A simple take: Beef and Rice

Needed materials:

• 1 pound of ground beef 
• Average cost of ~$3 per pound
• 1 pound of rice
• Average cost of ~$0.68 per pound
• A medium sized frying pan
• A ricecooker (recommended) or a small to medium sized pot

Servings: ~2

• Get the rice started. For those who are new to ricecookers, put the rice in, add water until the rice is covered, then turn the cooker on and set it off to the side. We'll use that later.
• NOTE: Due to the advice of a few people, this needed to be added. If you do not have a ricecooker the same can be done with a small pot. Fill the pot with water, bring it to a boil, then add rice and let sit on medium-low heat until the water is gone and the rice is soft and fluffy. In general try to keep a ratio of 2 cups of water to 1 cup of rice.
• Now get the beef ready. If it's frozen it is recomended that you dethaw it ahead of time. A way to do this is to put it in a bowl of warm water and let it set for a while.
• Turn on the stove top to about medium heat.
• Grease your frying pan if it's needed (a small slab of butter works as well), then put your beef on. While it is cooking stir it around while breaking it apart. It is highly recommended to continue this until there is no more red meat left. Afterwards, strain the grease from the meat, preferably into a bowl. Let the grease harden in the bowl to make it easier to throw away.
• Let's spice it up!
• Like I said in the first blog post, I would tell some prime times where you could get a bit creative with your meals. This is a perfect time. While cooking your beef, you can pick any kinds of spices you like and add them in to give it a different flavor. Remember, salt and pepper aren't the only thing you can add to food. There's chili powder, lemon pepper, garlic salt and plenty of others. This is not a science, it's an art according to your tastes, and everyone is different.
• Once your cooking has completed, the only thing left to do is add a bit of rice and beef to your bowl, stir it up and chow down!

Pretty simple dish here. I started with this because I want to be able to help people who both have done some cooking and have never touched an oven top in their life. Now to go over the pros and cons.

• Pros:
• Extremely simple
• Cheapest dish I have ever made at ~$1.84 per serving
• Quick and standard
• Very easy to alter taste based on spices
• Cons
• Needs rice cooker
• Very subjective on spices
• Can taste bland at times

Recommended for quick meals needed in about 30 minutes. Not as fast as fast food or ramen but gets the job done, as well as you can refrigerate it for quite a while.

Note on leftovers: Leftover rice can be fun to mess with too. Add a little water, add spices, stir and microwave to change up your meal a bit more if you want. Remember not all spicing is done the same!

References: www.bls.gov
Thanks to my Dad for teaching me that not all meals are linear!

An Introduction

Many new college students need to learn to set up budgets. These budgets generally contain costs from electrical bills to gas bills to, what some could say is most important, food bills. Food, however, isn’t as static of a cost as the others. The price of food varies based on tastes and just what you buy. The problem with these prices is that cheap and easy to make food is generally more unhealthy than expensive or semi-difficult to prepare dishes. The biggest problem food is ramen noodles, being very cheap but containing an unhealthy amount of salt.

Each blog post after this one will focus on a different meal. The idea behind this blog is to share meal recipes that are not only cheap, but relatively easy to prepare food dishes that aren’t destructive to a person’s diet.

Each post will contain:

• A step by step recipe
• A list of the ingredients and their costs
• An overall price per serving for budget reasons
• Areas where you can be “creative” in your dishes (such as adding different spices to your meal)

With this I hope to be able to aid some college students in finding a balanced budget with decent food. I do this because I was in the situation where my diet consisted of a meal of ramen a day, which can be a very unhealthy lifestyle. Hopefully people can enjoy these recipes like I do.