Michael David Talks Food #6

^{Image Source}

If you want to follow along:

Do You Ever Think About Food

The 50 Cent Meal Part 1

The 50 Cent Meal Part 2

The 50 Cent Meal Part 3

The 50 Cent Meal Part 4

The 50 Cent Meal Part 5

Quick recap...

We are at 22 meals for only $8 right now. We did 2 meals of chicken meat by itself, 8 meals of biscuits and gravy, 6 meals of chicken noodle and 6 meals of chicken rice...

All from one damn chicken!

We are standing right now at 36 cents per meal.

36 cents a meal!

If you have not kept up with this series go back and read them to know how we got here.

Alright, you could have guessed by the picture...

Mexican food is next.

Remember that 8 cups of broth we have saved?

Time to break that open.

We have a couple directions we can go here. If you are doing dry beans then half this broth will go to beans and half will go to rice.

If you are doing already cooked, or canned beans, you can use all of it on rice. So, here in USA I pay about $1.50 per 19.75 oz can of already made Mexican beans.

When I make beans and rice I add this can to rice made from 2 cups dry (4 cups broth).

If I make from dry then 4 cups broth will make around 2 cups beans. I'll cook that 2 cups dry weight to around 4 cups cooked and add that to the 2 cups dry rice I just cooked in the other 4 cups broth.

Remember to salt your broth first, add pepper or whatever you want to get it tasting right.

You can go as elaborate here as you like or you can keep this beans and rice really simple.

You can eat it in a bowl or get tortillas to use...

You can get cheese or leave it out...

You can make the rice much more Mexican by adding some tomato product like sauce, juice, paste. Cooking the rice in just a bit of oil till it turns white on the edges (or golden) before adding the broth is also more authentic.

A can of paste for me is 50 cents ish and I use that commonly. You can use tomato bullion instead for cheaper.

You can also just cook the rice in the salted/spiced broth and that is it. We do this all the time when out of stuff and it's actually pretty good.

Just a tomato fried into the rice just after it goes white on the edges and just before the broth will even work.

You can add any veggies you feel appropriate here too and we commonly will if we have them.

However, we're working on the 50 cent meal that is already lower than that and seeing how far we can take this and still have decent flavor and good nutrition.

So we're leaving everything out.

No extra veggies, no tomato product, just broth and rice.

Let's do the beans like that as well.

We really should add some chilis or tomato or greens when served or cheese here to really "bring it together" yet if your situation calls for ultimate stretching of the food then we leave it all out.

You can eat this just like it is in a bowl if you really need to and I have plenty.

Or you can add just corn tortillas to the mix for almost nothing and have something a bit more appealing.

I get 80 corn tortillas for $4, so that's 5 cents per tortilla added to each meal. Normally we will eat around 3 "tacos" (if we call them that) each meal. So that would add 15 cents to each meal by itself.

Look, this adds a considerable cost and our point here is to get this low and still tasty and nutritional.

No tortillas does that. We eat this bean and rice mix in a bowl. Maybe find a lime and squeeze over it or something.

Anyway, we get another 8 full meals from this. If we add things to it it goes further but adds cost.

Let's just make them both from dry using the broth we have saved.

So 2 cups rice and 2 cups beans (both dry) adds another 1 dollar to our total. We're now at a whopping $9 and have served a staggering 30 full meals from this one chicken, some flour, salt, pepper, little rice, few beans and half a bag of egg noodles.