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.