Ghetto Cuisine

Breakfast lately has been a couple eggs between a couple pieces of well buttered toast. Fast, easy, cheap, delicious. 

Make a bowl of grits. Add a packet of tuna (regular or flavored), couple scoops of black bean dip, shredded cheese of choice, fried crunchy onions, curry powder and mix all up.

OK......

Oatmeal with powdered  Hawaiian Punch  for flavor , 

"Mikey will eat anything ! "

This is a public service announcement. 
 

My local Walden-depot has changed (apparently) their ramen supplier. Specifically the chicken variety. Now we get this:

Do not buy this. I have low standards. Legendarily low. But this is beneath even me. 
Im loath to waste food, so I'll fix this the best I can (sriracha!) and finish what I bought, but there it is. In-edible ramen. I didn't know it existed. 

rob_lewis said:

Not sure how ghetto cuisine this is, but I've been living off the following recipe for about two years now:

• 1 cup of cooked rice.  Wife bought me a rice cooker years ago and I think I've used it every day.  Basically, the small cup you use for a single serving.  Instant rice or rice in a pot would work fine too, but the rice cooker just makes it easy (and they're cheap).
• Protein.  At first, it was a can of tuna, but my local HEB has frozen turkey sausage 4/$5 so I've been using half of one of those.  Or, chicken or ground beef or whatever I have around/bought on sale. 
• 1 Can of mixed veggies

Start the rice and cook up the protein.  Toss in the can of mixed veggies (drained) to mix it all together.  Pour over the rice in a bowl, mix it up and add hot sauce/soy sauce/taco seasoning to taste.  Maybe $0.10 of rice, $0.75 of protein (if I use the tuna or the turkey sausage) and the veggies are $0.50 a can.  Sometimes I eat it all, sometimes I eat half and save the other half for lunch.  If I'm feeling really hungry, I'll mix in a pack of Ramen. 

Easy to add/adjust dependent on what's around.  I've slow cooked on sale chicken/beef as the protein or substituted eggs or peanut butter.  I've grabbed leftover veggie plates from the office and cooked those instead of the canned veggies.  The rice seems to hold flavor better if I cook it a day before and let it sit in the fridge. 

-Rob

My Mom used to make something similar to this, and once I moved out it has become a staple to me, even to this day.

1 to 1.5 lb ground beef

I can Veg-All

Garlic powder or salt, depending on your cardiac health.

Just brown the meat and drain, drain the Veg-All and dump in the skillet; Garlic to taste.

More or less meat, or ground Turkey like you suggested, also fresh cut vegetables, and fresh pressed garlic if you are feeling up to it. Do whatever, it's hard to ruin it.

Super easy, and with some garlic toast, it's an awesome meal.

barefootskater (Shaun) said:

This is a public service announcement. 
 

 

My local Walden-depot has changed (apparently) their ramen supplier. Specifically the chicken variety. Now we get this:

 

Do not buy this. I have low standards. Legendarily low. But this is beneath even me. 
Im loath to waste food, so I'll fix this the best I can (sriracha!) and finish what I bought, but there it is. In-edible ramen. I didn't know it existed. 

How can they blow ramen?

Plus...... exactly how cheap is am off brand anyway. There can't be much profit to be had here

In reply to Antihero (Forum Supporter) :

Same price as the regular stuff, just bad. Maybe they switched vendors or there's a ramen shortage or something odd. 
Sriracha did a pretty good job of it though, and I'm not even a big sriracha fan. 

Staple for us was

1 lb ground beef

box souced brown rice (the quick cook stuff)

1 can cream of mushroom

regular rice

bouion cubes

brown the berger

add long grain quick rice and spice pack

add soup and a can or watter

if you need to feed more people add a cup of white rice and a cup of water per additional person. Add bouin cubes to tast. Simmer on low until rice is cooked. 
 

the base recipe feeds 3-4 but you can stretch it to 6-8 or even 10 by just adding more rice.  This was a staple at my house as we had 6 and many times mom was feeding other kids from the naberhood. I remember many a summer night there would be 10 people at the table. 

Mash up one pretty ripe banana, scramble in 2 eggs and pour onto a hot griddle for a sweet, gluten free pancake.

914Driver said:

Mash up one pretty ripe banana, scramble in 2 eggs and pour onto a hot griddle for a sweet, gluten free pancake.

I've tried this. Not a fan at all. Tastes and feels like exactly what it is: a Banana flavored omelet. The texture was wrong, the taste was wrong, there was nothing right about it. Putting cheese on it OR syrup did not improve it (I did not try both cheese and syrup). 

Growing up with a PA Dutch lineage, nearly everything I ate was ghetto cuisine.

1- Soak beans overnight, boil two ham hocks in water overnight, add beans in the morning and boil all day.  Most people call it ham and bean soup, but around here we call it soup beans.  Serve with cornbread (or corn pone as some call it) that you mix right in the soup.

2- scrapple.  Boil the carcass and parts from a hog in a big trough to get all the bits of meat off, throw in salt, pepper, and cornmeal to make a loaf.

3- take random vegetables, add vinegar and sugar and can them in a pressure cooker.

Mom had this great recipe for fish.  We never had much money, so she would get the rectangular frozen cod fillets for cheap.  She would cook them in the microwave with a little margarine and put crushed ritz crackers on top.  It was actually really delicious.  It was just enough flavor to make the cod not fishy, and the big flakes of fish actually make you think you were eating sea bass.

Now that I'm older and live alone, I have a bunch of ghetto things I do.  Skillet pizzas:  I take a flour tortilla in a pan and put some sauce and mozz.  Put a lid on it and cook on medium high until the cheese melts and you get little whisps of smoke from the tortilla.  Crispy pizza in no time.  A variation on that is to add another tortilla on top and fill with whatever you want to make a quesadilla-ish thing; ham and cheese, hummus and black olives, cheddar and apples, leftover chicken and BBQ sauce.

I will also do a box of Kraft Dinner (honorary Canadian here) and dump in a can of tuna.  Really yummy.

When it comes to ramen, in college I would make ramen and add a splash of soy sauce, then dip my fork in a honey jar before stirring.  Instant teriyaki noodles.

I had a buddy living with me for a while who put us all to shame though.  Packet of chicken ramen, add a can of peas and a can of tomato soup.  It was this vaguely orangish red bowl full of noodles and brown mushy peas.  It didn't taste awful, but it was just hideous to look at.

I also usually keep a tub of Miso paste in my fridge.  If I'm looking for a salty snack, I'll put a spoonful of it in some water and microwave it for a couple minutes.  Instant miso soup.

Marjorie Suddard said:

Was feeling a can of sardines for lunch, but wanted more of a meal than just little fishies on crackers (not that i'm knocking that), and have been craving pasta, so I did some Googling and found that sardines in pasta is a classic (and hella delicious) Sicilian dish that's really pantry-friendly. 

You need: 

1 can sardines in olive oil

2/3 C fresh (soft) fine breadcrumbs

half an onion, chopped

1T capers

1t lemon zest

1T fresh parsley

2 servings of angel hair, cooked al dente

Drain sardines, reserving the oil, and heat about 1T of oil in a frypan; drop in breadcrumbs and fry until golden and toasty. Remove to a plate. Meanwhile, bring pasta water to boil. Pour a generous couple T more sardine oil into pan, add onions and cook until onions are soft. Drop pasta into water, add sardines to frypan (clean out spines if they are big ones) and chunk ‘em up with the spoon. Cook a couple of minutes to heat through. Add T capers if you like—I didn’t have any here—and salt and pepper (more generous with the salt if no capers). Zest lemon over, add add pasta directly in from pot and toss with extra oil and pasta water if needed so it glistens, give a final toss with your breadcrumbs and lots of fresh chopped parsley.

Serves 2, unless you're alone in the house for lunch because Tim's out in the shop working on the Elva so there's no one to share or to stop you, in which case it serves 1.

Margie

I tried this the other night when Costco had Sardine's on sale for some crazy low price; absolutely recommended, and actually really healthy. Easy to add broccoli or asparagus to for a veggie source as well.

ALSO:  Capers are needed, and klamata olives go wonderfully as well.

GIRTHQUAKE said:

Marjorie Suddard said:

Was feeling a can of sardines for lunch, but wanted more of a meal than just little fishies on crackers (not that i'm knocking that), and have been craving pasta, so I did some Googling and found that sardines in pasta is a classic (and hella delicious) Sicilian dish that's really pantry-friendly. 

You need: 

1 can sardines in olive oil

2/3 C fresh (soft) fine breadcrumbs

half an onion, chopped

1T capers

1t lemon zest

1T fresh parsley

2 servings of angel hair, cooked al dente

Drain sardines, reserving the oil, and heat about 1T of oil in a frypan; drop in breadcrumbs and fry until golden and toasty. Remove to a plate. Meanwhile, bring pasta water to boil. Pour a generous couple T more sardine oil into pan, add onions and cook until onions are soft. Drop pasta into water, add sardines to frypan (clean out spines if they are big ones) and chunk ‘em up with the spoon. Cook a couple of minutes to heat through. Add T capers if you like—I didn’t have any here—and salt and pepper (more generous with the salt if no capers). Zest lemon over, add add pasta directly in from pot and toss with extra oil and pasta water if needed so it glistens, give a final toss with your breadcrumbs and lots of fresh chopped parsley.

Serves 2, unless you're alone in the house for lunch because Tim's out in the shop working on the Elva so there's no one to share or to stop you, in which case it serves 1.

Margie

I tried this the other night when Costco had Sardine's on sale for some crazy low price; absolutely recommended, and actually really healthy. Easy to add broccoli or asparagus to for a veggie source as well.

ALSO:  Capers are needed, and klamata olives go wonderfully as well.

I was going to say... if you added some olives and a couple roma tomatoes, you have a classic Puttanesca.

Which, by the way, gets its name from Italian hookers.  Not kidding.

Heat up instant burrito in microwave. Dump leftover spaghetti sauce on shredded cheese on and put in microwave to melt cheese. Pull out and you have a ghetto enchilada. 

Not sure if this is ghetto:

In a bowl mix;

1 cup mixed veggies

2 cups cooked chicken

1 can Cream of Chicken Soup (Campbells)

1/2 cup milk

Pour this into a 9" pie plate or casserole dish.

Make up a box of Zatarains Corn Bread mix according to directions, smooth over the top.

Bake 375* for 40-45 minutes.  (some people add grated chees 10 minn before the end)