University Death

Try adding some cabbage, shredded and fried for a short time in some oil/butter.  Nice cheap change.   If you like cabbage that is.  Cabbage only gets stinky when it is cooked for a long time.

Using what ingredients you have, I would do the following:

Boil rice for 10 mins in salted water.

Meanwhile, fry off some onions until a little browned and at last couple of minutes cooking add your garlic spice, some cubed up tomatoes & S&P to taste.  Mix together with the cooked and drained rice into the pan you have the onions in.  Toss through some (I am assuming it's tinned) drained and flaked tuna to warm through and serve.  Maybe with some toast triangles if you have some staleish bread. 

If you are feeling extravagant, add a fried egg on top.

For the Japanese style noodles, beat up an egg and fry it flat, then tip it out, roll it like a cigar and slice so it looks like noodles.  Cook the noodles per packet instructions, drain and sprinkle with garlic spice. Fry up some sliced onions. Toss the whole lot together and enjoy!   The heat of the noodles and onions will re-heat the egg.  Grab your fork/chopsticks and chow down /img/vbsmilies/smilies/thumb.gif

BTW many bakeries/supermarkets will discount day old bread either at the end of the day or the next day.  Just got to get your timing right.

 

Just thought of another....

Boil up some eggs for 8 mins, put into cold water then shell and chop into quarters lengthwise.

Boil and drain some rice.  Mix it with some drained and flaked tuna, chopped tomatoes, sprinkle with lemon juice

Top with egg quarters.

S&P as much or as little as you like.

Yum /img/vbsmilies/smilies/licklips.gif

P.S. I know nothing about black peas.....if they are canned, I guess mush them up cold, mix with some salsa to taste, then toss some boiled rice thru the mix?  Dunno, maybe you could fry this mix once done, and add some beaten egg once the heat is off until you see the whites turning white.

 

Do a little research on how to make Chinese fried rice. It's a brilliant thing: you take yesterday's leftover rice, spread it out to loosen, and then stir-fry it with anything else that doesn't run away fast enough. Pinch of salt, small dab of cheap soy sauce, and you've got a filling, dirt-cheap dinner. The other thing that's really great about it is that the more times you do it, the faster and easier it gets, and eventually you can do it really amazingly quick and easy -- at which point you have in fact learned a major cooking technique that will stand you in good stead for the rest of your life.

 

BUY SOME VEGETABLES. 

I lived on various forms of minestrone, lentil soups and frittata for a few years while a student. 

They;re easy to make. 

General principles are to put some onion, celery, carrot and garlic cut up in a pot with some oil, and let them slowly cook but not brown.  Then you can add water, salt and pepper and  the vegetables you find in season - spinach is always around, swiss chard, pieces of squash, zucchine, escarole, peas, potatoes etc, and cook around an hour, so everything is softened and the soup is not just water and vegetables floating in it, but has some color.  Drain a can of chick peas or beans and let it cook another five minutes or so.   Some people like stuff from the cabbage family like broccoli or cauliflower or cabbage, and it can make a great soup, but it will dominate in the taste.  You just have to spend a little time frying the first stuff and the rest does itself.  But if you only have garlic, or onion, or onion and celery, go with that.  At the end, throw in some pasta (small pasta is best, and it can be a mixture of different kinds) and cook till done, or cook it separately and add (throw in leftover pasta too). 

For lentils, fry some garlic, smashed, in the oil, then add dried lentils and water.  Let them cook.  depending on the lentils they may take an hour or so. They should get soft. You can also add celery and carrot and during the cooking add a package of frozen chopped spinach (this is not a gourmet recipe, but for a student not to starve) (you can also add fresh spinach of course, but you can keep the frozen on hand and it's cheaper).  Cook  some rice and mix in or some pasta, or toast some hard bread, rub with a piece of garlic, put in the bottom of the bowl and pour the soup over it. 

Beans, chick peas, lentils, mixed with grains (rice, pasta, bread) equals a whole protein like steak.  The lentil soup will supply iron. 

This is cheap cooking, and easy, and you can make it for a couple of days. It's also very good.

For frittata, put oil in a frying pan, slice up an onion (minimum) plus vegetable (sliced zuccine are standard, but peppers, or potatoes, or other things you like, alone or in combination are fine) with salt and pepper and cook over low heat till cooked.  Mix eggs with a fork, add salt and pepper and pour into the frying pan.  Cook, covered, on low heat.  When it's almost set, slide it out of the pan onto the cover, and reverse the cover over the pan and cook the other side till it gets a little lightly browned. 

Pasta is great with vegetables, esp if you;re sick of tomatoes. 

Slowly cook some cubed or grated zucchini or cut up cauliflower in oil with garlic and/or onion until its very soft.  MIx in with the cooked pasta. 

Or take a can of tuna and some garlic.  Fry the garlic slowly in oil, when it's soft, add the tuna, fry for a few minutes and put directly on the pasta. 

In the end, buy vegetables.  Buy vegetables.  Buy vegetables.  The beans and chick peas and lentils and the starch will fill you up and provide all the protein you need. 

 

Siduri, the sad thing is that you should be right, but in the US you're less right than you ought to be. Fresh vegetables, in season, are expensive here, because of our ridiculous food distribution system, among other factors. Good frozen vegetables remain passably inexpensive, but many of them do not hold up well to stews like this. You just wouldn't believe what a remotely decent tomato or zucchini can cost in late summer in a supermarket!

Beans are cheap, still, especially dry beans, and you can find a wide selection in almost any grocery store. A tip: be sure to check the "international foods" section and compare prices, because sometimes South or Central American beans (e.g. Goya) will be ridiculously cheaper than the same beans from somewhere else.

 

True enough, chris, but the guy's in california - SOME vegetables must be there available. Or are things that far gone?   But anyway frozen spinach works well in the lentil soup.  And back in the day, some 35 years ago, I used to buy frozen mixed vegetables to make minestrone - i used to do a soffritto of fresh carrot, celery, onion and garlic, and then threw in the mixed vegetables, frozen spinach and boiled it - now I could tell the difference but back then, it seemed good.  Anyway, Rima, you use what you can find at a good price fresh, the rest frozen. 

 

It's not that bad if you have the time to find and shop the asian and mexican markets veges are much much cheaper.  I swear shopping at a Bel Air makes me wonder if they think I live in Bel Air too.

 

lol the problem with buying veggies is that the nearest shop is 20 min on bicycle

Sorry to sound harsh, but this sounds like an excuse rather than an explanation. I went all through school without a vehicle of any kind. But there was always a friend with a car available if I had to go somewhere distant. For anything close-by (that is, within, say, four miles) it was shank's mares.

That aside, are you really saying you can't find an hour in your schedule to buy fresh veggies? Using your bike, it's 20 minutes to the store, 20 minutes to shop the produce aisle, and 20 minutes back to school. Get a basket that will hold one of those soft-coolers, and you can even bring back meat and frozen foods.

Nor is it necessarily a weekly trip. You'd be surprised at how long produce can remain good. Root veggies and aliums (i.e., onions, garlic, etc.) last two days longer than forever without refrigeration. So, among the choices you could make for non-refrigeration are potatoes (both Irish and sweet), jicama, turnips, carrots (although they do better, long term, in the fridge), onions, garlic, shallots, ginger, rutabaga, beets. Veggies for the fridge that will last more than a week include anything in the cabbage family, most lettuces, celery, undamaged tomatoes (although from a flavor standpoint it's better to not refrigerate tomatoes if you can help it), any heading green, such as bok choy, etc. etc. Same goes for fruits: apples, pears, peaches, grapes, etc. etc. etc.

Rice and pasta are fine. But, for variety sake if nothing else, I'd look at other grains.  You might want to explore things like quinoa, farro, cous cous, barley, bulgur, and such. Same goes with dried beans. Lots of plusses for dried beans. They are inexpensive, store easily, are more flexible than canned, IMO, and, when combined with any grain, provide a complete protein. Lentils, black-eyed peas (and other cowpeas) and dried peas broaden your choices and flavors even further. An advantage to lentils and cowpeas is that they do not need presoaking.