An Experiment in Cheap Fake Italian

 

Continuing on with both the rice and the beans, it's time for trying the mains with a new set of regional spices.

Ingredients:

2 cups of kidney beans

6 cups of water

1 cup of rice

1 cup of water

1 jar of pasta sauce

1 onion

Some garlic and herb spice mix

Instructions:

Instant pot the beans, half of the spices and 6 cups of water for 50 minutes

As it's venting, dice the onion

Add a bit of the bean water to the bowl

Strain the beans

Add the beans to the bowl

Instant pot the rice with the rice option

Pan fry the onions and spices

Stir in the rice, beans, and pasta sauce

Cook for several minutes

Garnish with shredded mozzarella and serve with badly freezer burned garlic bread

This was ok.  Not sure I'd recommend it normally, but adding variety in the midst of spending as little on food as possible was worth the experimentation.

An Experiment in Cheap Tacos

 

Still continuing on the theme of rice and beans, but looking for a bit of variety, I opted for giving tacos a shot.  The price is inherently upped, on account of adding meat, but it's a welcome change after the straight rice and beans.

Ingredients:

2 cups of beans

6 cups of water

1 cup of rice

1 cup of water

1 onion

1 package of ground beef

4 tbsp of chili powder

2 tbsp of cayenne pepper

2 tsp of cumin

Instructions:

Instant pot the beans, half of the spices and 6 cups of water for 50 minutes

As it's venting, dice the onion

Add a bit of the bean water to the bowl

Strain the beans

Add the beans to the bowl

Instant pot the rice with the rice option

Pan fry the beef, onions, and remaining spices

Stir the rice and beef into the bowl

Serve on tortillas with salsa

This turned out extremely well.  Cutting down on the rice from the previous recipe and adding the meat and spices made the base mixture far more flavorful.  Plus tacos are always fun to eat.

An Experiment In Cheapness

After spending far too long on r/EatCheapAndHealthy I decided that I would like to take a look into how long I could go while spending as little as possible.  To do this I decided to opt for rice and beans, which is frequently recommended to people who need to get by on as little as possible.  Luckily, before starting this I came across a post that adding a grilled onion to the mix goes a long way in improving the dish.

Ingredients:

2 cups of Dried Kidney Beans

2 cups of Rice

8 cups of water

1 onion

Instructions:

Add rice and 2 cups of water to the InstantPot

Cook on Rice setting and fast release

Add rice to a bowl

Add beans and 6 cups of water

Cook on Manual for 50 minutes

Chop the onion

When the beans are done, allow to natural release

Strain the beans and fry the onions in a large pan

Stir in the rice and beans and cook a bit longer

This... is about as good as a low budget meal can be.  It's not great, but it's filling, and the onion adds quite a bit of flavor to it.  The main issue, is that there is far too much rice for the other ingredients.

Pork Ring

One of the great aspects of getting new cooking apparati is going grocery shopping, seeing something you've cooked before and wondering 'I wonder how that will cook with my new stuff'.  This was the case when I noticed pork loins in the store.  Unfortunately, when I went to add them to the Instant Pot, I realized that they were simultaneously too long to fit in the pot, and two short to wrap around the entire pot.

Ingredients:

1 Garlic & Herb Pork Loin Filet

1 Onion

Garlic and Herb spices

Instructions:

Slice the pork loin in half longways

Put it into the bottom of the Instant Pot, making a ring around the sides

Chop the onion and put it into the center of the ring

Add the spices, and add water until the contents are covered

Cook on manual for 8 minutes

Eat as Sandwiches

This turned out extremely well.  It's extremely easy to do, and also quite tasty.  Also it makes for great leftover sandwiches.

Buffalo Joes

 

After making the buffalo chicken pizzas, I still had a bunch of buffalo sauce and bleu cheese dressing with nothing to do with it.  Figuring that since these are two great tastes that taste great together, I figured I'd try to incorporate them together into something else chicken wingish.  Since chicken is more or less turkey, and ground turkey is more or less ground beef, and ground beef is the core of sloppy joes I figured that sloppy joes are basically buffalo wings.

Ingredients:

1 package of ground turkey

1 onion

buffalo sauce

ketchup

Instructions:

Chop the onion

Brown the meat with the onion

Mix the ketchup and the buffalo sauce

Add the meat and the sauce to a crockpot

Cook on low for (at least) 3 hours

Serve on a bun (or bread {or a bowl?}) with bleu cheese and a side of celery

This turned out really well.  It's basically sloppy joes with a slight kick.  It was a great way to use up some extra sauces, but probably not worth going out of your way to get the ingredients for, unless you're really into both wings and sloppy joes.

Canned Bonanza

Weenies and Beans is a fairly classic staple, bringing forth the mental image of cowboys and miners.  But what can be done if you're willing to up the number of cans going into such a dish?

Ingredients:

1 package of hot dogs

1 can of baked beans

1 can of diced tomatoes

1 can of corn

Instructions:

Cut up hot dogs

Add everything to the InstantPot

Cook on manual for 8 minutes, allowing for natural release

Serve alongside a salad

This was alright.  I had been hoping that added ingredients would elevate the dish more than they did in the end.  In the end this would up being slightly differently textured weenies and beans, and not something I''d go out of my way to make again in the future.

Buffalo Chicken Pizza

In my experience, getting a buffalo chicken pizza results in getting a regular pizza, with chicken as a topping, and some buffalo sauce drizzled on top.  In my opinion, this is really leaving a lot on the table, as it's failing to truly incorporate  that heat.  So why not attempt to bring it fully into the recipe?

Ingredients:

1 Pizza Crust

2 Chicken Breasts

Frank's Buffalo Sauce

Italian Seasoning

1 bag Mozzarella Cheese

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 350

Chop Chicken in Chunks

Fry in a pan with oil and Italian Seasonings

Spread a layer of buffalo sauce over the pizza crust

Add chicken to the pizza

Top with cheese

Bake for 20 minutes

This initially didn't turn out great.  The buffalo sauce was too thin, the cheese wasn't firmly enough anchored, and the chicken was way too big.  Luckily, the pizza crust I bought came in packs of 2, and I bought an excessively large bottle of buffalo sauce.  So I opted to give it another shot.  I mixed the buffalo sauce with some bleu cheese dressing to thicken it up, cut the chicken finer, and made sure that the cheese went past the sauce to the crust itself.  These alterations allowed it to hold together considerably better.

Spaghetti and Meatball Salad

Pasta Salad is food that is almost totally dominated by a handful of pastas.  Rotini, Penne and Bowtie seem to have the market cornered, except for Macaroni, which has elbowed out of the market altogether and started it's own salad racket.  Why is Spaghetti, the cornerstone of American pasta habits, so unjustly underrepresented in the salad game?  

Ingredients:

1lb Spaghetti

1lb bag frozen meatballs

Italian Dressing

Lettuce

Instructions:

Cook Spaghetti according to instructions on the box

Add to a bowl and mix in some Italian Dressing

Add meatballs and some dressing to a pan and cook over medium heat until browned

Stir meatballs into the spaghetti

Put bowl into the fridge for a few hours

Serve with lettuce and dressing

This turned out pretty well.  The spaghetti is a bit cumbersome, but not really any moreso than how it normally is.  There are a few things I would do differently though.  The meatballs are a bit on the large side and I should have used a smaller sized meatball so they could be eaten more easily with the spaghetti and lettuce.  Additionally, I'm not sure that I would add the dressing while cooking the meatballs, as it was fairly poppy, in a not great way.