo]

In addition to rice, potatoes are good, cheap nutrition as well. Especially orange or purple sweet potatoes/yams. Put butter on them for taste and extra calories. Oatmeal and bananas are a good, filling breakfast. With potatoes you can even throw one in a bucket with dirt and water and it will multiply.

[T-Mick]

Throw cheap meat and a few vegetables in a slow cooker, come back in six hours. You literally can't fail to get something appetizing. 

[Knick]

Here are some of my old University stand-bys:

Soup--ramen noodles, sliced mushroom, spinach, onion, chicken (boneless chicken thigh, no more than one or two), or alternately soft tofu, sliced and thrown into the soup, and one egg whipped and drizzled in.  Replace ramen with egg noodles if you do not like ramen.  Cost will come to about $2.00. 

Rice, first boiled then fried with eggs and veg.  Onion, and maybe some sliced and fried cabbage.

Potatoes with cheese. 

If you need cheap vegetables, try cabbage.  It is good for salad and can be fried and eaten hot.  Personally, I don't like them baked myself.

Protein--chicken legs in a package go for about $3.00, pork shoulder roasts will provide several meals of food for maybe $10.00, Eggs usually go for about $3.00 per dozen, or less.  Bacon can be between $3.00 and $5.00 for 500 g.  These are all canadian prices, BTW.  Sardines can be less than a $1.00 per tin, maybe as little as 50 cents.  Cheese in Canada can be had for about $5.00 for 500 g.

Starches, etc-potatoes are the most effective.  You can live off of potatoes, with some added protein, and potatoes are cheap.  Rice as well, but it is less nutrious. 

[TamerVirus]

Some spaghetti, a pack of bacon can easily make a pasta alla gricia. Subtract bacon and add pepper and cheese for pasta cacio e pepe. Add an egg and cheese for an easy carbanara. Take the carbanara and add some tomatos and onions for pasta alla amatriciana. Basic roman pasta 

[scrdest]

Some spaghetti, a pack of bacon can easily make a pasta alla gricia. Subtract bacon and add pepper and cheese for pasta cacio e pepe. Add an egg and cheese for an easy carbanara. Take the carbanara and add some tomatos and onions for pasta alla amatriciana. Basic roman pasta

Honestly, any pasta at all + any mix of things that sound good together is a cheap dinner usually.

[CubicalSucrose]

Put some butter in a pan on low/medium heat. Throw a food in the pan. Add garlic, black pepper, crushed red pepper to taste. Wait until the food is cooked. Works for a wide variety of foods.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Cook chicken flavored ramen, as the water starts to boil crack an egg into it with bits of sliced meat, wait till noodles/egg are cooked and enjoy
add garlic salt or soy sauce for better flavor

[Muz]

Lentils + salt + pepper.

Delicious stuff. Probably the cheapest source of protein next to eggs.

Most proteins taste great with just salt and pepper. Scrambled eggs, sauteed fish, chicken, steak, whatever.

If you're really desperate, don't go for ramen. Steal some ketchup from your local fast food chain and add it to pasta. Depending on where you live, pasta can be the cheapest form of food.

Eggs + Rice + Whatever random Veg you have lying around = Egg Fried Rice. Soy Sauce optional if you wanna be fancy.

Egg fried rice with sweet (not salty!) soy sauce is also great. If you've got a bit more money, start with butter/ghee and toss some garlic until the garlic browns, then add the egg and rice. Don't even need the veggies.