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I was wondering if anyone on the board has done some research into a set meal plan (breakfast/lunch/dinner) for each day of the week.
The idea would be that it's something that covers all the nutrition needs (not a diet for example), but is fairly easily to make/maintain and moderately cheap. I'm starting to cook for myself, and it would be nice to be able to have such a guide.
Another point is that ideally some of the meals could be prepared all at once (for example, maybe enough pasta cooked on Sunday to last the whole week).
I'd like to see what ideas/experience people have - as a starting point. If there's enough interest, I'll continue to do some homework and try to solve this question.
 
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I really advice you to cook Fish and Sea food in general. That's so good for health and full of vitamines. With that, you can add some potatoes with cheese.
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United States24701 Posts
I think you would get bored very quickly and want to vary from your plan... but it's not a bad idea.
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frozen pizzas, burritos, and macaroni are about all I eat...
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On June 27 2009 09:01 GoSu wrote:
I really advice you to cook Fish and Sea food in general. That's so good for health and full of vitamines. With that, you can add some potatoes with cheese.
Limit potatoes and cheese becaues too much is not good.
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First of all if you want your food to taste good, you don't want to prepare it more than 1 day ahead of time. A whole week is just nasty.
I don't want to discourage you but, IMO set meal plans kind of suck. They will prove to be repetitive and boring, and don't teach you how to cook normally. You have to adapt to what your kitchen can handle, what ingredients are available in your area, and seasonal changes that affect food prices. The best way in my experience is to find a local supermarket, grab 5 veggies, 2 fruits, 2 meats, 1 fish/seafood, and eggs. Repeat each week. Then mix and match to your heart's content. This way, it's affordable, adaptable, and nutritious. You can go online to look up what you might be missing in your diet too. Onions(flavor), carrots(vitamin A), and green(the darker and more vivid the color, the better) veggies are good. You need at least two different types of fruits to get a good nutritional balance(especially citrus fruits).
If you're really new to cooking, start with pasta, stew/curry, and fried rice recipes. Then you can graduate to using the oven, steaming, stir frying, etc and doing it all quickly. Most important thing is to figure out what went wrong each time you screw up. Learning to cook can save you a ton of money. There's more to say, but I think I'll just stop here.
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Eggs, cereal, milk and meat(maybe canned tuna if youre cheap).
Orange juice or some fruit and brocollis or spinachs.
That was my diet for the previous 2 years when i had to survive on $200 a month.
Never eat outside your place if you want to save money.
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I'm not too worried about being bored. But the fact is that I'd like to keep the time and mindshare of cooking to a minimum. In other words, I don't want to care more than I have to.
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I used to be in the same situation as you. I'm an only child and I've had to cook for myself the majority of my life.
Before I start I just wanna say that your attitude towards cooking is different than my current attitude, but I was a college student in dorms for the past 1.5 years and when I was younger I knew very little about health/nutrition so as you say I made a lot of things that were easy to make and filled me. I won't try and teach you about nutrition, you probably know enough. Also, you shouldn't have to worry much about covering most nutrition needs if you can just buy a multivitamin to take with water in the morning/first meal.
The first thing you wanna do is look at the foods you like eating. Only you can answer this: Out of these things, if you can cook them, include them in your plan as long as they aren't outrageously bad for you to eat on a regular basis. For me, breakfast was the easiest to decide.
I ate cereal with skim or 1% milk, then I had 2-4 eggs depending on the style. This is probably the easiest meal of the day. Eggs can be cooked in sooooo many forms, so you can mess around with what you like and its probably one of the easiest things to cook. If you don't think this will fill you up enough you can add sausage or other proteins in scrambled eggs or make an omelet. Normally you can put other stuff in it like avocados and onions but since you're looking to save time, just proteins is fine. Also, I don't know if price is a factor but milk is pretty expensive nowadays so sometimes I would just make a bigger omelet. You can also toss in cheese.
Lunch/Dinner: things like canned tuna, brown rice, bread work. If you're thinking in week-long increments, at the beginning of the week you can cook up enough rice for the week [ I'd say a pound, or a little more is enough for most people ] Chicken breast or skinless/boneless chicken thigh does wonders. When I was living at my school dorms I would make my week meals on Sunday night/monday when I was cooking my meal. I would cook enough to eat + a ton of brown rice and like 8 chicken breasts or thighs. Fried rice was also one of my variants. I'd buy a frozen bag of peas/carrots and cut up onion/garlic and put that in with the chicken and rice. After you cook a big batch, 2 mins in the microwave and you have a meal anytime and its healthy.
To save time, its really all about preparation. You can buy fruits like watermelon/cantaloupe/honeydew/pineapple and cut up the whole thing on monday and you have fruit [ which ripens in the fridge too as a bonus ] the whole week.
Other things that are easy to make are fish/potatoes/soups. You can boil x amount of potatoes at the beginning of the week and use them any way you want. Or you can bake a potato [ takes like 5 mins and stuff it with whatever you like ] Fish is incredibly easy to make and its tasty/healthy. Only downside is that some kinds are expensive. You can pan fry a salmon filet in literally 6 minutes, and I did this very often while living in dorms and had potatoes as a side.
For soups just by x cans of chicken or beef stock, throw in cubed beef or chicken thighs, carrots, onions, garlic, peas, potatoes and you have a huge soup to last you depending on how much you make.
Pasta is also easy to make in large quantities. Also sandwiches/subs.
I think the answer you're looking for is basically this: As long as you prepare enough, sitting down to eat a meal shouldn't take much time out of your week.
As others have said it will save you money in the long run and you learn an invaluable skill. I fully support what Gliche said, but that is my attitude towards cooking.
As an example, the bare essentials I liked to have while living in a dorm were:
Gallon of milk [ depending on price ]
Eggs
Fruit [Pineapple or grapes usually ]
Veggies [ Diced tomato/herbs/onion/peas/carrots/corn ]
Chicken Thigh/Breast or sausage or fish
Pasta noodles
Olive oil
It usually ran $30-40 at the grocery store which i would say is reasonable since it lasts about 5-7 days. I definitely had other things most of the time but with just the above I never went hungry and never spent extra. Every meal took less than 20 mins to cook. Average cook time was probably like 10 mins.
Good luck!
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Chili is great.
Red: Kidney beans, onions, (tomato paste or diced tomatoes per preference), ground beef (quality as tolerable), spices.
White: White beans (white kidney, great northern, etc), chicken boullion, diced chicken parts, hot pepper. Cheese optional. Season to taste (oregano, cilantro, cumin suggested).
Inexpensive and nutritious, served over pasta or rice.
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As a college student who is severely underweight (and trying to gain weight), I make liberal use of protein shakes with whole milk/oatmeal/peanut butter/various fruits/coconut milk and sometimes, I'll add some olive oil.
You can just control the proportions of each ingredient to get the amount of calories you need. Even though these things are typically on the diet plan for those trying to gain weight, just adjust the amount to your needs.
I typically don't worry about consuming shakes that are heavy in both fat and carbs, since I'm lifting weights regularly, but if you're not bulking, maybe it's better to go only carb+protein or fats+protein at a given time.
Canned tuna with crackers is delicious.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
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I ended up keeping the keyboard, but I haven't played SC for many months.
re: Ack. Thanks a ton for your great post. I guess I'm in a similar situation, except that my outlook on cooking is different (though probably for the worse - since it's better to be into something to improve). I'll try to update this post when I settle something down.
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Alrite whenever i live alone and i cook i tend to just cook food for the whole week's worth and freeze them, most of them still tastes awesome later.
I tend to plan only for 14 meals per week since lunch is usually done @ work (cept for sunday and saturday) and I would like to eat out about once or twice.
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Most of what Ack says is good. I went through my first couple years of university eating crap, but I basically forced myself to cook over the last 2 years or so.
Eggs are great. Cheap and very nutritious. Compliment it with sausage or bacon in the morning and you'll get a nutrient-dense, high energy breakfast. You can use pork shoulder as well, since it's typically cheaper.
Buy whatever fruits and veggies you enjoy eating. There is enough variety so you don't have to force yourself to eat anything you don't like. Frankly, if you don't like vegetables or fruits at all, you can just stick to one or the other.
Here's some cheap meats:
Chicken Thigh (~$0.99 to $1.30/lb with bone)
Chicken Wings (~$0.99 to $1.70/lb with bone)
Chuck Steak (aka. pot roast) (~$1.99 to $2.60/lb)
Pork steak (~$1.99 to $2.70/lb with bone)
Pork shoulder (~$1.99 to $2.99/lb)
Pork ribs (~$1.99 to $2.99/lb with lots of bone)
Sausage (~$1.99 to $3.50/lb)
Ground beef (~$2.50 to $3.99/lb)
I think canned tuna is reasonable as well, but can't remember the price per pound.
Organ meats (liver, stomach, etc.) are cheap and very nutritious, but you may not enjoy eating them.
Chicken breast is typically $3.99/lb or so, but you can find it on sale for $1.99 sometimes. Other meats are pretty expensive like fish, nice cuts of steak, etc. Frozen meats are typically a rip off unless you get a really good deal. When they freeze the meat, they try to capture as much moisture as possible, inflating the weight. Oh, one thing I liked to do was occassionally buy an expensive cut of meat like ribeye or strip when they were on sale, and then balance it out with dirt cheap on sale meat that was $1-2 /lb.
For nutrition, I don't recommend heavily processed carbs like bread, noodles (unless it's derived from rice), etc. But if you really enjoy them try to limit it to one meal a day and don't make them the basis of your meal. When I do eat carbs, I'll eat something like beans, rice, or potatoes. I also don't recommend buying the low fat version of foods. It leaves you hungry, is nutritionally inferior, tastes worse, and sometimes costs more too so eat the full fat version of your dairy products.
Cooking methods... Buy seasonings and marinades and experiment. A lot of things you can pan fry. Eggs, sausage, veggies. Do a medium to medium-high heat. It varies depending on the stove and if you haven't cooked before, start near medium or else you might burn the oil.
Baking is easy too. A lot of meats you can just throw in with your veggies (like onions, peppers, carrots) or carbs (like potatoes) and bake for an hour or two. It depends on the cut of meat and I usually look on www.cooks.com or www.allrecipes.com if I don't know what to do. I baked a lot of big cuts of meat. Meatloaf, pot roast, chicken thighs/wings, ribs... A lot of things you can bake and it minimizes the actual cooking you have to do.
Making stews and soups are pretty easy too. Throw boney meat in a put, cover it with water (not too much), cover the pot, and simmier for hours. I've done it for 24 hours before, but something like overnight works too. There's all kinds of soup recipes so experiment.
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* 4 vegetable boullion cubes
* 1 bunch fresh cilantro, stems removed
* 12 cloves garlic
* olive oil
* 2 teaspoons salt, divided
* 2 large onions, chopped fine
* 3 cups of lentils, washed and drained
* 1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
* 12 cups water
* 8 ounces of spinach
* 3 medium potatoes, cubed
* 6 tablespoons lemon juice
* 1.5 teaspoons of cumen
Place cilantro in a food processor with garlic, 3 Tbsps olive oil, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt.
Process until mixture forms a paste.
Set aside.
Saute onions in 1/4 cup of olive oil until light brown.
Add lentils and mix.
Cook on medium heat for a few minutes.
Add cinnamon and water.
Turn heat to medium-high and cook, uncovered, for 30-40 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Turn heat to medium, add remaining salt, spinach, potatoes and cilantro paste.
and cook, uncovered, on low heat until lentils are creamy.
Add lemon juice and continue cooking, uncovered, for 10 minutes.
My semi-vegan friend taught me this recipe. It makes about 4-5 litres of very filling soup that can feed you for a week. It's a bit more effort than just heating up a pizza in a MW, but it's so much more healthy.
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On June 27 2009 11:31 Cloud wrote:
Eggs, cereal, milk and meat(maybe canned tuna if youre cheap).
Orange juice or some fruit and brocollis or spinachs.
That was my diet for the previous 2 years when i had to survive on $200 a month.
Never eat outside your place if you want to save money.
actually, if you only use good coupons for fast food/restraunts its about the same price as buying food at the grocery store and making it yourself. But I guess you could argue that if you only buy foods with coupons at the store it's cheaper.
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I've gone the full spectrum in terms of starving college student, to learning to cook, and now being bored of cooking for myself. I enjoy a good meal, but really, cooking for yourself is really tiresome and repetitive. Between the preparation, cooking, and clean up, you'll end up spending at least 2 hours if not more. Even if you cook only once every 2-3 days (I would advise against cooking one type of food for any longer than that; you'll be sick of it and it'll probably taste a lot worse), that's an entire evening blown for a meal. Granted, cooking is a very useful skill to have, so you should definitely at least try it before giving up, but I got sick of all the time it took. Plus, eating a nice/tasty meal by yourself doesn't have quite the same appeal to me as sharing a meal with somebody else. But yeah, I'm back to eating cereal, dried fruits, oatmeal, eggs, and chicken from time to time. The diet itself is nothing spectacular in terms of taste, but it's actually really healthy.
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On June 29 2009 01:32 CharlieMurphy wrote:Show nested quote +On June 27 2009 11:31 Cloud wrote:
Eggs, cereal, milk and meat(maybe canned tuna if youre cheap).
Orange juice or some fruit and brocollis or spinachs.
That was my diet for the previous 2 years when i had to survive on $200 a month.
Never eat outside your place if you want to save money. actually, if you only use good coupons for fast food/restraunts its about the same price as buying food at the grocery store and making it yourself. But I guess you could argue that if you only buy foods with coupons at the store it's cheaper.
Except groceries, produce, and cereal is a lot healthier than eating out and eating fast food. Fast food every meal is a quick way to a heart attack when you're 40.
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On June 29 2009 11:33 gchan wrote:Show nested quote +On June 29 2009 01:32 CharlieMurphy wrote:On June 27 2009 11:31 Cloud wrote:
Eggs, cereal, milk and meat(maybe canned tuna if youre cheap).
Orange juice or some fruit and brocollis or spinachs.
That was my diet for the previous 2 years when i had to survive on $200 a month.
Never eat outside your place if you want to save money. actually, if you only use good coupons for fast food/restraunts its about the same price as buying food at the grocery store and making it yourself. But I guess you could argue that if you only buy foods with coupons at the store it's cheaper. Except groceries, produce, and cereal is a lot healthier than eating out and eating fast food. Fast food every meal is a quick way to a heart attack when you're 40.
Well, if you are eating really cheaply off the supermarket then chances are the processed foods are just as bad as the fast foods.
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EPT
