Welfare diet, food banks & food budgeting

[shootingstar]

We eat a lot of beans and lentils, which are cheap, easy, nutricious, and when done well delicious. I also figure it's helpful to teach the kids how to prepare cheap, healthy food so that when they leave for college they have no excuses to starve or eat junk! We purchase fresh eggs from a friend, and eat a lot of them.

Very true, katherine. Children can learn. Whatever Asian dishes I cook, at least 75% is borrowed technique and childhood memory from my mother ..whole food cooking where she had to get abit creative because in the 1960's to 1970's there was hardly the choice of fresh Asian produce in supermarkets in small-medium size Canadian cities, as found now. (I was stunned a few years ago in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, we were moving my household across Canada: one could buy over 1 gallon of soy sauce from a national chain grocery store there. Ok. Obviously for the rural areas to bulk purchase.... This would have been unheard of where I grew up.)

Alot of my style of Chinese home cooking is genuinely what peasants prepare and...eat in rural areas. Some of the stuff is not common in Chinese restaurants (unless one asks to have it specially prepared..if the cook will oblige), because it's not visually elegant/dynamic or too 'simple' in technique to serve to paying restaurant customers...but it's darn healthy food!

I used to eat alot more meat...but simply due to laziness and cost-savings, I only eat meat once or twice per wk. or even less. Only seafood, chicken breast and an occasional gourmet sauage as part of supper, not breakfast. With nice veggie on side.

Later it may well be I may have to cut back even more on daily coffee, snack but have not bought any dressy/fashion clothing for past few months except for cycling clothing if there's a deal/something got worn out. I've cut my personal pleasures right down to the bone. So these snacks..I justify ...as left to enjoy and it's transportation fuel after all, since we don't have a car. Well, that's my rationale.

Really my fashion, right now..is literally my fitness/good health..because a reasonably healthy, fit body is always in "fashion".

I agree Oak, that time is a serious matter for any parent(s) with child(ren). However for some meals, I sincerely hope people throw out their boxes of Minute Rice in the garbage can, and buy a rice cooker. Buy rice. So simple these....days with some of our appliances to help us. Making rice from scratch is just brainless with an electric rice cooker.

And am also thinking of the recipes that TE members have mentioned about using slow cookers that don't require babysitting food while it cooks.

So tv dinners and processed foods only happen here and there during a month. Doesn't need dominate a family's regular eating repetoire.